To Become a Champion

What does it take to become a champion?  

First you need to be making a championship effort.

Then you’ll need two additional things: 

1. Championship level coaching
2. Championship level competition.  

Championship Level Competition. 
Until you get into top level competition you'll never find out exactly where you are in your development.  

When you compete at the highest level you either win or lose. When you are on your way up and compete at the championship level, you're a winner regardless of how the match or game turns out because even if you lose you're going to learn. 

You’re going to win knowledge of what additionally you need to do, what skill you need to develop, where your areas of weakness are that will allow you to move up and when it comes. 

Championship Level Coaching
On the other hand, when it comes to making those changes you'll need coaching from somebody who has been there, coached and preferably competed. You don’t want to waste your time training under someone who really has no first hand knowledge of what it takes. That would be a blind leading the blind situation and you don’t have time for that.

The experience of coaching and/or competing at the highest levels gives a coach the experience to show you the secrets that only the champions know. Winning is getting a specific thing done in a specific time period and doing it better than anyone else at that moment.  

Winning involves making lots of things happen. A winning performance involves making lots of critical things happen at the right time. At this level you don't learn how to be a champion out of a book.  

The Road to Becoming a Champion: You learn and develop into a champion from combining your own Championship Level Effort with the benefits that only come from Championship Coaches and Championship Competition.

Winner's Book Club Selection of the Week: Geno

WINNERS CREDENTIALS

Geno: In Pursuit of Perfection is the memoir of Geno Auriemma, the most accomplished male coach in women's basketball today. In his relentless quest for excellence at the University of Connecticut, he has led the Huskies to five national championships.

From the Book Jacket

Controversial, confrontational, and driven, Coach Geno Auriemma is a force to be reckoned with. For Auriemma, life affords only the briefest moments of happiness - a good round of golf, forty minutes of great basketball, a day at the beach with his family, a nice glass of wine - while disaster is seemingly always waiting to strike. It's a fatalistic philosophy, a remnant of his hardscrabble early years, but it's an outlook that has driven him to unparalleled success.

In this deeply personal memoir, Geno Auriemma reveals for the first time the man behind the legend. He talks candidly about his coaching style - famed for being one of the most demanding in all the sports world. He spills the beans about his stormy dealings with other coaches such as his archrival, Pat Summitt of the University of Tennessee. And with warmth and a genuine love for his champions, he writes openly about Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird, Nykesha Sales, Rebecca Lobo, Swin Cash, and all of his other UConn stars who have gone on to stellar WNBA careers. You get a courtside seat to all of the action - including an epilogue on the 2004-05 season, as well as interviews with the team's most celebrated players.

Amazon Editorial Review

If nothing else, Auriemma, coach of the UConn women's basketball team since 1985, explains how little girls in Connecticut inherited the dreams of little boys in Indiana. The rise of a program with a leaky gym and roll-away bleachers to become a powerhouse with five national championships is a Hoosier-like tale. Read more>>

From Booklist

Auriemma is one of the most successful college basketball coaches in the history of the sport, yet he is never mentioned in the same sentence as Dean Smith or Mike Krzyzewski. The reason? Auriemma coaches women's basketball at the University of Connecticut. In this revealing autobiography, written with the help of Boston Globe reporter MacMullan, Auriemma tells a version of the classic immigrant's journey. His parents immigrated to the U.S. from Italy when he was seven. He was the new kid, the kid who talked funny, and the poor kid. Read more>>