What John Wooden Can Teach Us

Was the ‘greatest coach of the 20th century’ a crafty wizard, or a master teacher?

By Ronald Gallimore

Some call John Wooden the Wizard of Westwood because his UCLA teams dominated college basketball in the 1960s and early ’70s. But to that, Coach Wooden says, “I’m no wizard. I am a teacher.” He says he learned to coach by applying what he learned as a high school English teacher. Coach believes the principles of teaching are the same for classrooms and courts. Teaching academics or athletics, he insists, is more effective if these fundamentals are followed. Can classroom teachers learn from this master of basketball teaching? Yes, say researchers who have studied his work.

During Wooden’s final season in 1974-75, Roland Tharp and I spent 30 hours recording the coach’s words and actions during practices. We were motivated by an interest in how the teaching practices of master teachers aligned with what researchers were reporting then. We wanted to expand the scope of our investigations to include case studies as well as experiments and surveys. The major challenge in case studies is finding a candidate whose credentials and accomplishments warrant a claim of master practice. We wondered, who near our University of California, Los Angeles, campus might be a credible master of teaching that we could study?

Here are the simple facts: At the beginning of the 1974-75 basketball season, John Wooden’s teams had won nine NCAA championships, including seven in a row from 1967 to 1973. He won with teams of great or modest talent. The season we studied his teaching was one that many believe to have been the most challenging of his career. The fact that the 1974-75 team won UCLA’s 10th NCAA basketball championship is among the greatest accomplishments in the history of intercollegiate athletics, because no one thought the Bruins that year were talented enough to win even...