Today's a day to remember the life and career of legendary UCLA Basketball Coach John Wooden. Coach Wooden is probably the best coach the game has ever seen at any level and is also one of the most influential. Everyone knows about all the Championships at UCLA, but most do not know his ties to the Bluegrass State. He began his coaching career at tiny Dayton High School in Northern Kentucky, just minutes from my hometown. His first game as a coach was a high school game in Kentucky and his last game as a coach was against the University of Kentucky, as he won his 10th National Championship. At Dayton, a school that to this day has always struggled in athletics, was where the legendary coach started his career with only a 6-10 record. That would be his first and only losing record in his career.
At 21 years old, he was not only a coach, but also an English teacher and an Athletic Director at Dayton. I played in a basketball league in Dayton as a kid and played District football games there in high school. This is encouraging to me, because I'm attending Xavier University in the near future to start working on my Masters of Secondary Education with an Emphasis in English to go along with my Sport Management Bachelors Degree at Eastern Kentucky. I have hopes of being an English teacher and an Athletic Director, and it's inspiring to me to learn that a legendary coach like John Wooden started out doing just that, right here in Kentucky. I've never met Coach Wooden and I wasn't even alive to watch him coach a single game, but just hearing his story and reading some of his famous influential quotes is enough to have great respect for the "Wizard of Westwood".
Here are a couple of my favorites:
"Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts."
“Learn as if you were to live forever; live as if you were to die tomorrow.”
RIP, Coach Wooden.
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