{"id":681896,"date":"2026-03-27T10:42:41","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T10:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/681896\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T10:42:41","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T10:42:41","slug":"a-college-basketball-coach-made-418-mistakes-his-first-year-he-kept-track-of-all-of-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/681896\/","title":{"rendered":"A college basketball coach made 418 mistakes his first year. He kept track of all of them"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peak newsletter\u00a0| A version of this story first appeared in\u00a0The Athletic\u2019s\u00a0weekly newsletter covering the mental side of sports.\u00a0Sign up here<\/a>\u00a0to receive the Peak newsletter directly in your inbox.<\/p>\n

Thirteen years ago, a college basketball coach dreamed up an idea to help others: He started writing down his mistakes. Mike Neighbors was always a list maker, the kind of guy who would rank his top 1,000 movies of all time.<\/p>\n

To make a list was to introduce order and rhythm to his life. So when he became the head women\u2019s basketball coach at the University of Washington in 2013, he pulled out a fresh notebook and started documenting everything he did wrong during his first season.<\/p>\n

Sometimes he jotted down an error in real time. Other times, he reflected at the end of the week. Studies have shown that people who write down their mistakes perform better on similar problems in the long run. But Neighbors wasn\u2019t just thinking about himself.<\/p>\n

Every year around this time, dozens of college basketball assistants become head coaches for the first time. The distance from assistant to head coach, as Neighbors puts it, is only 18 inches along the bench. But it represents a transformational experience \u2014 a transition\u00a0 found in industries and organizations across the world.<\/p>\n

One day, you\u2019re offering recommendations. The next day, you\u2019re making decisions. One day, you\u2019re a staff member. The next, you\u2019re a leader.<\/p>\n

When Neighbors\u2019 first season was over, his notebook contained 418 mistakes. He turned the contents of the notebook into a document about becoming a head coach, which then turned into a presentation at the annual Nike Villa 7 coaches forum, a now-defunct incubator for top college basketball assistants.<\/p>\n

Neighbors spent four years at Washington, leading the Huskies and Kelsey Plum to the Final Four in 2015, then moved to the University of Arkansas for eight seasons. These days, he\u2019s an assistant coach for the WNBA\u2019s Dallas Wings.<\/p>\n

Yet, more than a decade later, coaches still call him about his presentation. The anecdotes and details are dated, but the lessons remain universal.<\/p>\n

The lesson: I told people the TRUTH before I had earned their TRUST<\/p>\n

Neighbors: I had a returning senior who was very good and who had established herself in her role with the previous head coach. I\u2019d had a good relationship with the players as an assistant. I was thinking I could say just about whatever I wanted. I flash back to Old School with Will Ferrell when he says: \u201cI thought we were in the trust nest.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

So I just said to her: \u201cYour role is going to change a lot next year, and you\u2019ve been used to shooting it 20 to 25 times a game. Well, that\u2019s probably going to go down because we have a freshman coming in who is going to take a lot of those shots.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I thought it was a nice little friendly conversation. Well, the next conversation I had with her was making sure she just came back. It gave her second thoughts on if she even wanted to play with us. Big mistake! I had to literally re-recruit her.<\/p>\n

Neighbors always wanted to be a college basketball coach. He just wasn\u2019t sure how. He played baseball growing up, but always loved basketball. When he graduated from Arkansas and started applying for jobs with college programs, he went zero for his first 122.<\/p>\n

He settled for coaching high school girls basketball, which came with an unexpected perk. When Neighbors was at Bentonville High in the mid-1990s, the school purchased a set of desktop computers, which came with something called Pegasus Mail. Intrigued by the new technology, Neighbors started an email newsletter about coaching.<\/p>\n

As he climbed the ranks and earned assistant jobs at Tulsa, Colorado, Arkansas, Xavier and Washington, he kept sending out emails. By the time he became the head coach at Washington, he counted upward of 75,000 recipients. The list included everyone from Buzz Williams, the Division I men\u2019s coach, to club coaches in Russia.<\/p>\n

