For 38 years beginning in the fall of 1966, Dick Gould was the Stanford men's tennis coach. During that reign his teams won 17 NCAA team championships. For thirty-five years every four year member of the team earned at least one NCAA team championship ring. The most well recognized names from these teams being John McEnroe, who became #1 in the world in both singles and doubles, Mike and Bob Bryan, who are the current #1 in the world men’s doubles players.
In 2004, Gould retired as head coach but remains active on campus as the John L. Hinds, Director of Tennis.
SZ: You’ve said, “Great players have tremendous egos.” Through the years how did you manage these talented players with egos and keep them focused on the team goals?
Gould: When you say, ego’s I don’t want to mistake that, they had tremendous belief in themselves. As a coach I wanted to continually try to help players become better. To do that I had to continue to pump them up and help them feel good about themselves. It was hard for me to take a player who was already very cocky and had supreme belief in himself and try to bolster them. I felt one thing I was able to do well was to make the team part very important. It’s a very important lesson for them in life because they were going to be a part of a team eventually, whether in business later in life. If they couldn’t function on a team, if they couldn’t give up for the team, if they couldn’t sacrifice for the team, if they couldn’t make the team better, by what they do, if they couldn’t lead the team, they were not going to be effective with what they did later on. This is a really big thing for people who are involved in individual sports to learn.
I was with these players all the time three, four hours a day six days a week easy days, tough days, stressful days, all kinds of situations for most of the year and I really got to know them well. One of the beauties of coaching tennis is you can treat each player differently. My greatest strength as a coach is that I could be flexible with the team and the individual needs of my players.
When I first began coaching at Stanford my goal was to win a national championship within five years. I was so caught up in winning the national championship that I was not a good coach because I made that the team goal. There are so many other things you’ve got to do before you get there. Once I won the first championship in 1973, I became a much better coach because I didn’t care if I won another one, but we did. Then I stopped talking about winning national championships and I just started talking about trying to be sure that my players felt that they were improving individually. If you ask me for a blueprint for winning national championships I couldn’t give you a formula. Every year we did it differently, but I think that flexibility and adaptability as a coach is relevant.
I'd like to thank Coach Gould for taking the time to chat about his team philosophies and his many years of excellence as head coach at Stanford.
*Featured clients are not former nor current clients of Susan Zaro
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