'You Cry in Practice. You Laugh in Competition'

"A sword is made strong by putting it through fire. I try to create that sword."

December 24, 2022

The winningest coach in college sports history isn't John Wooden, Bear Bryant or Nick Saban.

It's a soft-spoken squash coach at Trinity College in Connecticut, who admittedly knew very little about the sport when he got into coaching nearly five decades ago.

But over the last 29 years, Paul Assaiante has guided the Bantams to 17 National Championships — winning 252 straight matches at one point — while drawing attention from ESPN, The New York Times and Sports Illustrated.

The Daily Coach caught up with him recently to discuss lessons from his time at West Point, his constant battle with imposter syndrome, and the four factors he feels determine performance.

This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity.

Coach, thanks a lot for doing this. Tell us about your childhood and some lessons from it.

I was born in The Bronx right across the street from Yankee Stadium to pretty humble beginnings. My crib was in a closet. We had lots of relatives living with us. We didn’t have very much, but I was loved.

My father was an interesting man. He really wanted me to constantly challenge myself. When I’d accomplish something, he’d often say, “O.K., what’s next?” That thinking sort of put me on a treadmill that took me a long time to get off because I now know that what’s really important is what’s right now.

My mom was a classic little Italian mother. She was convinced Michelangelo carved David in my likeness and that I could do no wrong. I learned later on that I could do a lot wrong.

How’d you get into coaching squash?

I was always very small and played the traditional sports growing up, but I just wasn’t going to get selected to play at high levels. I was into gymnastics and walked onto the team at Springfield College. My coach actually cut me three times, but I wasn’t a very good listener and just kept coming back.

I graduated and was up at West Point training to make the Pan-American Games, but I suffered an injury, so I actually picked up a tennis racket for the first time at the age of 24 to stay active. I started playing about seven hours a day, seven days a week, and got to be fairly good pretty quickly.

The tennis coach at West Point had resigned, and like an idiot, I applied for the job. They offered it to seven other people, all of whom turned it down because they didn’t want to go running with Cadets at 5 a.m., but I was happy to do it. They made me the interim head tennis coach and took me down to the second-floor gym and said, “You’re also now the head squash coach.”

How did you build confidence as a coach with so little experience?

I really wrestled with confidence even until recently. There are so many interesting motivators in a person’s life: Fear, wanting to prove you belong, different things.

My life has really been about pushing through imposter syndrome. Every night my first three years at West Point, I’d wake up to a recurring nightmare that we were playing the Army-Navy match and at a quiet moment, a General would stand up and say, “This man’s an imposter! Take him out in handcuffs and send him to the clink.”

But I learned if you show people around you that you truly care about them, it usually works out O.K.

What was your biggest takeaway from West Point?

I learned how important the truth was. Everything there was very black and white. If the answer was “Yes,” it was yes. If it was “No,” they didn’t sugarcoat it. I left there to work in a private country club in the mid-1980s, and there was no black and white. Everything was gray, negotiable, and I struggled in that setting.

Now, as a coach, one of the things I tell my players and when I speak to companies, I tell them this, too. You have one obligation: Always let the people you employ know what went into a decision. They don’t have to like it. They don’t have to agree with it. But they deserve to know what went into it.

I find that very black-and-white approach very helpful. This generation wants to know why, and I bristle at that and often want to say, “Because I said so.” But that doesn’t fly anymore. I have to explain why, and the black-and-white style I learned at West Point is how I do it.

You have some pretty interesting thoughts on the factors that determine performance.

There’s a plaque on a wall at West Point with a quote from General Douglas MacArthur: “On the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that on other days, on other fields will bear the fruits of victory.”

What that meant to me was you have to learn how to be a winner. You also have to learn how to lose, how to strategize, how to adjust on the fly. To me, the keys are No. 1, preparation. Practice is everything.

No. 2, it’s the maintenance and control of your emotion in the fire. Can you, in a competitive moment, keep yourself centered and focused?

No. 3, it’s in-game adjustments. You have to be aware of what’s going on. Look at how different Bill Belichick’s team comes out after the half. It’s amazing.

And then finally, how you deal with the outcome. To me, that’s where coaches and parents are most important. Learning is the playground of success. If coaches show emotion about what just happened, you cripple young people.

How do you productively learn from defeat without dwelling on it?

One thing’s for sure. If you move forward too quickly, you will repeat it. When somebody loses or makes a mistake or someone in a hedge fund makes a bad choice and loses millions of dollars, if you speak to the person on the heels of that moment, nothing will get accomplished. They are so overwrought, there’s so much emotion.

What I believe is you go to that person a little later. “Are you calm now? How are you feeling? Let’s discuss what happened and your preparation." At that moment, you can talk to the person about what transpired.

I used to try to coach immediately after defeat and I found all that would happen was I would get into fights with the athlete. Then, I thought I’ll just stay away. Well, I learned that’s not the solution either.

You need to go over to the athlete, put your hand on his shoulder, say “Tough one there” and then come back later. If you don’t acknowledge the hurt at the moment, they think you’re angry at them. The worst thing you can do, though, is wait too long before you come back to speak. The timing of true teaching is critically important, and true teaching happens after defeat.

How did your friendship with Bill Belichick come about?

His son, Brian, came here. And Linda’s twins (Belichick's girlfriend) went here to Trinity College. I always thought he hung on the moon. One day, I’m at tennis practice and my phone rings, and it’s him. He said, “Hey, Coach. How would you like to come up and speak to the team?” They had four games left and were favored in all four, and he knew our squash team is typically favored in all our matches. He said, “I want you to talk to the team to make sure we avoid the trap game and don’t look past anyone.”

You talk about imposter syndrome. I get in my car and drive up to Gillette Stadium and spoke to the Patriots for 90 minutes. I never prepare a speech. I can usually feel the crowd, and there were 80 young men in that room. It was an amazing experience. After the speech was over, Tom Brady came up to me, shook my hand, patted me on the shoulder and said, “Coach, that was great. That was just what we needed.”

You have a really diverse roster at Trinity College with players from 11 different countries. How do you build chemistry and get such a diverse group on the same page?

It’s an interesting and challenging mix because they come to the program with a skillset but also preconceived notions, in some cases prejudices, about people from other cultures. That requires a continual and ongoing whittling away of that. You’re not going to change a young person, but you can teach them to become more open-minded to differences.

For us, the biggest differences are religious. We talk about differences between religions and similarities. What we try to do is we just try to spend time together away from the gym. We pride ourselves on going through difficulty together. I believe in the Japanese philosophy that you cry in practice, you laugh in competition.

We’ll get up at 7 a.m. on Wednesdays and I’ll just work the hell out of them. A sword is made strong by putting it through fire. I try to create that sword.

But there’s also a social component. I went over the other day to watch the World Cup finals with the guys. We hung out and ate doughnuts. We’ll go miniature golfing together. Some weekends, I’ll spend 48 hours with those guys on a bus or hotel room, and we’re just always talking, always trying to share the journey. I know it sounds trite and everyone says it, but the journey really is the destination.

When young people come back to visit 20 years later with their partner or their children, they don’t remember what number they played or even a result. But they do remember breaking down in Maine on a bus and sitting in the snow. That’s what it’s about. That for me is the paycheck.

Q&A Resources