One of the greatest coaches in the history of women’s basketball and a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, Muffet McGraw spent four decades coaching college basketball, including 33 years as the head coach at Notre Dame, winning two national championships and three consensus National Coach of the Year honors. Muffet joins Adam to share her journey and her best lessons and advice. Muffet and Adam discuss leadership, coaching, building winning teams and cultures, building confidence, handling losing, and much more.
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Read the full transcript of Adam’s conversation with Muffet McGraw.
Episode Summary
Muffet McGraw is a Basketball Hall of Fame coach who spent 33 seasons as the head coach at Notre Dame, winning two national championships. She tells Adam how a player who came up before Title IX built a career on curiosity and a belief in people, and how she changed the way she leads.
Muffet recalls arriving at St. Joseph’s in the first year Title IX had come into play, when her team had no practice clothes, did its own laundry, bought its own sneakers, drove itself to away games, and waited for the men to finish practice before taking the gym. She says they played for love of the game, and she would like to consider herself a pioneer. A sociology major who was not sure what she wanted to do, she took a part-time high school coaching job in the Philadelphia area that she says paid $1,200 for the year, and after her first practice she came home and said she had found her passion.
She says she went to every practice and clinic she could, including a clinic on the Friday night before her wedding, and that her years at Lehigh let her make mistakes and grow when no one was looking over her shoulder. Even at Notre Dame, she says, she never felt she had arrived, and she credits her staff and players for the success. She describes doing a 180 in her leadership, from a Bobby Knight, my-way-or-the-highway approach to a collaborative style in which she asked players for their opinions, which she says is how you grow their confidence.
Muffet says leadership is all about believing in people, and the hardest part is believing in someone after they fail. She recalls walking into the locker room after a national championship loss that came down to a missed free throw and telling her team that was not how they lost the game, something she says she might not have done earlier in her career. She calls “what do you think?” the four most important words a leader can say, as long as the leader lets people answer first, and she describes telling each player, in front of the whole team, exactly what she needed from them.
On building teams, Muffet says she sees herself as an educator teaching life skills. She recruited for fit and character, watching how players reacted to bad calls, to coaching, and to teammates’ mistakes, and she passed on highly ranked players who only cared about themselves. Accountability is one of her core values, she says, and it starts with her. She describes a culture of belonging in which the last player on the bench and the best player follow one set of rules, and she says listening is number one in building trust. Watching her son play sports, she says, pushed her to move from transactional to transformational coaching.
Muffet also urges women to expect more, to have the courage to advocate for themselves, and to ask their bosses what they are doing well and what they need to work on. She encourages women to coach their kids’ teams so children can see women lead. Her closing advice is to be self-aware and to remember her coaching motto: what you allow is what will continue.
What You’ll Learn
- Ask “what do you think?” and let people answer before you share your own view, Muffet says: she calls it the four most important words a leader can say, and she learned that announcing her plan first told her staff the decision was already made.
- Keep believing in people after they fail, Muffet says, because that is true leadership: after a national championship loss that came down to a missed free throw, she told her team that was not how they lost the game.
- Recruit for character and fit, not just talent, Muffet says: she watched how players reacted to bad calls, to coaching, and to teammates’ mistakes, and she passed on highly ranked players who only cared about themselves.
- Build accountability from the top, Muffet says: she rewarded players who owned their mistakes, and she says she could not go into a press conference and blame the players.
- Keep learning no matter how much you have won, Muffet says: up until her last year, she watched Boston Celtics practices and visited Tom Izzo at Michigan State and John Beilein at Michigan, because even on the right track you will get run over if you just sit there.
- Expect more and advocate for yourself, Muffet says: she urges women to tell the boss what job they want and ask how to get there, and she reminds listeners that what you allow is what will continue.
About Muffet McGraw
Muffet McGraw is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, enshrined in 2017, and the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, inducted in 2011. She coached 33 seasons at Notre Dame, from 1987 to 2020, winning NCAA national championships in 2001 and 2018, reaching nine Final Fours, and earning consensus National Coach of the Year honors three times. She finished with 936 career wins. A sociology graduate of Saint Joseph’s University, where she was a starting guard and two-year captain, she got her first college head coaching job at Lehigh University, from 1982 to 1987. She has taught Sports Leadership at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
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