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Dick Gould Talks To SportsEdTV - Coaching Career
Dick Gould, 17 National Championships, 38 years at Stanford. It's probably an unmatched record in any of the sports. Amazing, one of the things that made Dick the greatest coach is that he was a club teaching professional, a coach at the junior high school, high school, and junior college level before arriving to coach at Stanford.
Dick: What a pleasure to be with you, John. It really is great to see you and congratulations on all you guys are doing in SportsEdTV. Is really impressive to me to see how quickly you've grown and how many people you are reaching, the good you're doing in the sports world and not just on one sport, but also in all ancillary products around many sports.
SportsEdTV: What were your initial goals when you arrived at Stanford? What was going through your mind to get the job?
Dick: I played at Stanford and I really enjoyed it. My coach came there just after World War II, as did yours at Miami. I think our average NCA finish in those 16 or 17 years was No. 6 or 7 in the country and we were never out of the top 10 Yet there were two big elephants in the room. These were USC and UCLA In those days there weren't a lot of indoor courts. Thus sunshine area, along with a couple of other areas, were the bastions of tennis and they ruled- the collegiate world. I would say, in fairness, Trinity University had also done a great job down there and they had some incredible teams, with players like Buchholz, McKinley, and Froehling. But they never elected to play in the NCAA Championships because the NCAA’s were in mid-June in those years, and ended too close to Wimbledon to give them ample chance to prepare on the grass court surface.
SportsEdTV: That was the standard, so what you're saying is, you arrived at Stanford, you've been good and so you would love to win a national championship. What was your philosophy? What was your thinking? What were the key things that you talked about with your players?
Dick: Well, I coached at a junior college for four years, and I really enjoyed that experience. I would not have left to go anywhere other than Stanford. But when my Stanford coach retired, I was in the right place at the right time. When I was getting interviewed for the position, I told the athletic director that I thought we could win a national championship in tennis. In those days, this was a rare occurrence in any sport! Stanford had won one championship in 1953 in men’s golf. We won one in 1967 men’s swimming. In fact, when I began coaching in the fall of 1966 and the whole attitude in the athletic department was really negative. The feeling seemed to be that you can't have an academic background strong enough to get into Stanford and be a good athlete. You don't have time to spend time practicing and competing and still be a good scholar. It was really a rationalization by the coaches and by our Athletic Department for something I didn't think was necessarily true. I thought really there was something that could be done. I told my prospective, soon to be boss, that it could be done in tennis. Then, I made the mistake of telling my first team that we could do it, too. They looked at me like I was crazy and then, looked at each other and just said,” Coach, it is never, ever going to happen here at Stanford.” In those days, there was no pro tennis and open tennis per se. The guys would come for a couple of hours. They took their shirts off, got a suntan, and that was it. I really made a mistake starting out of setting a goal that was so high that my team couldn't relate to it.
SportsEdTV: How did you adjust to that goal that was too high?
Dick: Well, it was interesting because I didn't realize at first that it was too high, and then I realized that I had to get better players.
I don't care how good a coach you are. If you don't have players with talent, you're not going to do very well, and so my job was to get better players. That took a while and we gradually built that up. A big step was to host the national junior training camp at Stanford. The USTA paid top player’s transportation to Stanford for a week and a half for ten days of training. All of a sudden people got to know me a little. I had earned a little bit of a reputation locally, but nothing beyond that. This Camp gave me an entree to meet some players and get them and get to know Stanford and the surrounding area a little bit. Each year, our players got a little stronger and we started to get pretty good by 1972.
We had never been out of the top 10 since World War II. In my first year with this bold claim, “We can win a National Championship”, we finished- 16th in the country. The next year we're 33rd in the country. My third- year we won 9 matches and lost 12. But in that year, the NCAA ruled freshmen were eligible to play on the Varsity competitions. Our conference said they couldn't play in dual matches, But they could play in the national championships. Since my freshmen were better players than my varsity players, I took 4 freshmen to the NCAA Championships (it was an individual tournament in those days), and we placed 8th. The next year, Roscoe Tanner came in and we were on our way. It was not easy starting out.
SportsEdTV: Which year did you win the championship?
Dick: 1973. Roscoe enrolled for the 1970 season. - Roscoe is a really positive guy. The glass was always overflowing. He was really confident himself. He was really easy to be around. Another local fellow, Rick Fisher, changed the thinking of tennis that we can win. The culture was starting to change a little bit, and Roscoe was mostly responsible for that. He got to the NCAAs finals as a freshman and as a sophomore in singles. As a junior, he lost in 5 sets. to Dick Stockton in the semifinals. Sandy Mayer had entered Stanford, and I thought, wow, we are going to win it next year. But Roscoe decided to turn pro with the lure of Open Tennis.
