As TigerBlog said yesterday in his piece on the celebration of the life of Pete Carril, he'd be reproducing here the remarks that Princeton head coach Mitch Henderson delivered at the event.
Henderson was the starting point guard on Carril's final team. He was Carril's favorite kind of player — tough, tenacious, team-oriented, great court vision, could play 40 minutes a night without losing a step. As with every player who played for Carril, Henderson has taken with him what he learned as a Princeton men's basketball player. He also is in the unique position of passing on those lessons to the current generation.
Here are his remarks:
A short time after I was hired as head basketball coach at Princeton in 2011, my former coach handed me an index card with three words written on it. Think. See. Do.
After Carril handed me the card, he looked at me for what felt like 30 seconds, staring me down with that “are you listening?” glare.
Coach was a teacher before he was a coach. He started out as a history teacher and was clearly heavily influenced by the teachers he knew throughout his life. He would often say the role of a coach is that of a teacher. And if one of us didn’t know how to do something on the basketball court — make a hook shot, throw a left-handed pass to the corner — his job was to teach us how to do that. We’d repeat the moves, over and over, until we got it right. His record here proved: he was a master teacher.
He was always teaching—sometimes by showing us out on the court, sometimes in more subtle ways. My freshman year (1994-95), Coach would occasionally toss a stapled packet of box scores our way. It was a gesture that was clear in its intention. These were box scores of great games from before our time at Princeton, from teams he had coached that were special. These box scores were a snapshot of what a TEAM can and should do together. Even if it was highlighting an individual performance, the emphasis was on how that performance contributed to a key team win. Or better yet, a League Title-clinching win.
18 rebounds in 1 game. 33 points scored in a game. 10 assists and only 1 turnover! It was his way of saying ‘You want to know what doing something looks like…? THIS is what doing something looks like.” He might have also been saying, “You guys stink!” Even if that wasn’t his point, that’s likely what we heard. We were all very aware that he was nearing the end of his time at Princeton at this point—the looming conclusion to a monumental career he’d hint at every now and again, usually in moments of frustration or anger. The team wanted one of those big title-clinching wins too—a victory for us but also for him.
The following year in 1996, we were on the cusp of just such a win. We finished the season with a share of the Ivy Championship, which meant we were preparing for a one-game ‘playoff’ against Penn to decide which team would get to go to the NCAA tournament that season. The game was to be held at Lehigh, not far from where Coach had grown up in Bethlehem, PA. To make matters worse, we had lost to Penn several times in a row, including twice already that very season. I don’t remember our team ever being so nervous in the locker room before any other game.
But something clicked that night. We beat our nemesis in overtime, and the team and all our fans broke out into a massive celebration. It was huge for all of us, but it felt like something more for Coach. I remember watching Coach entering the locker room silently. He walked right up to the front of that room without saying a word and started very slowly writing on the board in chalk: “I am very happy. I am retiring.” We all started cheering and hugging and clapping. Happy was not an emotion we expected often from our coach—when he felt it, we were allowed to feel it too.
Then the party started. Coach loved to celebrate the big wins, especially on the bus. It was finally our turn to celebrate a huge win with him. That bus ride back to Princeton was one of the most fun bus rides we ever had. We all knew he was a great coach and teacher, but I suspect none of us on that team felt quite as connected to him as some of his earlier teams and groups. He’d had such a storied career and coached so many greats—those historic box scores he handed out to us every season made us feel like we’d never quite match up to our predecessors. But on that ride, we finally felt like the team Coach expected us to be. We sang songs with him and the rest of the staff and loudly celebrated our upcoming trip to the NCAA’s.
***
Anyone who has ever played for Coach knows how tough a road it was. But I can honestly say that my relationship with him now is so different than it was when I played for him. To play for Coach is to see the game like him. And there isn’t much room for interpretation. He would often ask “What do you see?” If you were dumb enough to answer, it was at your own peril. The point was that you were expected to figure it out. You had to figure out how to “just play” the way he saw the game.
