Circle of Success: Lessons from a Lifetime of Sport - Softcover

Leach, Bill; Newland, Ted; Bindloss, Lesley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0970864205 ISBN 13: 9780970864208

Publisher: Hawthorne Hills Pub, 2001

Synopsis

“Circle of Success – Lessons from a Lifetime of Sport” is an inspirational collection of anecdotes on the value of sport in bringing out the qualities we all need to be successful in life. Drawn from the experiences of an Olympic athlete and an NCAA Championship water polo coach, each of the twelve chapters in the book contains between two and four stories that illustrate qualities such as self-discipline, confidence, persistence, responsibility and attitude – qualities that can be developed through sport. The book is written in a conversational tone that makes it easy to read. The anecdotes are challenging, amusing, and enlightening, and each is partnered with a page of motivational quotations by noteworthy figures.

Hugh Hewitt, three-time Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist, said of this book: “Newland and Leach have something important to say to everyone who values success. They know about training the body, but they speak about training one’s life”.

“Circle of Success – Lessons from a Lifetime of Sport” will appeal to a wide range of readers and will be a timeless addition to any home.

About this title

About the Author

Bill Leach

Bill Leach was born in Southern California in 1946 and has participated in sport his whole life. His first success in athletics came at Corona del Mar High School, where he was on the All CIF water polo team and the All American Swimming Team and was named Athlete of the Year. Later, after playing on the U.S. National Water Polo team, Leach switched to the sport of kayaking, and earned a place on the Olympic team. He raced in the Montreal Olympics in 1976, and when the boycott of the 1980 Olympics was imposed, he began participating in triathlons. Hard work and effort over a period of years culminated in a first place award at the ITU World Championships in 1996. In 1998 he co-founded the Pacific Coast Triathlon, of which he is now the Race Director. In addition to his career in sports, Leach has taught history at Corona del Mar High School for over 30 years. His experience has convinced him that the character and strength we need to face life can be learned through participat! ion in sports, and this book is an expression of that conviction.

Ted Newland

Ted Newland is a legend in the world of water polo in Southern California. Born in 1927, he began his teaching career at Newport Harbor High School, California. The water polo programs he founded at this school and at Corona del Mar High School became two of the strongest high school programs in the U.S. In 1965 he coached his team to a CIF Championship victory, and then accepted a head coach position at U.C. Irvine where he still coaches today. Newland was the national coach for the Pan Am Games in 1971 and 1974, and was head coach of the World University Games in 1973, ’79, ’91, ’95, and ’99. He holds the honor of having the most wins in NCAA Water Polo history. His philosophy of hard work and self-discipline yields results: he has coached 64 players to All American status, and 12 of his athletes became Olympians. Newland has coached in over 5,300 water polo games and swim meets, and the book “Circle of Success – Lessons from a Lifetime of Sport” distills the wisdom he has ! gained from his vast experience in athletics.

Lesley Bindloss earned a degree in English at the University of Southampton in England. Working closely with Newland and Leach, she helped put into words the principles they passionately believed in.

From the Inside Flap

In 1986 I turned forty, and Ted Newland was nearing sixty. I was working out every day, and so was he. We both enjoyed sport and knew that our lives were richer and our bodies healthier because of it, and it occurred to us that it was time to write a book explaining Newland's philosophy. If others knew what we knew, their lives could be enhanced too. Full of optimism, we wrote a couple of chapters of what was basically a how to book. I spoke with some publishers, and although they were polite, they showed little interest. In their words, "the fitness boom was over".

Time passed. For ten years, the book sat on a shelf. I turned fifty, and won a Triathlon World Championship for my age group. Newland had his sixty-ninth birthday, and won another NCAA Water Polo Championship. We were still working out every day. The fitness boom was still booming. In fact, fitness oriented recreation was exploding, and we realized that now we had even more to say about fitness than we had ten years before. Only this time, instead of a fitness manual, we would explain how sport had helped us develop the emotional qualities necessary for success in all areas of life. We believe that the lessons we have learned in over a hundred years of athletic experience are universal lessons. It doesn't matter that we learned most of them through a career in sports, because they apply as much to business, marriage or any other endeavor you decide to pursue.

With the assistance of Lesley Bindloss, whose writing and editing skills helped us form and express our ideas, the book began to take shape. Ironically, the strengths we acquired over many years in athletics, which we wanted to explain in the book, were the very qualities we needed to write it. We started with a dream, and then worked as a team to achieve it. We persevered in finding the right format, and did many re-writes. We used self-discipline to find the time week after week to fit the book into our busy schedules. Above all, we believed in ourselves, and in the value of what we had to say, and we did not give up.

We have reached the finish line. We hope you enjoy the book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Coach Like You Think They re Listening (Sometimes They Are)

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow-men; and along those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects. Herman Melville

Sometimes when I m coaching I feel like I m just out there shouting into the wind; my words seem to zip right over the heads of the kids in the water and ricochet back off the pool deck. It frustrates me, but I don t give up. It is my duty to throw out the best I have, and hope that some of what I believe in so passionately will hit the mark. I ve learned from many years of coaching that some of it does, mainly because of a player I had named Jeff Harvey.

I recruited Jeff in 1987. He was large and very fast, and he was on the 1989 team that won the NCAA Championships, although he didn t play in any of the games. For some reason Jeff never reached the level I thought he would, and I didn t think he was getting much out of what I was saying. It has always been hard for me to accept that some kids have great talent but lack the discipline to develop it, and when he ended up drifting away from the program I wrote him off as one of the ones I lost . How wrong I was.

One day I ran into Jeff at the Corona del Mar High School pool. He wore a bright red bandana around his head and gave me the grim news he d been diagnosed with testicular cancer. The chemotherapy had made all his hair fall out. I was surprised at the determination in his voice when he told me he was swimming again to get back into shape, that he d quit drinking and staying out late, and he was eating better. He said that playing water polo at UCI had taught him how to fight to win, and he would never give up battling this disease. For the first time in his life he felt that he was taking control.

I was blown away. All the years he played on my team, and I never thought he was listening as I hammered away about the importance of self-discipline and strength of character. I was stunned to realize that in fact Jeff probably took in more of what I was trying to teach than many of the star players on the team.

He started coming over to my house quite regularly to talk, and I saw that his days in the water polo program had planted in him the seeds of a tremendously positive attitude. Now, just when he needed it the most, he was reaping the harvest.

It would be a great story if Jeff had won the fight, but he didn t. He died in 1996, only 28 years old.

I have done a lot of thinking since those final talks with Jeff. I m glad that right until the end he was able to live a positive life, drawing inspiration from the structure and discipline he remembered from his water polo days. By fighting so hard when his life was on the line, he taught me never to compromise on coaching with passion, because we never know who we are going to affect. Jeff was listening, and when it came down to it, he proved himself a winner in the deepest sense of the word. EHN

Edition details

• Publisher: Hawthorne Hills Pub
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0970864205
• ISBN 13: 9780970864208
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 236