SportsEdTV: Getting your first singles championship and now got a National Championship. How was your thinking after winning the first time the National Championship at Stanford?
Dick: We had a guy named Paul Gherkin before Roscoe, but he left after his freshman year because he couldn't play any matches as a freshman, and he felt he was not getting enough competition to improve as fast as he wanted. He transferred to Trinity where his buddies were. When Roscoe left, I thought “Oh my, gosh, there goes our chance.” We finished a close second to Trinity, but we didn't quite do it. With Roscoe leaving, I thought we were now never going to win a Championship - we had missed our chance! Then, the next year Sandy Mayer wins the singles Championship, and Rick Fisher reaches NCAAs semi-finals on Clay. Mayer and Jim Delaney win the doubles title, and we win our first Championship! I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. But I made a mistake because in those days I made everything so all-important. I would say things like guys, “If we win this match…”, “We have to win this match.”, “We'll do this, we're qualified for this, and then we can do this.”, “We're going to do this.” I put too much pressure on the guys. Putting this amount of pressure on my guys each day hurt my effectiveness as a coach! My ego was really getting in my way of trying so hard to get this job done - basically trying to prove to MYSELF we could win it all!
SportsEdTV: But you get your ego. You're trying too hard. You're pushing too hard, right?
Dick: Exactly right, and when we finally did win, at first I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, I didn't care if we won another one. Then, the next year we're doing pretty well and we get to the very end of the season. But Sandy left the team right after our conference championship. Pat Dupré, who was a former National Junior Champion and a great player, hurts his wrist in that conference championship, which is the last competition before the NCAA’s -, my top two players were not available. I thought, “ I'm glad we won the one last year because we're sure not going to win it this year.” In those days only 4 players could enter the singles, along with two doubles teams. Well, it turns out that John Willinger, who was No.3, all-season won the championship in the finals over a teammate who had been playing No. 6, Chico Hagey. Jim Delaney also had a great tournament and won the doubles with John Whitlinger. These performances earned us enough points to win the tournament again - in back-to-back years! I think just after that, I became a better coach because I didn't want to put too much pressure on the guys in terms of results, I started thinking a lot more in terms of improvement, I felt I was improving as a coach and learning more each year, and these guys certainly deserved that!
SportsEdTV: How would you define winning in tennis?
Dick: I think the first thing to not equate winning with success, think the problem is when we go to school in kindergarten or first grade, we bring home a spelling test, and the paper has 10 words on it, “C.A.T. D.O.G,” and we happen to get them all right. So, we've got a problem. We show our parents - it has a gold star on top of that page. It's got a big smiley face. The teacher put it there and wrote,” PERFECT!!” Right away in our minds, we get the idea that to be successful one has to be perfect and it carries over in a practice court and everything else. We missed a shot, we're shaking our head, “I suck! I'm terrible!” We equate success with perfection. That's a tremendous mistake to make. You look at the top hitter in baseball, and realize he fails to get a hit 2/3 of the time., You look at the top quarterback in football and see he fails to complete a pass 1/3 of the time. No one shoots 18 in 18 holes in golf! There's a big difference between perfection and doing well and being at the top and winning. I think when I learned to stop stressing winning and to start stressing improvement, then I became a much, much better coach. I think the problem is that in tennis, it's so hard to measure improvement. We get in a situation that we're playing on a team - college team or a high school team or a club team - and we're playing No. 3 in the line-up, and we say, well, I am really improving. I'm playing really well. Then the coach tells you. “You're playing great.” “I really like how you're coming along”. Then, he/she looks at you and says, “By the way, tomorrow, instead of playing No. 4, I'm going to play you at No.6”, and then you think, “How can I be improving?.” In other words, I'm measuring my improvement by false standards of where I play on the team, whether I beat the guy who just had a good growth spurt or just got a little better all of a sudden. I think I suck because I lose to him for the first time, whereas I might still be improving. It's not an exact measurement like swimming. You might never win a race, but you can always better your time: track and field events are the same way.
SportsEdTV: That's a really amazing philosophy that you got to measure yourself in a different way and be able to get rid of this.
