The Carolina Way: Leadership Lessons from a Life in Coaching

The most successful coach in college basketball history shares his complete coaching philosophy and demonstrates how to apply it to the leadership and team-building challenges in one's professional and personal life, emphasizing the three key principles of Play Hard, Play Smart, and Play Together.

Dean Smith became head coach of the University of North Carolina's basketball team at age thirty, and in thirty-six years in that position, he established coaching records that will likely long remain unbroken. His 879 victories are the most by any coach in college basketball history. In 2000, an ESPN panel of experts named him one of the seven greatest coaches of the twentieth century in any sport. Smith also coached the 1976 U.S. Olympic basketball team, which won the gold medal. He is the author of A Coach's Life.