Sorry, took a day off, but I really wanted to share some of UW head coach Lorenzo Romar's quotes about legendary coach John Wooden:

(How important is the John Wooden Classic to you?) "Very, very important. Growing up in Los Angeles, following John Wooden from the time I first learned how to play basketball and actually I told this story before I took a visit here coming out of junior college. On my way back, I was confused a little bit. I kind of knew what I wanted to do, but I was confused. Am I going to make the right choice? As I got off the airplane and I'm walking towards baggage claim and I see this little man walking ahead and I looked at him and I said I bet he can give me some great advice. And it was coach Wooden. That was 1977. I caught up with him and asked him. And I'll never forget, he said if you have a chance to play for Marv Harshman, you can't pass that up. Being at UCLA when I was an assistant, I got a chance to spend a lot of time with him and just probably the most amazing and impressive man I've ever met in my life. To be involved in this situation means a lot.

(Do you think your players know about Wooden?) "They all know who John Wooden is. Growing up I knew who Adolf Rupp was, but I just knew he was pretty good. I don't think our guys understand that coach Wooden could have been one of the best teachers in America if he continued to teach english. If he would have ran his own company away from basketball, it would have been a billion-dollar company. I don't think our guys really understand how amazing a man he is. It's well documented how successful a coach he was. But I think as remarkable as his coaching history has been, if you spend time with him and talk to him, you can almost forget about what he did as a basketball coach and get so into what he is as a person and his knowledge on so many different things.

(Every team still runs his plays, right?) "We invited him when I was at Pepperdine - my first head coaching job - we invited him to come watch practice. And you talk about intimidating. Coach Wooden sitting in a chair at halfcourt watching practice. Practice ended and we asked him to sit down and critique our practice, which he never will. He'd just say you're doing a fine job and it didn't matter what you're doing. There's a drill ... where you have players on each sideline, it's a continual fastbreak drill ... that's called 3-on-2 conditioning. Well what we did, you'd have usually just players running in, well one of my assistants decided to have one team on one side and the other team on the other side to make it competitive. And we were doing that. When practiced ended, coach Wooden said I think you're doing a fine job. I think we were 10-17 that year. He said I think you're doing a fine job. He said in fact I learned something. If I had it to do over again, 3-on-2 conditioning, he said I'd probably do it the way you're doing it. Then he said, you know when I first invented that drill. Coach hold on, hold on. You invented that drill? Everybody does it. Everyone does that same drill. But coach invented the drill. He invented stuff in basketball. It's unbelievable. But really, really special. You can almost bring up any subject and he's got a poem for it. Any issue you're dealing with in life, he's got some type of poem for it. Some metaphor. He's really special."