Great article. I loved Pitino's quotes:
Why Fleck’s approach has worked
Minnesota basketball coach Richard Pitino greeted Fleck with similar skepticism when he arrived on campus. Pitino remembers leaving the building one night and running into Fleck, who immediately made Pitino know how he was doing: “ELITE!”
Pitino remembers thinking to himself as he got in his car: “Am I going to have to listen to this every time I see this guy? Not only is it annoying, but it’s grammatically incorrect.”
Pitino’s roots in the Northeast trend him toward cynical. So you can imagine his reaction when Fleck moved in on the same street. But after a few nights smoking cigars and sipping wine at his backyard fire pit, Pitino warmed to Fleck. Richard and Jill Pitino have grown close to P.J. and Heather Fleck, and the Pitinos have gone through familiar phases of understanding the P.J. Fleck experience: Skepticism to acceptance to full embrace.
“You’re not going to like him if you don’t know him yourself,” Pitino said by phone Tuesday. “But that’s the way that he is all the time. He’s relentlessly positive. He’s a lot more real than you’d think he’d be.”
Pitino said there are parts of Fleck’s coaching mindset that overlap with his father, Hall of Famer Rick Pitino.
“They’re both insanely confident in their plan,” Richard Pitino said. “When you start to coach for a while, you realize there’s a million different ways to do it. You have to believe in what you’re doing. That’s what I’ve taken most from P.J., he believes in it and knows how to sell it.”
https://sports.yahoo.com/pj-flecks-...tive-on-him-he-may-be-a-genius-012329346.html
Go Gophers!!
