According to Andy Hill, who played for Coach John Wooden who won 10 NCAA championships while coaching at UCLA:Coach Wooden never emphasized winning. What he talked about was the commitment to playing your hardest. Never permitting fear of failure to prevent effort. We are all imperfect and will fail on occasion, but fear of failure is the greatest failure of all. If you gave it your best and lost, that was fine. In fact, that was better than winning with a mediocre effort.
It’s not that Coach didn’t care about winning. Many of his ex-players state that they’ve never met a more competitive man in their life. But he was smart enough to know that people focus too much on the score and tighten up.
There is no doubt that valuing effort over winning was something that Coach had integrated into his highly competitive nature at a very early age. His father told him, “Johnny, don’t you try to be better than your brothers. But try to be the best you can be. You’re gonna be better than some and there are gonna be some better than you. You’ve got to accept that. But you should never accept the fact that you didn’t make the effort to do the best that you can do.”
He really does judge success by effort and by how close a group comes to realizing their own potential. By this standard, any team has the opportunity to achieve great success.
Coach’s genius was in understanding that those who spend all their time talking about winning aren’t helping their chances. Every player should remove the thought of winning as the focal point and by doing so can reduce the pressure and fear they feel entering a game.
The key point here is that effort is mental (internal), and is completely within your control. Winning is a just a byproduct of effort, but it is conditional to external factors and is almost never completely within your control.
So regardless of the circumstances you find yourself in, your effort and mental approach (make it fun) is what will determine your ultimate success.
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