When I was in sixth grade, I wanted to become a priest.

My parents didn’t really understand too much about sport. At that time, we were in a Polish community in the inner city of Chicago, and I was the youngest of a bunch of cousins. Polish families are real big, with cousins and aunts and uncles.

A basketball team is like the five fingers on your hand. If you can get them all together, you have a fist. That’s how I want you to play.

I had a really bad temper, when I was growing up. Sport helped me channel that temper into more positive acts.

That’s another thing, we made up games. We didn’t have equipment. When it snowed, we would play slow motion tackle football. We would play hockey, but we wouldn’t skate. We just made things up. I loved doing that.

I’ve tried to handle winning well, so that maybe we’ll win again, but I’ve also tried to handle failure well. If those serve as good examples for teachers and kids, then I hope that would be a contribution I have made to sport. Not just basketball, but to sport.

Each group and each youngster is different. As a leader or coach, you get to know what they need.

The life expectancy of a team is about eight months. Then the next year, it’s a whole new team.

The truth is that many people set rules to keep from making decisions.

Parents can really help, but they can also really hinder the development of their youngsters.

When I went to high school, an all-boys’ school, a Catholic school, I tried out for football, and I didn’t make it. It was the first time, athletically, that I was knocked down.

The person who has inspired me my whole life is my Mom, because she taught me commitment. She sacrificed.

To me, teamwork is the beauty of our sport, where you have five acting as one. You become selfless.

Basketball was not my main sport in grade school, or even the first year of high school.

I always wanted to teach.

Throughout my life, my mom has been the person that I’ve always looked up to.

There are kids don’t want to do something because they’re afraid of looking stupid to their peers. There comes a time when they start protecting themselves, instead of extending. I want to make sure that they’re always trying to extend themselves.

That’s what I do now: I lead and I teach. If we win basketball games from doing that, then that’s great, but I lead and teach. Those are the two things I concentrate on.

If you win a National Championship, or you win two, people think you have not only seen the Holy Grail, but you’ve embraced it. Basically, I do what a lot of people do, but I’ve been able to win.

I always won in my imagination. I always hit the game-winning shot, or I hit the free throw. Or if I missed, there was a lane violation, and I was given another one.

Actually, the Kentucky moment was better than winning the two National Championships, because it was the epitome of what I try to get from a team in a crisis situation.

I think you’re not a human being unless you have doubts and fears.

With me and basketball, it became part of me.

In high school, in sport, I had a coach who told me I was much better than I thought I was, and would make me do more in a positive sense. He was the first person who taught me not to be afraid of failure.

My ambition in high school was to be a high school coach and teacher, and that’s still what I do: teach.

I’m still not a great reader, but my wife is and my daughters are, and I envy them. I think I got into a bad habit of trying to do something all the time, instead of trying to sit down and take my time a little bit.

Playing sport was somewhat frivolous, but I liked it. I rebelled a little bit, and wouldn’t go to music lessons and things like that, but I would go and play ball. My parents learned to love it because they saw how much I got out of it.

I’ve been so fortunate in my life that my family has never been jealous of my success. They have shown true love and commitment to me by being supportive. They shared in it.

I have a rule on my team: when we talk to one another, we look each other right in the eye, because I think it’s tough to lie to somebody. You give respect to somebody.

The thing I loved the most – and still love the most about teaching – is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits.

Everybody wants to take responsibility when you win, but when you fail, all these fingers are pointing.

I think some parents now look at a youngster failing as the final thing. It’s a process, and failure is part of the process. I would like it if the teacher and the parents would connect more. I think that used to be, but we’re losing a little bit of that right now.

When I was growing up, there weren’t any Little Leagues in the city. Parents worked all the time. They didn’t have time to take their kids out to play baseball and football.

First of all, what happens is, when you’re good at something, you spend a lot of time with it. People identify you with that sport, so it becomes part of your identity.

Imagination has a great deal to do with winning.

I hated to lose.

I’m fortunate now that I coach at Duke University and we’ve won a lot. I have some kids who haven’t failed that much. But when they get to college, they’re going to fail some time. That’s a thing that I can help them the most with.

Once you win a National Championship, how do you do that again? How do you get the passion to do that again? We won it again right away, the next year. A lot of it had to do with the fact that I didn’t give myself an opportunity to enjoy the first one.

The other thing I knew I had was a high level of competitiveness.

Even though we want huge individual egos, our collective ego is unbelievable.

When I was in sixth grade, I wanted to become a priest.