HOT SPRINGS — Arkansas women’s basketball coach Mike Neighbors spoke at the Arkansas Basketball Coaches Association clinic on Sunday at the Arlington Hotel.
Neighbors has attended the convention for years to give back to the coaches who helped shape him when he was the Bentonville High School lead man, but he took a different approach to his speech Sunday.
“I’m here to talk you, the next hour, about losing,” Neighbors told the room.
Everyone in attendance got a handout in which Neighbors went into detail on each of the 133 times he’s lost in his head coaching career. He started each of the 133 points with “I” — “I’ll change the ‘I’s’ to ‘We’s,'” he said when talking about changing the subject to winning.
“It does not do me any good to stand up here and talk about the things that I’ve done that’s going to help you win games because you don’t know me. It’s about the games we lost more than the games we won,” Neighbors said. “I do believe that games are won by players and lost by coaches.”
Neighbors touched on several of the losses individually — a 2015 NCAA Tournament loss to Miami while with Washington, the losses to Mississippi State and LSU last season — and spoke about what he felt he could have done better in each one.
“There’s a lot of reflection this offseason,” Neighbors said afterward in an interview. “You go to clinics and speakers get up there and tell you all the great things that they’ve done. ‘Oh man, this works every time,’ and it really doesn’t work every time.
“I chose the topic because I needed to do it for myself. I needed to do it for our team. I think it’s valuable information to share with people that are in the same boat.”
Neighbors said it can be hard to look at some of those defeats. One loss, his 2016 Final Four defeat to Syracuse, was labeled in a different color. But through the difficulties of looking back at the painful memories, realizing mistakes and seeing losing streaks, more became apparent.
There are gaps without losses and lessons to be taken.
“Everybody’s got unique challenges,” Neighbors said in the interview. “I think it will help me mold how we head into this year. The trajectory will start on. I also think, when one of those moments comes up this year, I’ll have something to immediately flash back to.
“I hope it helps us lose one less, two less, three less — whatever the number is. … If everybody can win one more, we’ll all be happier.”
Neighbors said the biggest lesson he took from putting the painful list together was to continue learning. Coaches ask players to learn every day, and he said that coaches need to take lessons as well.
He said it’s more important to handle things that way now because of the landscape of college basketball.
“[It is] a reminder that we need to be supermodels of that, not just models,” he said. “It was a reminder and something that I learned that I’ve got to do that [with] every single aspect of our program. … Anything that we’re doing, it’s got to have that approach with it and to it, or we’re bringing losing back into the equation.”
Neighbors speaks on the new-look Razorbacks
Since last season ended, Neighbors spoke about how Arkansas’ team would look like “the United Nations” this season.
The Razorbacks have players from seven different countries and several different parts of the U.S., with seven newcomers and seven returners. Neighbors has paired a newcomer and a returner together each week to build chemistry.
Adversity is still to come. The conditioning has been hard, and the Razorbacks have gone through team challenges and are asking the right questions in practice, Neighbors said.
“I think this has made us all a little bit more bought-in,” he said.
He said he’s encouraged by their depth and that there haven’t been talks in the locker room about playing time and starting roles as there have been in the past.
“Too early to tell, but I do like the fact that we’re not going to be reliant upon one or two people or things,” Neighbors said. “We may not be great at anything, but I think we’re really good at a bunch of things.”
