“My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me.” – Jim Valvano

As many of us here in the US are consumed with March Madness and the college basketball finals this weekend, I thought I would use a quote from one of the more storied coaches of my time – Jimmy Valvano. Jimmy was the head coach of the North Carolina State Wolfpack and went on to be a well-known sports commentator for ESPN.

While he led his college team to a college championship in 1983, he is more widely known for the content of his character – determined, driven, passionate, and a coach whose reputation of caring for others was rivaled only by the grace he showed in his final battle with cancer. For those of you who know of Jimmy Valvano, no introduction is necessary. For those who don’t, it’s worth some research, as one of his lasting legacies is the Jimmy V Foundation – a charity set up by Jimmy in his last months of life for the express purpose of ‘winning the battle against cancer once and for all’. Continue reading →

“You hold back only to realize there is nothing keeping you back, except yourself” – Rachel Wolchin

One of my favorite books – subsequently turned in to a movie – is Moneyball. It is the story of Billy Beane (then the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team), and how he transformed baseball using a revolutionary approach to assessing, drafting, and ultimately fielding players based on a complex formula of statistics. The approach, called sabermetrics, had only hereto been used by a small following of fans for fantasy and similar tracking of player performance. Billy was the first Manager in professional baseball to embrace the approach and use it as a primary factor in his decision on which players he kept on his team and the order in which he had them bat. Today most professional baseball teams use this approach – and in many respects this is behind the recent success of the current world champion Houston Astros.

Back to Billy – his achievement is even more profound when you consider the circumstances. At the time, the Oakland Athletics were a second-tier professional market with an extremely limited budget to match. Most of the more successful franchises were spending 2 to 3 times more than the Athletics, allowing them to field the best talent in the league, and in return, consistently outperform other teams. Continue reading →