Dick: I'm pretty vocal in practice and during matches. One day in practice, a couple of my players were about 4 courts away from me and happened to be playing sets. I think it might have been John McEnroe or Martin Blackman, one of the two. Anyway, he ran over and hit a ball into the bottom of the net. I holler, “That’s exactly what I want.” He stopped with his hands on his hip, looked up at me, and yelled back, “Coach, what are you talking about, that was set point. The ball went to the bottom of the net!” I said, “Yeah, but your preparation of that shot, the way you got your shoulders around, the way you got set up for the ball - it was so much better.” Of course, he thought I was crazy! Try to find a part of a stroke, a part of something they were doing well, and emphasize that. Get them to realize they are doing that part of it better, and the results will come.
SportsEdTV: That's brilliant. You got them to feel good about themselves and you made sure that you measure winning the right way. With 17 national titles, you are the king of the team format. What is your philosophy on what I would call the ideal team, or is there such a thing as the ideal team?
Dick: You know, first of all, I coached 17 championship teams, and I never hit a ball. I had great players. I would say I was very lucky because I was able to attract good players who were admissible to Stanford to come to Stanford, and that all of a sudden that makes me a good coach. So let’s talk a little about what I would consider an “Ideal Team.”
I like to be around people who are positive. I don't want to be around people who have their heads down and spend all the time shaking their heads. I want to be around people who are quick to smile, who are happy, who can spread the ‘sunshine ‘ -that a smile brings to other people, I like people who are “up.” They walk tall, they are proud of themselves, and who are good to other people. My ideal team would be composed of people like this. Positive, up, no excuses, no alibis, no procrastination. I love the Nike slogan, “Just. Do It!” Now, the other part of that ideal team, especially in a sport like tennis, which becomes a team sport in college and is a very competitive sport because you're dealing with egos and who's playing what position is that these players have to have respect for each other and don't let their feelings of where they think they should be playing in the lineup, get in the way.
I'll contrast two of my better teams. One was 1978, and that team consisted of John McEnroe, who had just gotten to the semifinals of Wimbledon, Matt Mitchell, who was from Northern California in Palo Alto, and who won the NCAA Singles title the year before. In addition, Bill Maze was also a great player. I think he won the National 16s. Then another player, Perry Wright, who finished # 12 in the college rankings later that year., A guy named John Rast was playing No.5, and three guys were battling for the #6 and final starting position - Lloyd Bourne, soon to be a top 100 player in the world; Peter Rennert from New York, who reached No. 38 in the world, and another - great player, Jim Hodges. These three guys were all freshmen. That team was really competitive amongst itself. When we won the championship, I couldn't jump up or down or anything. I sat on a bench and put a towel over my head. I sat there while the guys were going crazy and celebrating and just inhaled a big breath and let it out slowly. I thought, “Thank gosh we did not self-destruct over the course of the year!”
That year, I gave John McEnroe the fall off. The spring semester while he's at Trinity High School in New York, he started playing a lot of Pro tournaments on an Eastern Circuit. John is playing guys like Charlie Passerelle and Arthur Ashe and Stan Smith -, all good players. He did very well that spring. Then he goes to Wimbledon on the US junior team, held the second week of the event. He also gets into the qualifying rounds for the main draw because of how well he had done that spring. He does really well, and he qualifies for the main draw that first week, and then he just keeps on winning. It now conflicted with the Junior event, which he now could not enter. He ended up reaching the semi-finals.
When you're chasing those points and you're on a roll, you know how hard it is to back off and catch your breath for a few days. I tell my guys, ”You shouldn't be playing more than three or four weeks in a row, then you must take a week off.” Otherwise, the risk of injury becomes too great. Well, Mac played the whole summer. I don't think he took a week off all summer, and he had good results throughout.
This is why I just told him "Take the fall off" his first quarter at Stanford. He didn't practice. By giving him the fall off, he was fresh in the Spring when we really needed him.
Dick: This team is still very close today. It was amazing, but it could have self-destructed.
