Dan Hurley is the head men’s basketball coach at the University of Connecticut. He won back-to-back NCAA championships in 2023 and 2024. He tells his story and shares his leadership philosophies in his new book Never Stop: Life, Leadership, and What It Takes to Be Great, written with Ian O’Connor. Read my review of the book here.

Here are 20 of Hurley’s leadership lessons from the book:

• Teaching them to be disciplined, to grow their minds as students while also growing their games, to build great relationships and be passionate about life. That’s me caring about them.
• I wanted to teach as much as I could, as quickly as I could, mature them and get them ready for the big, bad world.
• It was always also about giving them the mental toughness they need to be successful.
• I try to be a role model for my players—in every way. I walk it before I ever talk it. That’s a big reason why I get the buy-in.

• You can’t appreciate your success until you realize it’s built on a foundation of failure.
• I started a book club for my players years ago.
• I wouldn’t be half the coach I want to be if I didn’t speak freely and frequently about my own struggles with mental health. Vulnerability shows strength.
• I don’t treat everybody the same. I coach my best players harder, hold them more accountable, watch them more closely than anybody else. If there’s a better leadership strategy than that, I’m not sure what it is.
• When a coach, or a program, prioritizes selflessness, as we do, it almost always has a catalyzing effect—it laces the whole group together tight.
• Yes, I’m demanding. What parent would want to send their kid to a coach who isn’t demanding?
• We will not ever lower our expectations, not for any recruit, not for any generation.
• Body language is so important when you’re the point guard or the quarterback. It’s also important when you’re leading an organization.
• I must have been a gladiator in another life. Because I coach every practice like it’s the last one I’ll ever coach. I show up for every game like I’ve never won a game in my life. Like I’ve never won anything.
• When I think back on the darkest times of my life, they’re united by one common theme: Either I didn’t have clearly defined standards for myself, or else I wasn’t living up to my own standards. Either way, those dark times taught me that standards are everything. And at UConn, it all starts with our standards.
• I don’t believe in compromising on standards, but I’ve had to learn to compromise on other things. Softer things, intangible things. Temperament, personality, that kind of stuff. I had to realize that compromising over personality isn’t compromising over morals or precepts or core values. That was a huge leadership lesson for me.
• Sometimes leadership means having the courage to change, and sometimes it means having the courage to resist change.
• I always think that part of being a leader is knowing exactly how hard you’re being on your people.
• Pushing players to the max should be the norm. And it used to be. But these days we’ve allowed people to grow soft. Which is ironic because life is only getting harder.
• Coaches should be demanding, and they should make their players tougher—give them the physical and emotional armor they’re going to need to survive and thrive in this world.
• I was no longer compulsively drawn to pure athletic talent alone. I looked deeper, thought harder, about the kinds of people I wanted around me, in the building. Coaches can overlook character issues for the sake of talent. And we weren’t about to do that.