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Late in the 2016 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship, Villanova blew a 10-point lead.
With 4.7 seconds left, UNC hit a 3-pointer to tie the game.
Villanova's head coach, Jay Wright, called a timeout, and as his players walked to the huddle, they were all saying the same word:
“Attitude.”
“It's the most important aspect of our program,” Coach Wright explains in his book titled, Attitude. “We wear 'Attitude' wristbands. And when we break a huddle, we say '1, 2, 3, Attitude.'”
The test of Attitude, Wright taught his players, is:
“Where is your mindset after something bad happens to you?”
Where is your mindset after you blow a 10-point lead? Where is your mindset after your opponent hits a 3 to tie the game with 4.7 seconds left?
“When I looked into the eyes of our players,” Wright writes, “I saw no anger or regret. No one bemoaned [the UNC player's] 'lucky shot,' or that any of our guys had failed to stop him from grabbing the pass that led to that shot, or anything else.”
Instead, “they were all saying, 'Attitude. Attitude. This is what we do. Attitude. This is what we do.'”
With this mindset, the players returned to the court.
Villanova's Kris Jenkins inbounded the ball to Ryan "Arch" Arcidiacono. Arch dribbled up the left side of the court, crossed half court, cut right towards the 3-point arc, where he underhanded a pass to Jenkins, who caught the ball with 1.3 seconds left, and, in perfect rhythm, jumped then released the ball with 0.6 seconds, and hit a buzzer-beater to win the 2016 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship.
Takeaway 1:
A primary indicator of physical fitness is recovery time. If you are doing all-out sprint intervals, for instance—people who are physically fit recover from one interval to the next faster than those who are not physically fit.
“So then, what is mental fitness?” the mental performance coach Greg Harden likes to ask. “Mental fitness is about recovery time,” Harden says.
It's about, as Coach Wright said, where your mindset is after something bad happens to you.
After something bad happens, people who are mentally fit recover faster than those who are not.
Takeaway 2:
Just after Kris Jenkins hit the buzzer-beater, Coach Wright famously barely reacted.
Before his guys went back on the court, he explained, “I processed all the potential scenarios.” Most likely, the game was going to go to overtime where UNC would ride their wave of momentum and win the game.
“No matter the outcome,” Wright continued, “because of the way our players responded after UNC tied the game ["Attitude. Attitude. This is what we do."]—I felt like they had the greatest lesson in life. I felt like that was an accomplishment that would follow them through their lives.”
Ryan Holiday once told me, “You have to get to a place where doing the work is the win and everything else is extra.”
Wright got to that place. He had done the work to instill in his players a mindset, he said, “that they would carry with them for the remainder of their days on earth.”
“In that sense, I knew we had already won.” Everything else was extra.
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“The fact is, none of us control what happens to us in life—but we do control our responses to those circumstances...no matter how tough it gets or how much of a challenge you face in the final 4.7 seconds of a game.” — Jay Wright
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