Will Wade: “You’re in the total wrong frame of mind when you get on the bus” ‬ by Chris Filios

Sound bite of the week comes from Virginia Commonwealth Head Basketball Coach Will Wade:

“We had two guys that didn’t wear VCU issued gear on the flight” by Will Wade. They wore their own, stylish whatever-it-may-be. That’s selfishness. You could say ‘oh, that doesn’t matter’. That stuff matters. I wasn’t there to pick up on it. By the time I saw it, it was that night at shoot around. There’s really nothing you can do about it. Like if we get on the bus to go to Old Dominion and you aren’t in VCU gear, your ass is going to the dorm and the bus is leaving. I don’t care. I don’t care who it is. Cause we’re not going to win with you. You’re in the total wrong frame of mind when you get on the bus. You’re in the total wrong frame of mind when you get on the bus.”

This quote comes in a press conference after a 64-46 loss to Illinois in which Wade said it was the worst the Rams have played in his two seasons as head coach: “That’s as poorly as we can play, as selfishly as we can play, as softly as we can play,” he said, taking the blame because he was “in charge of that disaster” and didn’t have the Rams in the right frame of mind.

“You just can’t show up and beat people in college basketball. Everybody’s got good players…Sometimes we think we can just go out there and do what we want to do. It’s my fault. I didn’t have us prepared. … I had us in a soft frame of mind. There’s a couple of things that pointed to us being selfish. … I didn’t recognize some things I would have typically nipped in the bud when we were going down there.”

The small things matter. Everything is important. The details make the difference. It may seem small at the time, but they can sometimes be the root cause of bigger problems. What Will Wade is pointing to isn’t necessarily that he didn’t like they way the guys looked stylishly. He didn’t like what they were wearing because they had decided to put themselves before the rest of the team. They were saying they (and the way they looked) were more important than the rest of the team. That mind set can carry over both in the preparation and execution of the game plan…and in this case, it seems as though it did. The team attitude isn’t about ME, it is about WE…and that is what these two players forgot and it hurt their team. Now are they the only reason VCU played poorly against Illinois? No…but the “small” things are just as important as the “big” things.

Click on the pdf link to download the Will Wade Article:

Will Wade: “You’re in the total wrong frame of mind when you get on the bus” ‬