Getting to Us ─ How Great Coaches Make Great Teams

From the acclaimed CBS Sports commentator and author of the definitive biography of John Wooden: In Search of Excellence for coaching

What makes a coach great? How do great coaches turn a collection of individuals into a coherent "us"? Seth Davis, one of the keenest minds in sports journalism, has been thinking about that question for twenty-five years. It's one of the things that drove him to write the definitive biography of college basketball's greatest coach, John Wooden, Wooden: A Coach's Life. But John Wooden coached a long time ago. The world has changed, and coaching has too, tremendously. Seth Davis decided to embark on a proper investigation, to get to the root of the answer to the question.

In Getting to Us, Davis probes and prods the best of the best from the landscape of active coaches of football and basketball, college and pro--from Urban Meyer, Dabo Swinney, and Jim Harbaugh to Mike Krzyzewski, Tom Izzo, Jim Boeheim, Brad Stevens, Geno Auriemma, and Doc Rivers--to get at the fundamental ingredients of greatness in the coaching sphere. There's no single right way, of course--part of the great value of the book is Seth's distillation of what he has learned down into types of greatness in coaching, and what sort of leadership thrives in one kind of environment but not others. Some coaches have thrived at the college level but not in the pros. Why? What's the difference? Some coaches are stern taskmasters, others are warm and cuddly; some are brilliant strategists but less emotionally connected with their players, and with others it's vice versa. In Getting To Us, we come to feel a deep connection with the most successful and iconic coaches in all of sports--big winners, and big character, whose stories offer much in the way of both fascination and edification.

Seth Davis is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Wooden: A Coach’s Life and When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball. He is an on-air studio analyst for CBS Sports and CBS Sports Network during coverage of college basketball and the NCAA tournament, and he is also the managing editor of The Fieldhouse, a national college basketball platform at The Athletic. Before joining The Athletic, Davis spent twenty-two years covering college basketball for Sports Illustrated. A graduate of Duke University, he lives with his family in Los Angeles.