Paul Assaiante
Athletics Ambassador, Trinity College. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
otherauthorinternet3.trincoll.edu/facProfiles/Default.aspx?FID=1000532 ↗Wikipedia ↗
Known as the winningest coach in college sports history, Assaiante guided Trinity College men's squash to 17 national titles and a record 252-match winning streak between 1998 and 2012. A U.S. Squash Hall of Fame inductee, he also co-authored the book Run to the Roar: Coaching to Overcome Fear.
2shows
2appearances
34statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
6said about them ↓ Everything Paul Assaiante said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Assaiante: Emotion is the enemy of performance because it blinds strategic adjustments
“And this is where my feelings about emotion are your enemy. Because emotion takes away your ability to recognize what adjustments and shifts need to be made.”
Assaiante: Practice should be harder than game day
“I think that's backwards, because you know what? Once you put a scoreboard up there, all of a sudden, it's human nature. It becomes more important to you, and so I believe the opposite. I believe let's make practice more difficult, Make it more like game day s…”
Assaiante: Athletes should avoid giving 100 percent effort in daily conditioning
“And I personally believe in terms of conditioning, I don't want people to put in a hundred percent on any given day. I want them to save a little for tomorrow.”
Assaiante: Focusing on people drives results, while focusing on scoreboards fails
“I think if you take care of your people, they will take care of the scoreboard. If you focus on the scoreboard, You're gonna fail.”
Assaiante: Smartphones are the seventh gate to hell for young people
“The cell phone is the seventh gate to hell. There's no question in my mind, because everything is perfect.”
Assaiante: Modern youth are less self-critical because they lack personal ownership
“Yeah, no, much less now. There's lack of ownership. So if I don't own an outcome, why would I take the time to beat myself up about it?”
Assaiante: Educators must share all perspectives so students decide for themselves
“If you have a tree that's bent to the left and you want the tree to grow straight, you don't tie the tree straight. You bend it to the right and then the tree finds the middle. I think we have to share all perspectives and let the kids make up their own minds.”
Paul Assaiante: Coaching is fundamentally about managing people, not technical knowledge
“You need to have some knowledge of the sport. You can go pick up a book and learn what you need to know. It's about people and managing people.”
Billie Jean King: Even top talent still seeks approval from leaders
“No matter how talented a person is that you're working with, they want your approval. And number two, never pretend to be something you're not.”
Socioeconomic status and religion divide collegiate teams more than race
“And to me, the two largest differences in our program are socioeconomic, When kids graduate from here, we have an area called Tent City. Dozens of tents down there. My guys are in the tent. They've got some beers, some pizza. The tent next to them has ice scul…”
Star freshmen play number one but must defer to team seniority
“I believe in a rite of passage. I believe in seniority. It's a meritocracy on the team. If you come in as a freshman, and you're the best player on the team, you're going to play number one as a freshman, but you're going to be reminded that entire year that y…”
Winning teaches nothing, while losing halts momentum and forces evaluation
“When you're winning, you're not learning anything. When you lose, the train stops.”
Assaiante throws unread student evaluations of his coaching directly into the trash
“At the end of the season, our players are going to be given an evaluationary form, evaluating my performance as a coach. And I go down to the athletic director's office, and he hands me this packet, and I thank him very much, and I put it in the garbage pail. …”
Assaiante: Directly confronting perceived problems reveals they are harmless
“And so the concept is go at the problem. Go at what you perceive to be the problem. And what you'll invariably find is it's a toothless old lady.”
Assaiante: Moving from good to great requires accepting a temporary backward step
“One of the things I find as a coach is in an effort to move forward, You sometimes need to take a half a step backwards, and people will absolutely fight that to the death. I don't want that. I want to become, I want to go from good to great, but I'm not willi…”
Assaiante: True success is knowing when you have enough without stopping effort
“But I think success is to get to a place where you can look in the mirror. Almost nobody gets here, by the way. You can look in a mirror and say, I have enough. To me, that's really successful. Now, that doesn't mean you take your foot off the gas. You continu…”
Assaiante: Leaders should never coach or teach immediately following an emotional loss
“You can never teach or coach on the heels of loss, business or otherwise. In your relationships, when there is emotion, that is not the time to go in and try to figure out anything. You need to come back later when things have calmed down. You can't come back …”
Assaiante: High-stakes performance cannot exceed the quality of practice
“You cannot perform on game day. You cannot present in the boardroom any better than you can in practice.”
Assaiante: Athletes must practice their weaknesses but compete strictly to their strengths
“I believe that you practice your weaknesses, but you compete to your strengths. And the more you can shore up your weaknesses when your opponent tries to expose those, then you're going to be more able to get past it. You always want to go out there in competi…”
Assaiante: Elite performers find joy in daily practice, while others see drudgery
“The great ones have this great capacity for imagination where they can come in and it's fun. It's exciting. They see the value. They see the purpose. For the others, it's drudgery.”
Assaiante: Leaders must explain the 'why' behind decisions, not seek agreement
“As future leaders in this world, They deserve to know what goes into every decision. I have no expectation that they're going to like it, agree with it. That's not important to me, but they need to know why.”
Coach K pre-scheduled practice outbursts to capture his team's attention
“I said, well, you are a little out of control today. You really lost your stuff very early in that practice, and he said, oh, no, no, no. I had scheduled this a couple of days ago. I knew I needed to get their attention, and good coaches know how to motivate.”
Assaiante: Leaders Must Tailor Communication Individually Rather Than Treating Everyone Uniformly
“You have to have a different language with everyone you work with. You can no longer treat everybody the same, and that takes time, and it takes trust, and trust is a meal that's served with a teaspoon, so it takes time.”
The other half of the tape: Paul Assaiante's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Bill Belichick 6
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Knowledge Project 6
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Paul's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Athletics Ambassador, Trinity College | 1 | 17 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Athletics Ambassador, Trinity College | 1 | 17 | — | full record on the Knowledge Project → |