Now fast forward 20 years, 1998 was a team with 4 guys who could play No. 1. Paul Goldstein, who was a great player, soon to be Top 60 in the World, Ryan Wolters who won the prestigious all-American tournament the year before, and the Bryan twins, Bob, who had just won the national junior title at Kalamazoo, and Mike, who also was a great player. Who was going to play# 1? For the No. 5 and No.6 spots, I had to choose between Geoff f Abrams, who won several age-group championships in the Juniors, and Alex Kim, who two years later won the NCAA singles title. I sat them down on the court and said “Guys, what do you want to do? Do you want to play each other for positions? They responded that they did not want to play each other and were actually giving me reasons why someone other than themself should play #1. They finally said, “Coach, you make the decision.” I went home that night and I realized we had exactly 24 matches on our schedule. I came back the next day with a plan. I said, “Guys, here's our schedule. We have 24 matches. You're all going to play No.1, No.2, No.3, and No.4 an equal number of times - 6 times at No.1, 6 times at No.2, and so on. I'm going to tell you right now what number you are going to be playing for the entire season - on May 3rd, as well as what number you're playing on February 2nd.” I continued, “However, you have to realize that you might be playing No. 4, but be playing better than whoever is at #1. Can you live with that?” They answered, “Absolutely, coach, that sounds great”, and then I said, “ Geoff, you and Alex, are maybe just a tad behind these guys, I'm going to alternate you guys at No. 5 and 6; These six guys never wavered. They lost just three singles matches all year. Two of those matches were redeemed when the guy played him a second time that year.
Dick: Now, college competition in 1998 was different in 1973, Most guys were still going to school for a couple of years, the very top players even. But if you talk about the ideal team where you talk about the qualities every day of practice that I just mentioned, the 1998 team would be it.
SportsEdTV: Yeah. They plan to work together, and they were a team.
Dick: They were a great team and that was just a joy. I told John Whitlinger, my assistant, “John, you had better enjoy this year because in all my years of coaching I've never seen it before and you probably and you and I will probably never see it again.”
SportsEdTV: How do you take all those minds now you've got to organize on the court, but how do you train them? How do you train on and off-court, studies, and social life. What is your vision? How do you manage the rest of their life while they're in college?
Dick: Good point. Well, first of all, let's go in reverse - let's start with social. I fully believe that's part of growing up. These guys are free snd away from their folks for the first extended amount of time. I encourage participation in joining fraternities. If they wanted to play intramurals representing their living group in another sport, that was fine by me. I also encouraged practicing with the girl’s team on occasion. I thought they should really benefit from the fact that it is a residential university and they should do what their buddies are doing. But what I expected from them is that when they came to the courts, they'd be 100 percent there. Once they walk through that gate and onto the court, they're in a different world, and they have to respect that. As far as studies, you're not going to get into Stanford if Stanford is not 100 percent certain you can do the work, so that was good. (In reality, perhaps only one in 5 of the top-ranked high school seniors in the country were realistic candidates for admission to Stanford).
As for the style of play, I was a big proponent of putting the pressure on the opponent, making him react to you what you did rather than vice versa.,. One might call this pro-activeness - “First Strike Tennis.” I had really only two players come to Stanford as good serve and volleyers and who preferred that style of play - getting to the net first: Alex Mayer and Jimmy Grabb. Even John McEnroe preferred to stay back. That was my credo. Keep in mind that at fourteen years old, you're probably not strong enough and big enough to be able to serve and volley, even though you have the net skills. You can have a good volley and overhead, but you probably haven't used it much in matches. My job at Stanford was to be sure these guys had or developed these skills and their anticipation, and then give them the confidence to apply relentless pressure with the application of these skills in a match. This is relatively easy to practice and do in practice, but to have the confidence to do it in a match is something else.
In college coaching, we had the advantage of being able to tell the player what to do and to talk to them during the match. I was a little afraid of this when I started coaching, as I was too worried about saying the wrong thing or making a mistake. As I learned over the years, what I was teaching was really becoming successful and people were buying into it because it worked for all these other guys before them. I would tell them almost every point what to do. After a year and a half or so, I would look over to someone to suggest something, and just before I even said it, they were already doing it. By coaching them in a match, I could say, OK, I want you to serve and to the forehand and come in, and then volley behind the guy, or and hit to the open court. On return of serve, it might be to come in or move around to another receiving position. It's like baseball, where often someone in the dugout is calling the pitches or telling the hitter what he wants the batter to do. That's what I was doing, calling the pitches. It really made coaching fun for me because I was actually playing the match. I wasn't right all the time. But if a player tried something and it didn't work, then it was my fault, not his fault. It took the pressure off the player from trying it. Actually, I'm writing a book right now and having a great time. I have two hundred guys who are still alive. I sent out twenty questions, tough questions, like, How did we manage egos? Did you feel relevant if you weren't in the starting line-up? What was our culture? How important is trust? These are not simple questions to answer and took some thought. Yet I had 162 guys respond. Amazing! Their answers to these questions give insight as to how I managed them - what worked and what didn’t.