He had patience, albeit limited, for learning, but zero tolerance if you didn’t try to do your best. If you did try your absolute very best and maximized your potential, it was noted. But that level of effort wasn’t deserving of a compliment. That was just the way it was supposed to be. To get a compliment from Coach as a player, this was the ultimate gift—it was so rare.
The same has been true as my relationship with him changed, from player to collaborator and colleague. Compliments were vanishingly rare, but there was a level of positivity I’d never experienced before. Whenever he would tell me that the team was playing well, the words alone, coming from him, were a great reward. Sometimes it was just a nod, but I read it. The nod meant that what I was doing, in his eyes, was right. Maybe for that one night, I was thinking, seeing, and doing, just as Coach had always wanted me to.
I’d like to share what those three words— think, see, do—mean to me, those words Coach has been drilling into us all these years.
Think. Think about what the most important thing to do is, and then do that in practice as often as possible. Think through carefully how to work through all of the different teaching points on one side of the court. Then, when it’s time, move to the other side. Keep thinking—which way does the player you are guarding prefer to go, right or left? What play does this coach like to run in this exact scenario? Where is the best matchup on the floor right now? And then ask regularly (in Coach’s voice), “YO! What were you thiiiinkiiing?”
See. See everything. Watch what they do and then ask questions. Observe very carefully how someone does something and then ask them to do it again. Is it the same this time or different? Why? How? Don’t always answer right away. Be sure to let your team know that you believe in change, in growth. What are they doing to make themselves experts? Then ask, all the time, “YO! What do you seeeee?”
Do. Be on the floor, be engaged, and teach them what to do. The ‘Do’ part is the work. The goal is to become a worker, to overcome something that is in you and push through it to where you can see change. The “doing” is the moment that stands out.
Craig Robinson ’83 told me about how at the beginning of his senior year, Coach was imploring him to work on a reverse one-foot layup. Craig spent time on this move, and when he made the move and sank the layup in an open gym session that fall, he heard a familiar voice from high up in the Jadwin Gym bleachers… “YO CRAIG!” The best kind of “YO!” you could get—one of approval. Coach loved to be around people that worked to improve on their own. In the fall, in the spring, down at Jadwin, working hard in an empty gym. He believed “doing” was rare. It was the sign of strong character.
Of course, then ask the players all the time: “YO! What are you doooooing?”
When I became head coach several years ago, he would frequently stop by to watch us practice. Afterwards, when practice was over, we would often talk. He’d say “I have some notes for you from practice…” He would pull a piece of paper out of his pockets, look down at it, and shake his head. “Well, that’s not it. (Long pause) That’s my recipe for Spanish Rice.”
***
Coach’s wisdom never faltered. “Be yourself,” Coach told me many times over the years. He would often drop this one on me after a particularly tough loss. You think about what you want to do, watch closely, and then you do it. You lose the stuff that doesn’t work, keep the stuff that does, and above all, do it in your own way.
There is so much of Coach in me in—so much of him in Bill Carmody, who coached me at Princeton after Carril and then hired me at Northwestern—that what comes out of my mouth should often be footnoted: Passes must be on the money. Snap your chest pass. Cut hard. Free throws are free points, fellas… We have to get every one.
It is the way in which these points are delivered that resonates the most to me now. The longer I coach, the more I realize the simple elegance of each teaching point being reiterated regularly.
No one who knew Coach will ever forget his mantra: The most important thing you are doing is the thing you are doing right now. Our coach was practicing ‘Mindfulness’ before anyone even knew what that was.
Coach was also a pioneer in basketball analytics, way before anyone else was. Which was ironic, given that he never crunched a single number on any computer. Bill Carmody once said to Time magazine writer Sean Gregory ’98: “He didn’t understand computers or the people who used them.”
He was a singular presence, an unforgettable essence. He was, forever and always, very much himself. As a player, it was easy get lost in the way Coach would talk to me. He was unlike any coach or teacher I had ever had; he was so direct, so honest, and often personal.
