Coach Cal's Books
By: John Calipari
If recent history has taught us anything, it's that nobody goes through life unscathed—no matter how rich, how smart, how talented, or how fortunate they may be. White collar, blue collar, or no collar, there is an undeniable commonality to the raw emotion that strikes people when they are knocked down.
University of Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari has experienced his share of public setbacks, but he has learned that bad situations are permanent only if you allow them to be. What Coach Cal—as players, peers, and his legion of fans that make up the Big Blue Nation call him—learned from his experiences was the importance of having the right attitude when dealing with life's major impediments. On the court and off, he emphasizes to his players that a big part of success is being able to handle obstacles. Now he is offering you the chance to learn the same strategies that he teaches the young men who play for him. By becoming an active participant in your own resurrection—through practice exercises and tips from Coach Cal and his deep bench of highly successful people—you too will gain the tools and insight to understand that it's never a matter of how far you have fallen, but instead it's about how high you bounce back.
By: John Calipari
Having worked as an assistant at Kansas and Pitt, Calipari took over the basketball program at the University of Massachusetts in 1988, after the school had recorded 10 straight losing seasons. Adopting the motto that he and coauthor Weiss (Full Court Pressure) also use for this conventional autobiography, Calipari proved himself a fine motivator of young players and an astute manipulator of television to publicize UMass's increasingly successful organization.
Each year, his teams improved on the record of the previous season, climaxing in 1996, when his players had a 35-2 record, were ranked first in the nation for much of the season and went to the NCAA's Final Four. The star, Marcus Camby, was judged the best in the nation, and Calipari himself was chosen coach of the year by at least four court groups.
By: John Calipari
Whether your team is trying to win its first game of the high school season or preparing to take the floor for the national championship, you need to have a multitude of options for your offense. John Calipari brings winning one step closer with his tried-and-true collection of offensive plays. Presented in an easy-to-follow format with diagrams for reference, this book is a must for coaches looking to optimize their half-court game. John Calipari took the basketball program at the University of Massachusetts from one of the country's worst and made it into one of the elite, a program with legitimate national championship aspirations.
A new state-of-the-art facility, the perpetually sold-out William D. Mullins Center; five straight Atlantic 10 regular-season titles; five straight A-10 Tourney titles; five straight NCAA appearances; trips to the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight; and 1996's trip to the Final Four sent a clear message to the basketball world: besides developing some outstanding UMass teams, John Calipari also built a winning program. He has also served as head coach of the New Jersey Nets.