SportsEdTV: You are managing a lot of players. There are a lot of egos and lots of talent, developing talent. What did you learn from the loss that hurt you the most? And what did you learn from your losses or did you learn more from your wins?
Dick: I think I learned that a loss is not the end of the world. There's only one loss that counts and there's only one win that counts. That's the last match you play in the year. Everything we did was aimed at where we would be at the end of the year. Matt Knoll, the coach at Baylor once asked me, “How many times were you in the finals that you won the championship?” I had to look it up - I did not know. It turned out we won it every time we reached the finals except for two times: one was a 5-4 loss to UCLA and the other, a 4-3 loss to USC. My guys keep saying in the interviews for this book that “You always got us ready for the last match of the year. You never put too much emphasis on the indoor championships. In fact, we won more NCAA Championships than Conference Championships. Mike Bryan said, “When I went to the Indoor Championships at the start of the season, I lost every match I played in singles and doubles over four days. I came off the court, and I expected I was going to be castigated, but you put your arm around me and said, Mike, we're going to work on this and by the end of the season, you're going to be great. “, Mike never lost a match for us the rest of the year.
There are many challenges in addition to just tennis. Sure, maybe a player had a bad match or a bad practice, or maybe a girlfriend just broke up with him, or a test didn’t go well, or there was a challenging family moment at home, or maybe the player was simply just tired. There is always something with at least one of the team. I often would say come back tomorrow when you're fresh and ready. If a player misses a day of practice, the world is not going to end. Also, we never started practice before 2:30 pm and we stopped right at 5:00 pm. Then later, we had a strength coach, a conditioning coach. If it took my team more than a half-hour to complete what he/she wanted, I'd say, ”You have to do better, you've got to get them out of here in 30 minutes. I don't want them here any more than that.” I didn’t want tennis to take more than three hours of their daily life. We never practiced on the weekends except during spring break weekend, and the weekend before the NCAAs. They could play on their own, but no formal practice together, and that is one reason they were fresh when it counted most - at the end of the year!.
SportsEdTV: You had the three big lefties, McEnroe, Tanner, Salzenstein that won a lot of matches for you. How did you manage your lefty?
Dick: They're all very, very different people. It's not that they’re left or right-handed. Roscoe had a great first serve, and Raul Ramirez, a nemesis from USC, kind of waited till Roscoe got tired or until he got a little tight and would finally miss some first serves. He wouldn't get frustrated by Roscoe’s great first serve It didn't matter how many times Roscoe aced him; he waited for Roscoe to get a little tight, or maybe a little tired, then the toss would get a little too low and he had to serve second serves. At that point, Raul had to take advantage of that to break serve. Roscoe served and volleyed and had a reputation of being a great volleyer. And he was a very good volleyer, largely because his first serve set him up for a good volley. So, as he will tell you, we spent a lot of time working on making the second serve better in the hope it would give him a less difficult volley. Now, Mac was different, I didn't understand how he played. It was so different and just beautiful, He had such a distinct style and such a beautiful feel. I concentrated on firming up his volley a little bit and encouraged him to keep attacking all the time, which he did. Jeff was a little kid and all of a sudden, he grew and as he got bigger and stronger, the serve got so much better. Roscoe had a big bomb off of a low toss with the resultant quick delivery, and the ball seemed to come at you so fast. Jeff had more of a textbook serve. Nothing sneaky about it, but it would turn out to be a really good serve and great weapon. He was able to do a lot with it. He worked really hard to develop that serve. He was able to do that as he got his growth.
Jeff Salzenstein – Serving Fundamentals Series
SportsEdTV: What type of strategy coach are you? Talked more about strategy. Are you more of a pattern guy or what is your strategy about playing points, the structure of points? You like patterns or you like to leave things a little bit more open?
Dick: No, not really. I really wanted the guys at the net. First strike tennis!- knew our team was going to come at them - to make them hit their shot under pressure. If that weren’t enough, I would holler at them from three courts away. “Get your butt in this one.” They knew it was going to happen often on returns off second serves as well, which puts pressure on the opponent. A lot of guys in this book of mine came out and said that's one reason we didn’t get tight. We didn’t have time to think about it. We would force the action. We would get in on it, and we would dictate play. . Sure, we might get passed. You're going to be a little naked at that, the ball is going to get by you some. But the pressure is on the other guy to make the shot, and that, in fact, took a little pressure off us. Then my tactical part of the question will be, well, if he's going to go to the net, I have to help him figure out a way to get him up there, so it'd be most effective. Then we would talk about what kind of serve we're going to use, spin it, slice it out wide, go into the body, and then where are you going to volley? It would be like, “ This guy is really fast, So we are not going to volley to the open court; rather, we are going to hit more behind him. OR, we're just going down the middle.” I've had guys hit every ball into the body and play every point down the middle, including first volleys and the serve return. That's where I can help them think about the process and how to use it.