Many former players would come back to games or to Princeton Reunions and tell some of their favorite Coach Carril stories, some good ones and some bad ones —and there’s no shortage of these stories. As players, we have all held onto these stories—we tell them to compare tours of duties, to laugh, to unload, but most of all, to honor our coach.
Coach would occasionally admit to me that he wasn’t always right in the way he did things. I’d watch Coach cringe occasionally as he listened to the stories where he was particularly harsh on someone. Coach was, in short, brutally honest. But he was less so as he got older, and he trended towards the positives, towards building relationships that were about more than just basketball. Of course he enjoyed talking hoops, but he also loved to drill down on the best Gary Cooper Westerns, or what makes for a great breakfast sandwich, or to talk about his own kids and grandkids and what they were up to.
It's not always easy to be taught well. For Coach, praise was the cheapest form of reward. When Craig tells that story of Coach giving him a “YO” from the rafters, he says he felt like he was floating in the air.
***
In 2017, Ben Cohen came to do a featured story on Coach for the Wall Street Journal and Carril’s influence on the NBA. This was a very important piece to Coach – he had it framed and hanging on the wall of his apartment ever since it was published.
I remember Bill Carmody telling me a story about how when he was Carril’s assistant, high school coaches would often call the office in Jadwin looking for notes or plays on how to run the Princeton Offense. Coach would answer the phone, there’d be silence for a few seconds, then he’d say, “Figure it out like I did.” And then he’d hang up. Good spacing and good players that play together. Who are the X’s and who are the O’s. What are you doing on every possession to make the guy next to you better? Fellas, I am preparing you to WIN THE GAME. Not to be close. We must make practices harder than the games. You are what you do in practice! Basketball as a metaphor for life.
Coach didn’t like the term Princeton Offense, and he told reporters like Cohen and anyone else who asked as much. For him, it was about 5 guys playing well together, thinking together, speaking the same language. Coach believed that any shot, regardless of distance, in which you aren’t guarded, is easier than the shot that you are guarded. He constantly asked us: What are you doing on every possession to make your teammates better? If you commit to that, the ball will find you.
Coach wanted his centers to play the game like Bill Russell. He would tell us that there were lots of players that are better than him, better shooters, or dribblers, or passers. But no one takes away more things from the other team than Russell. No one makes you win like Russell.
To celebrate Coach is to talk about his direct influence on us on the court, on sharing the ball, on playing together. But playing for one another is just one part of his legacy. There is a notable influence that Coach has had on the game at every level—everyone from Steve Kerr to Brad Stevens count Carril as an important influence on their careers. With so many of us former players and assistants now coaching, Coach has to have one of the most expansive coaching trees in the country.
His profound influence on the game of basketball itself is sometimes hard to fathom. In the first two years since the advent of the three-point shot, which started in 1987, Coach’s teams shot 30% of its shots from behind the arc. Two years later, it was 42%. Two more years later, nearly half of Princeton’s shots were threes. (As a point of comparison, in that same year, 1991, the percentage of shots taken from beyond the three-point line in the NCAA was near 20%, the NBA below 10%.) Carril, ever the outlier, had those Princeton teams shooting near or above 45% from beyond the arc, not to mention 50% from the field. His 1991 team was nationally ranked most of the season.
Coach was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1997, accepted the very first time he was eligible.
He got in on his impact on game of basketball: his impact on the game, on his players, on the character of the game. Coach understood that he was a dose of reality. He wasn’t the guy in the three-piece suit, never a self promoter. He stayed true to who he was. This resonated.
In
that same Wall Street Journal article, Coach was asked if it's easy for him to enjoy watching the NBA's best teams — because the NBA's best teams now play like his old Princeton teams. Coach responded, in trademark fashion, "You'd have to be blind as a bat not to see that."
Thank you, Coach. Think. See. Do.
We think about you every day. We see you. And we love you.
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