Neighbors remains self-deprecating about his writing skills. But he loved to share nuggets of wisdom. When he was a boy, he soaked up leadership maxims from his \u201cpapaw,\u201d James Neighbors.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the water around a boat that sinks it, it\u2019s the water in it.<\/p>\n

A thought without action is a daydream. Action without thought is a nightmare.<\/p>\n

Shout praise, whisper criticism.<\/p>\n

It was the last one that always stuck. When it came to players, Neighbors always sought to lead with praise. But when it came to himself, he took the opposite tack. To be self-critical was a recipe for growth. He found value in being vulnerable and owning his mistakes.<\/p>\n

After replacing Kevin McGuff as the Washington women\u2019s head coach in 2013, he suddenly realized he had a lot of reasons to be self-critical.<\/p>\n

The lesson: I tried to do too many \u201cthings\u201d<\/p>\n

Neighbors: When I was an assistant at Xavier, I used to go to Sean Miller\u2019s practices for the men\u2019s team. My rule was to stay until I learned one new thing. He had this deal where the player of the week got to wear a white jersey, and everybody else\u2019s was blue and gray. I thought it was awesome, and I wrote that down: When I\u2019m a head coach, we\u2019re going to get some practice gear like that that\u2019s different.<\/p>\n

I did \u2013 and that idea completely flopped. Completely fell on its face the first week.<\/p>\n

The player who got it didn\u2019t want it. And it was badass. It was purple-and-gold camouflaged. I spent like $2,000 of our budget to get it in every size.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I gave it to her, and she was like: \u201cCoach, I don\u2019t want to be different than my teammates.\u201d I was like: \u201cWell, that\u2019s a really healthy attitude to have, but you\u2019ve completely screwed my idea up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Mike Neighbors was the head coach at Arkansas for eight seasons. (Williams Paul \/ Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

On his first day as Washington\u2019s head coach, Neighbors came to understand a life maxim: Nobody really understands what their boss does. He thought he knew, of course. He had worked alongside Gary Blair, the legendary women\u2019s coach. He had strong mentors. He had studied head coaches at other programs.<\/p>\n

But reality hit hard that first day. When he was an assistant, he always began each morning with a to-do list. He could put his head down and work. He took joy checking boxes.<\/p>\n

But soon after he walked into the head coach\u2019s office with a to-do list in hand and sat down at his new desk, his secretary walked in. Then his associate athletic director and nine other people.<\/p>\n

None were on his list, and by the end of the day, he hadn\u2019t accomplished a single thing he had set out to do.<\/p>\n

Washington finished 20-14 in his first season and missed the NCAA Tournament. When the year was over, Neighbors sat down with his notebook:<\/p>\n

Wow, he thought. He had messed up a lot of things.<\/p>\n

By the end of that first season, his list was up to 418 mistakes.<\/p>\n

The lesson: I stopped confronting things that needed to be confronted<\/p>\n

Neighbors: This isn\u2019t one I\u2019m real proud of, but I\u2019ll share it. I had an assistant coach who was undermining me a bit. It got back to me through players. It got back to me through staff members.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I knew it was going to be a hard conversation. I knew where it was going to head. And I never did it until it kind of blew up and I was forced to deal with it.<\/p>\n

I thought: This problem is going to work itself out. Well, it didn\u2019t. I ended up having to have the conversation, and it was much harder. And we all know that! Anyone going into a leadership position knows that; they\u2019ve heard it. But when you\u2019re confronted with it for the first time, it\u2019s a lot harder.<\/p>\n

After the season, Neighbors sat down with his notebook and tried to sort those 418 mistakes into categories. He settled on 12.<\/p>\n

I assumed being an assistant coach would prepare you to be a head coach
\nI told people the TRUTH before I had earned their TRUST
\nI got out of shape
\nI got out of alignment between Process and Results
\nI tried to do too many \u201cthings\u201d
\nI was afraid to do \u201cwhat I thought best\u201d
\nI exhausted my daily decision energy on stuff that didn\u2019t affect winning
\nI stopped confronting things that needed to be confronted
\nI let the Urgent overcome the Important
\nI forgot to keep myself \u201ccharged\u201d
\nI didn\u2019t realize how tight my friend circle would become
\nI had no idea how to manage a staff or how to \u201cmanage up\u201d<\/p>\n