SportsEdTV: Developing a plan of how to go to the net. You like them to play instinctively. But from what you're saying at this point, you were calling the plays for them as much as you can on the big points, you were coaching more like a baseball coach.
Dick: Absolutely. You know, it spoiled watching tennis for me, because I can't watch tennis on TV. To me, it's too boring now because I'm so used to playing the match with the guys, I actually felt like I played the match.
Gene Mayer - Former world No.4 player
SportsEdTV: Coach now, so you win your last championship, I guess you remember what year you won that championship?
Dick: Year 2000
SportsEdTV: Now Director of Tennis, but you are also now working in your off time on brain stimulation. Tell us a little bit about that. Why are you excited about that? Brain stimulation is another future part of tennis, a lot to learn from that.
Dick: I told myself that I was going to coach for 40 years. This is at about the start of my last 10 years. I decided I would coach no more than 40 years or until one guy went 4 years and did not earn a championship ring. We actually went 34 years during which time, everyone had at least 1 championship ring. The last was in 2000. I had another 6 years to reach my 40-year plateau. Well, in 2001 we had a great team, Alex Kim was the defending national singles champion. We entered the NCAA championship playing great as a team - I would have never bet against us to win the championship. However in the team quarter-final match, Alex gets full body cramps so bad they gave him liquid intravenously, but so much fluid that his brain started to swell. It almost killed him in the hospital. Thankfully, he recovered, but he couldn't play again in the tournament. So, he was out, and with only four players on scholarships, you don't lose the defending national championship and win the tournament.
The next year, a guy who won a previous NCAAs doubles championship, K.J. Hippensteel, got hurt right at the end of the season in our conference tournament and could not play in the Championships. He was ranked # 1 in the country at the time. We were playing great as a team and had a great chance to win it all before his injury. . Then in the 3rd year, I had three guys, David Martin, Scott Lipski, and Ryan Haviland. One of the guys didn't like where he was playing in the lineup. He said, “I'm going to quit.” When he left the team, we did not have enough depth to win it.
Dick: So we had 3 more years. We easily could have won a couple of those. In my 4th year, we just weren't good enough to win. So at that point and after 38 years, I went to my athletic director and said, “Ted, it's time for me to stop. Let me give you a job description of what I want to do next. It is to be named the Director of Tennis. That was a new term in those days, and I probably was one of the first guys hired as such, full time.
There were a lot of things I wanted to do, but I didn't have time to do while coaching. I wanted to host the National Championships, but I didn't want to do it while coaching because I wanted to spend the time to do it better than it had been done before. I wanted to build and initiate a video streaming system. We ended up with an incredible system enabling streaming for twelve courts. We built a great broadcast system. I was able to do many other things I didn’t have time to do while coaching, so was really a creative time for me, and then finally we ran out of things to do. We build our stadium by raising every dime - 20 million dollars. We raised it all ourselves, no one else, not the athletic department, not the university. When I left in 2018, the entire men’s program was endowed - my position as Director of Tennis, our head coaching position, the assistant coaching position, all of our scholarships, our operating budget at the level that Stanford lets us operate at, and even maintenance endowment of over a million bucks. I'd done about all I could, so I retired. A buddy of mine has an office building downtown. He said, why don't you move your office downtown, I’ve got you a space there. I said, Yeah, OK, because I don't want to sit around the house all day. I go down there and it's the home of a nonprofit, which has done a lot of work on HIV education, starting such in 82 countries throughout the world. They had just transitioned into concussion education. Well, of course, that's related to athletics. So, I've been three years now working on concussion education, which is used by almost all youth football and a lot of the U.S. Olympic Committee groups and so on. So, I'm really fascinated by this. This has been a lot of fun for me, and we are making a difference.
SportsEdTV: That's really exciting, Dick. I'm really excited to have been able to ask you all this question, honored to be with you. In a few conversations I've had with you through the years, I've always learned a lot from you. Some I'm grateful for those times. Looking forward to our next conversation.
For the complete live interview, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDMxuOKQk8M&t=1040s
