Character Counts!

Like many of us, Brent Bell, former high school basketball coach and current Head of the Upper School at the Randolph School in Huntsville, Alabama was impressed with Butler's run during the NCAA Basketball tournament. He emailed members of Randolph's faculty and staff to share comments that "jumped off the screen" at him during the telecast of Monday night's championship game. One of Brent's observations regarding comments made by Butler coach Brad Stevens after the game was particularly compelling to me. During the postgame press conference Stevens very purposely stated:

"We are Butler and we are going to keep doing this the Butler way. We are going to keep recruiting the types of kids we recruit(kids who won in high school, kids who will play a role, kids who will compete all the time) and if we don't catch 'lightning in a bottle' and reach the championship game or win a national title so be it. We are who we are and we are proud of it."

How refeshing! In the program's most shining moment, the coach talks about the mission of Butler basketball! Instead of submitting to vacuous coachspeak to put the best spin on the loss, he stuck with the team's core values. In every interview that Stevens did during the tournament you got the feeling that when he looked into the camera and spoke, he meant what he said. He refused to get caught up in the perception-is-reality culture surrounding him.

What makes Stevens so believable is that his players actually LIVE OUT the program's mission. They had to "compete all the time" just to defend opposing teams stocked with bigger, more athletic players. The true measure of a competitor in any sport is a willingness to grind on defense. By the end of the tournament it seemed like every Butler player had been described as a great on ball defender! It also took a team of players who "will play a role" to stay in games with teams bringing high school all americans off the bench. Gordon Hayward, Butler's best player, proudly stated that "the ability of our team to say 'next person up' is special."

Steven's third point about recruiting "kids who won in high school" seems obvious, but it is not. So many basketball players are recruited based on their ability to fill stat sheets during summer tournaments. The AAU circuit is unabashedly about showcasing talent not winning. The Butler players competed like winners. They handled success and adversity the same way. When the other team made a run, they kept executing. When the Bulldogs got ahead, they played defense even harder to preserve the lead. There was never a sense of panic on the Butler bench.

In today's image-is-everything sports world where success is too often based on entertainment value and the buzz that accompanies it, the Butler basketball program is bucking the trend. In the same year that John Wooden is voted the greatest coach of all time in a poll conducted (ironically) by the ENTERTAINMENT Sports and Programming Network, Brad Stevens and his Bulldogs embody one of Coach Wooden's most famous admonitions: "Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are."