The End is Not the Trophy: Reflections on a Life in Coaching

Considered one of the most competent in his profession, Odum, head basketball coach at Wake Forest University in North Carolina for the past seven years, has taken his team into NCAA postseason play seven times and led them to two Atlantic Coast Conference championships. After 11 years in high-school ball, he served as an assistant at Wake Forest and the University of Virginia until he accepted his present post in 1990. He notes that he wrote this book as a guide for young people who aspire to follow in his footsteps, and he succeeds notably. In discussing the coach's function in any sport, he makes a number of arresting observations: a coach who is not a teacher is not a good coach; a coach who relies only on computer printouts and other statistical data ignores the humanity of his players. Most intriguing of all, he claims not to read articles about himself or his team in the press, for he believes that sports reporters don't know as much about the game as he does. (Mar.)