Friday, June 1, 2012

THE IMPORTANT OF SELF-EVALUATION


Thanks to Joey Burton for passing along this article from The Herald Sun by Steve Wiseman.  It speaks of the process Coach Mike Krzyzewski has undergone in the off-season to re-evaluate how his team does everything.  It speaks volumes of why Duke remains an elite program season after season -- because they don't hesitate to take a strong look at themselves. Here is some excerpts from the article:

This past season’s ending, a maddening March rather than March Madness, represented a rarity for Duke basketball.

A loss to 15th-seeded Lehigh at the Greensboro Coliseum marked the first time since 2007 that the Blue Devils had failed to win at least one NCAA Tournament game. It was just the fourth time in 28 NCAA Tournament appearances under Coach Mike Krzyzewski that Duke went out without a win.

The loss led Krzyzewski and his staff to ask some tough questions about the program.

“Sometimes if you leave a tournament earlier, you are more truthful with yourself, not just about that game but about everything,” Krzyzewski said Wednesday. “If you would have won, say, two games and lost in the Sweet 16. Well, we won 30, so it must not be that bad.

“I’m not going to go through everything I looked at because that’s private. But we need to be tougher with what we’re doing, how we’re practicing, how we bond. I take a look at all those things. I think you look at them closer, whomever you get beat by. When you leave a tournament that early, that’s not what you want to do.”

“We’ve had a chance to look at everything, make the appropriate adjustments,” Krzyzewski said during a news conference at the start of the K Academy Fantasy Camp. “It’s been very busy. I’m really pleased with where we are at right now.”

Read the entire article: http://bit.ly/LKwNhT