He realized that more than 200 of the mistakes stemmed from a simple problem: A lack of energy. He had stopped exercising. Stopped playing the guitar. Stopped playing golf because he worried about someone going on a Washington message board and complaining that the head coach was out on the course, not recruiting.<\/p>\n

The biggest issue: He stopped doing the things that kept him feeling charged. And when he didn\u2019t feel charged, he learned, he made poor decisions.<\/p>\n

The solution: He had to carve out time for himself.<\/p>\n

The lesson: I got out of alignment between Process and Results<\/p>\n

Neighbors: Process: \u201cThis is the way we\u2019re going to do things. These are our day-to-days. These are our non-negotiables. Blah blah blah.\u201d All those things every coach talks about. I had 14 years as an assistant to come up with all of those.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Well, then you set goals attached to that and it\u2019s immediately out of alignment. Goals are results-driven; processes are systems-driven. I should have said I\u2019m goal-driven. Or I should have said I\u2019m process-driven. You can\u2019t be both.<\/p>\n

That first year, it came up with some of the players. \u201cHey, coach, I\u2019ve got all these shooting goals, and I did all these things you wanted me to do, and I\u2019m still not playing more.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was like: Hmm. You\u2019ve got a good point there.<\/p>\n

They\u2019d done everything I\u2019d asked them to do, yet it didn\u2019t yield the results. I had to admit to them: \u201cI had it wrong. You\u2019re correct. You\u2019ve done everything. But so has this other person, and they\u2019re just doing it a little bit better.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think it hurt my credibility with that set of players.<\/p>\n

For years, Neighbors had been a believer in setting goals. It seemed like something you had to do. That first year, he had team goals, game goals and position goals. He even instituted goals for four-minute increments during the game.<\/p>\n

The result: None of the players knew what to focus on. The same with his staff.<\/p>\n

Neighbors tried to streamline the process in his second year. But there was still one problem. His program set a goal to reach the NCAA Tournament. The Huskies had not been in eight years, and he plastered the goal everywhere \u2014 in the locker room, on T-shirts, and on scouting reports.<\/p>\n

The tactic appeared to work. The Huskies made the tournament and traveled to Iowa for the first round. But in the news conference before the game, Neighbors listened to his juniors and seniors tell the media how proud they were to reach the tournament and accomplish their goal.<\/p>\n

In one sense, the players were saying all the right things. But when the news conference was over, Neighbors walked by Plum, then a sophomore.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know we\u2019re getting ready to get our ass kicked, right?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Sure enough, Washington lost to No. 11 seed Miami. The next week, Neighbors stumbled upon a book called \u201cBurn Your Goals\u201d by Jamie Gilbert and Joshua Medcalf. The book argued for focusing on process and toughness. From then on, Neighbors stopped setting goals. He started creating standards.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t worry about the results, Neighbors told his players. Just focus on our processes, our systems, and then let the standards carry us as far as they\u2019ll take us.<\/p>\n

The next year, Washington made the Final Four.<\/p>\n

The way Neighbors saw it, the run had begun two years earlier. It only took 418 mistakes.<\/p>\n

More than a decade later, Neighbors\u2019 notebook was gifted to an executive at Nike, who filed it away in a storage box. But the PDF from his presentation lives on. It\u2019s a document about becoming a leader, a reminder of everything he wishes he knew.<\/p>\n

Every year, another coach seems to find it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Peak newsletter\u00a0| A version of this story first appeared in\u00a0The Athletic\u2019s\u00a0weekly newsletter covering the mental side of sports.\u00a0Sign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":681897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3724],"tags":[598,7,325,6074,6201,354,1697,10,13650,458,6135],"class_list":["post-681896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-arkansas-razorbacks","tag-basketball","tag-college-sports","tag-dallas-wings","tag-los-angeles-sparks","tag-mens-college-basketball","tag-peak","tag-sports-business","tag-washington-huskies","tag-wnba","tag-womens-college-basketball"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116300727038206523","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/681897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}