Page 290 - How to Create a Winning Organization

Wooden on Leadership
272
BAD HABITS ARE HARD TO BREAK
The Bob “Ace” Calkins Memorial Award was given to the Bruin
basketball player who made the highest percentage of free throws
each season. Free throws were, and are, an important element of
overall scoring, and, at crucial moments in the game, making or
missing them can often have a disproportionate impact.
Thus, I paid a lot of attention to free throw practice (as you’ll see
in other notes presented here). But, looking at these statistics of the
winners of the Ace Calkins Award reminds me of this surprising fact:
As a team, the players I coached at South Bend Central High School
were generally better free throw shooters than those I coached at
UCLA. This fact may surprise you, but the reason is fairly simple.
At South Bend I taught and insisted on one method of shooting
the free throw, namely, the two-hand underhand style. Today no-
body anywhere uses it, but I still think it’s the most structurally
sound method.
I was also able to convince junior high school coaches in South
Bend to teach the same method to their players. So, by the time a
young man arrived at South Bend High School, he had already
been taught the method I believed in. In effect, the high school
player had no bad habits or home-grown style that I had to untan-
gle. My job was simply to help them refine the method they had
already been taught—a method I felt was most productive.
At UCLA the situation was just the opposite. By then, free
throw shooting had taken on many forms and each player devel-
oped his own style going through junior high and senior high
school programs. By the time they arrived at UCLA, it was a diffi-
cult chore to make changes. The habits—often bad habits—were
too deeply ingrained.
Bad habits are tough to break in free throws. They are even
tougher to break when it comes to character issues such as those I
placed in the Pyramid of Success and discuss in Chapter 4, “Good