Coaches Emphasizing Academics

During the ESPN broadcast of last nights game between St. Mary's and Santa Clara, they did a short feature on Kerry Keating, 1st year head coach at Santa Clara talking about his emphasis on academics and working on his players' time management skills. Here is the short in-game segment,



I also happened to catch Jay Leno last night and Bobby Knight was his guest and we all know Coach Knight was huge on academics. I found these quotes from last nights show off of Coach Finamore's Blog and IndyStar,

On his players’ academic success: “I think we probably had the highest graduation rate of anybody,” Knight said. “I wanted (my players) to be afraid not to graduate.” He wanted his players to think, ‘Hey, he might not renew our scholarship.’ … I think that when I take your son, I want you to feel after four years that it’s been worthwhile. I want you to be able to say, ‘Hey, thanks for what you’ve done.’ I think the major responsibility that any college coach has who recruits kids is to see that those kids graduate. I mean, why else are they there?”

Lets not forget that most of us are coaching student-athletes. The student comes first before the athlete...