I would never expect a great coach to try to do something his team doesn't do

Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim was asked if he was surprised when West Virginia didn't try to press his team the night after the Orange's six OT game against UConn, which SU won (at 1:22 a.m.).

“I’m not surprised a team that’s well coached and is a really, really good team that never presses, doesn’t press,” Boeheim said. “That would surprise me if they did. If you’ve seen us play, we’re pretty good against pressure. So that has sometimes given us baskets. Tomorrow night we will be pressed for 40 minutes because that’s what Louisville does. But I would never expect a great coach to try to do something his team doesn’t do.”

As small things cumulate, bigger things will happen

Dave Ulrich wrote the foreword for the 2002 book "The Extraordinary Leader."

Ulrich, a management guru who Fast Company magazine recognized as "one of the 10 most innovative and creative leaders," outlined his advice for leaders. Here are three of his points:

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1. Start small. Going from good to great follows an "S" curve of learning. Starting small means doing something now, something within your control that will have an immediate impact. As small things cumulate, bigger things will happen. A leaders should identify some quick, simple, and readily visible things that can be done along the "S" curve path.

2. Excel at something. The worst leaders have an average profile with no great strengths or weaknesses. They are "vanilla" leaders, not standing out on anything. My advice to you as a leader is to figure what you are good at and improve it. Be good at something, then a few things.

3. Remedy fatal flaws. (1) The inability to learn from mistakes and develop new skills; (2) being interpersonally inept; (3) being closed to new ideas; (4) failure to be accountable for results; and (5) not taking initiative. Assess yourself and see how others assess you on these five fatal flaws. If any show up, work on them fast and furiously.

Take advantage of your strengths and hide your weaknesses

After winning AP national coach of the year honors last season at Drake, first-year Providence coach Keno Davis, son of longtime Iowa coach Dr. Tom Davis, guided the Friars to an 81-73 upset win over Pitt last week.

According to this story in "The Daily Orange," an independent student newspaper for Syracuse University, upon arriving at Providence in April of last year, Coach Davis "retooled his team's offensive and defensive systems" and "learned to adjust to the athletes' playing style."

"You have your basic principles that you want to stick to," Davis said. "But you also make sure that you want to take advantage of the strengths of your team and try to hide your weaknesses as much as you can."

According to the Daily Orange piece, Providence's "weaknesses were hard to hide at first. The season started slow: An ominous manner with a 70-66 loss to Northeastern. But instead of telling the team to be better for the next game, Davis adjusted his goals for the Friars."

"By the time the conference rolls around we have to improve," Davis said. "Not only did we set out a goal for improvement, we put a timeline by it and explained it to the team at what level we felt like we needed to be at to be able to compete against the best of the Big East."

Says senior guard Weyinmi Efejuku, Coach Davis doesn't pull any punches.

"He doesn't sugar coat it but he tells us we're talented players," Efejuku said. "He tells us to play our strengths and puts us in great positions to use our strengths. He's just very effective in his strategies and it's working out well."

Improving your strengths

Roger Federer has won 13 Grand Slam titles, second only to Pete Sampras who won 14. Federer won five straight Wimbledon titles (2003-07) and five straight U.S. Open titles (2004-08).

After losing in five sets to Rafael Nadal last month in the Australian Open finals, Federer was asked what he thought he needed to work on:

"You can’t win everything. The idea is to take positives from those setbacks and work at getting better. I have never believed in working on my weaknesses. My serve and my forehand are my strengths and I work on them to get better."

[Here's a great highlight video of Federer.]

Striking a balance between control and freedom

If you haven't checked the Ivy League standings lately, you might be surprised to see Princeton back on top.

Tigers coach Sydney Johnson, who returned to his alma mater two years ago after working as an assistant under John Thompson III at Georgetown, is rebuilding the program, which has seen its wins drop from 20 in 2003-04, to 15, 12, 11, and, finally, 6, the last four years, respectively.

Former Princeton coach Joe Scott, whom the 34-year-old Coach Johnson replaced following the 2006-07 season, is quick to accept full responsibility for the program's decline.

"I was a bad coach," said Coach Scott, who also played at Princeton and served as an assistant for eight seasons under Pete Carril. "If you want to blame the downfall (on me), then go ahead and do that. That's fine. That's what happens in sports. I did a bad job coaching there for three years. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong person. That's how it goes in life."

Coach Scott, the former head coach at Air Force and now the head coach at Denver, "inherited an Ivy League championship team from John Thompson III, who left for Georgetown, that featured four returning starters in 2004-05. Scott's demanding, militaristic style created friction with players and the team finished with a losing Ivy record for the first time in school history."

According to this article, Coach Johnson's "first order of business was simple: understand his players."

"Some kids respond very well to being pushed hard. Some kids don't. So I don't think you should say across the board, 'I'm going to scream and yell at every guy.' Because some guys are going to pull back. ... So, I took time to figure out who I was coaching and went from there."

The article explains how Coach Johnson "adapted to his players' strengths and struck a balance between control and freedom. He retained the framework of the Princeton offense, but incorporated specific plays to maximize the individual talent of his players."

"All players want some freedom," said junior guard Marcus Schroeder. "Coach Scott wanted the offense to be run more precisely and let the offense get a shot rather than let the players get a shot. Coach Johnson is more improvisational, letting the abilities of the individual players do it."

The four pillars of a successful team

Here's a good excerpt from Phil Martelli's book, "Don't Call Me Coach."

Coach Martelli is in his 14th season as head coach at St. Joe's, where he's won 18-plus games for eight consecutive seasons. This season, the Hawks are 13-8 and have won 9 of 10.

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To me it's never been about a system. It's about building on foundations. It's absolutely essential that our players be willing to compete. That's the first pillar. We set up a competitive atmosphere throughout -- in practice, in our scheduling, and our game opportunities.

Yet, it's also essential to learn to share the basketball. To me, sharing the ball is the ultimate sign of respect on the court. That's the second pillar in building a team.

I think it's really important that you take your shot, the third pillar. Everyone's worked hard to get you that opportunity, and if you don't take it, that's worse than taking a bad shot. It sounds ironic, but teamwork is based on competition.

To relate that to the wider world of work, suppose someone has prepared you for a promotion, to take a position in your company, and you decline to accept it. Your not taking the shot others set up for you is harmful to the whole organization. They thought you were ready, and put their effort behind you. You let them down, as well as yourself.

The fourth thing we ask every player is to know your abilities, the key final pillar that holds the structure up. There's nothing harder than being realistic about yourself, but we all have to do it.

Go to your strengths, stay away from your weaknesses. We will try to analyze both, as we've seen them, practice after practice. We will explain both to you, and then plan around your strengths, in combination with those of your teammates. But then you have to do the rest.

If life is a competition, stressing your strengths is the way to be a winner. I don't want to make basketball bigger than it is, but it's the same lesson you'll need in life.

I know it sounds simplistic -- to compete, to share, to take your shot when it comes, to really know your strengths and weaknesses -- but that's what builds a team. Nobody does it alone. Look into the stories of great statesmen, great generals, great entrepreneurs, great leaders in any field, and see how they achieved success. It won't be a waste of your time.