Win Forever By Pete Carroll

Win Forever By Pete Carroll



What I Have Learned From Pete Carroll

Winning Forever

1. Win Forever
2. To do things better than they have ever been done before.
3. To have the most fun
4. Competition is everything.
5. Finish everything.
6. The starting line-up is etched in sand.
7. Make practice an event.
8. Scrimmage to simulate game day
9. Own the Rose Bowl
10. Recruiting is competing for the team of the future.
11. Emphasize the ball possession and turnover
12. No whining, no excuses, no complaining
13. Protect the team
14. Be early
15. Our style is great effort, great enthusiasm and smart play.
16. Practice is everything.
17. Everything counts.
18. The central theme of the program is competition.
19. Competition is essence of being great.
20. Competition is realizing how much you have inside of you.
21. Competition is the driving force for success.
22. We will come to a point where we know we are going to win.
23. Players perform at a high level when they know they have an audience.
24. Practice at game speed.
25. Relentless pursuit for a competitive edge.
26. Something good is always about to happen.
27. We condition at full speed to practice at full speed to play at full speed.
28. To become the greatest dynasty of all time. History’s #1.
29. We only focus on what we can become.
30. We will never do what we don’t do well.
31. Everyday we are on course to win.
32. Tradition Never Graduates
33. Success is a choice.
34. Last one standing wins.
35. Training is why you improve.  Recovery is when you improve.
36. Only coach what you want, not what you don't want

The Real Trophy

• "I love trophies, but f--- 'em. They're for old men, for guys living in memory," he says. "I'm talking about: Are we competing today, every minute, in everything we do in practice. Are we letting loose and daring to be great here and now? And can we sustain that? And repeat it. Trophies are great, but we're trying to win forever."-Pete Carroll, USC Football Coach

After A Tough Loss

• "There are always setbacks, unforeseen circumstances that arise. They come in different guises, different forms, and you just have to deal with it," he says. "I didn't think for a second we were going to lose. I was allowing myself to lose focus a little bit, maybe. But we don't fix that by making changes. We fix that by staying on course. We get back to football, to Competition Tuesday, to what we do and how we do it, with more emphasis and focus than ever. It's a belief, it's not letting anything into your mind-set that will keep you from that belief."

• I’ll search long and deep but you’ve got to do the same,” Carroll told the team. “We’ll suck it up and move on. We’ll get this done but we’ve got to hang tough and stay in this together.” Today, they just beat us,” Coach Pete Carroll said in a sullen locker room after the game. “It’s reality, and it hurts. “It shows you how hard this is.”

• “I don’t know what happened tonight but I do know what has to happen from here,” Carroll told his players in the locker room. “We have to go back to work and get this started again. This game doesn’t mean a thing now, because we can’t do anything about it. But we can bounce back. “Have we lost a game before? Yeah, of course we have. But do we come back and win? Yeah, and we’ve won a lot.”

What Does Win Forever Mean?

• “Wining forever to me,” Carroll said, “would be easy to say we win every game from now on, and I would love to do that. We endeavor to do that every time we go out, but I know better. I know that you can’t win every single game every bit of the way, even though all USC alums want me to. Winning forever to me is finding a way to maximize your potential — be everything that you can possibly be in whatever you’re doing.”

On Finishing

• “We place a big emphasis on finishing,” Carroll offered as a hypothesis for the perfect November record. “We’re hitting the home stretch now, and it’s all about that ‘finish’ mindset. You've got to finish right if you want to be champions.”

Every Spring

• “Every spring we set out to find out if we can reclaim and rediscover the work ethic and competitiveness we’ve had over the years. To me, that’s the No. 1 objective, knowing if you practice really hard with great effort and energy, we can accomplish the stuff we are trying to get done. From the first day on, it’s been a great spring. Guys have really answered the call. We’ve had great work, great speed with the kind of juice that we like. That’s been done.

On Complacency

• There are always new challenges,” he said. “There is no time for complacency. We have never felt like what we have done is good enough, the competitive mode is always here. Whether it be coaching methods, teaching methods, schemes or philosophies, we are continually trying to get better.”