Sports analyst Ric Bucher has spent the last three decades surrounded by some of the greatest athletes of our time. Over the years, he became obsessed with the ultimate question in sports and life: Which traits separate the best from the rest? He began asking that question, and the same answer kept coming back again and again from greats like Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Diana Taurasi, Brandi Chastain, and Stephen Curry: I was coachable. 

Coachable? Yes, coachable. Of all the possible markers that contributed to their greatness, coachability emerged as the surprising X factor. So Bucher set out to explore this often overlooked aspect of the careers of every major athlete he could access and found stories that these stars have never revealed.

Coachable is organized around the 10 Truths of Coachability that every athlete, team leader, manager, coach, and parent needs to know. Each truth is dissected and illuminated through exclusive interviews and stories from legendary coaches like Gregg Popovich, Steve Kerr, and Coach K; all-time greats like Stephen Curry and Landon Donovan; the rising stars of tomorrow, like Rose Zhang and Paolo Banchero; and some of the athletes most known for maximizing their talent, like Fred VanVleet and Richard Jefferson. Taken together, the stories and insights in Coachable are a fascinating window into how we can improve at whatever we do.

The following excerpt come from the book's Introduction. 

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THIS IS, BY ALL APPEARANCES, A BOOK ABOUT SPORTS. IT IS NOT.

It is about people of various genders and generations who, independently, adopted one common trait they consider indispensable to their subsequent success: the ability to synthesize who and what they wanted to be with someone else’s vision of who and what they could be through a mutually embraced idea of how to get there. They were all, in a word, coachable.  

That is not a concept exclusive to sports or athletes.  

This book is organized around the ten “truths” of being coachable, with each truth illustrated by an athlete’s full story and their road to reaching their highest potential. I chose to illustrate the value of being coachable through a variety of athletes, rather than a variety of professions—athlete, musician, business executive, astronaut, politician, etc.—for a couple of reasons. One, because if there is a universal language, it is not Esperanto; it is sports. No matter what profession we ultimately pursue, at some point we were all enthralled with a sport, whether playing or watching. And two, to truly show the dynamics that make someone coachable, I needed to dig into the events and experiences that shaped my subjects at an early age–events and experiences that weren’t always flattering. My long career covering sports and the relationships I’ve built have earned me the necessary trust to do that.  

As a kid, I didn’t dream of writing a book about the value of being coachable. Like a lot of us, I dreamed of being a professional athlete, a dream I surrendered when I was accepted into an Ivy League school; as the first person in my family to go to college, I felt I owed it to my parents to shift my focus from the pitch to the classroom. I still made Dartmouth’s varsity soccer team as a walk‑on freshman, but I played more out of pure love for the sport than pursuing a future career. Having always had a creative bent—I had played trumpet and piano, drawn cartoon strips, and written short stories and poems since grade school—I always fancied myself as a performer or creator of some kind. When I landed an internship with Sports Illustrated the summer before my senior year, it offered the chance to splice my sports dream with my artistic one. Working with the writers and editors at SI, I saw for the first time that sports were a sneaky way of writing about life lessons. Every sports story in some way is about facing an obstacle and overcoming it or being inextricably changed by it. Sportswriting gave me the chance to identify formulas for success and present them in a way everyone could appreciate and understand.  

I now know that my experiences as an athlete—including the sobering reality that I would not reach as high as I had hoped—shaped, inspired, and informed everything I’ve done ever since. As a sportswriter, I was most interested in the life experiences and relationships of the athletes and coaches before they reached the pinnacles of their sports, particularly those experiences and relationships beyond the locker room or field of play. Part of it was to understand what they had that I didn’t; part of it was to identify their formulas for success and see if they would work equally well on my nonathletic goals.  

I am happy to report that those formulas do. They are, it turns out, the most valuable intangibles an athlete can extract from playing a sport. Author and motivational speaker Simon Sinek crafted a parable about two road signs: one that read Victory and pointed in one direction, and another pointing in another direction that read Fulfillment. The value of victory, in short, is reaching a specific goal or destination, a moment of standing at the top of the mountain as the crowd cheers and confetti falls. Fulfillment is all about what is gained—and shared—on the way to the summit. What this book suggests is that victory and fulfillment can both be realized treading the same path; victory, however, is a roadside car wash, while fulfillment is a lifetime AAA card. Monumental victories are part of every performer’s story in this book, but they were mere mile markers on the way to fulfillment, which is what they truly cherish. Equally important to them were the places they crashed on the journey because they are now convinced the victories would not have been realized without them.  

While this book is about more than sports, there is a coachability crisis in American sports today. Far too many young athletes and their families today are all about victory when it comes to what they hope to gain from playing a sport. That has led to their dreams being exploited by anyone dangling exposure and connections to land an athletic scholarship (and, now, a name-image‑likeness bonus). There’s nothing wrong with aspiring to earn an athletic scholarship or an NIL (name, image, likeness) deal, but making it the be‑all and end‑all as soon as a kid shows any degree of aptitude creates a host of repercussions. Besides, if a Division I or Division II free ride and a few extra bucks are the lone measure of success, the vast majority of athletes (and their families) will have wasted considerable time and money and be sorely disappointed with the results of their efforts. I’m reminded of legendary NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who, in the aftermath of achieving his lifelong dream of winning a Super Bowl, thought, Is that all there is?  

“I was like, ‘Did I aim at the wrong thing, or did I spend too much time thinking about stuff that ultimately doesn’t give you true happiness?’” he said in the Netflix documentary Aaron Rodgers: Enigma. Anyone who has achieved anything noteworthy is sure to tell you that the final product—be it a Vince Lombardi Trophy or inventing a bagless vacuum cleaner—is not what they treasure; it’s what they discovered along the way.  

James Dyson, a billionaire thanks to his invention of the aforementioned vacuum cleaner that bears his name, took as much satisfaction out of inventing the Contrarotator, a washing machine. It was, essentially, a commercial bust, but it worked exactly the way Dyson had hoped.  

“That it was not necessarily a commercial success came secondary to the pursuit of solving the problem,” he told the BBC. “That is what I really enjoy. Failure is the best medicine—as long as you learn something.”  

The reality: everyone has a gift or special talent. Identifying it, encouraging it, and, perhaps most important, challenging it determines whether it’s ever fully developed. One of the common threads among the athletes in this book is that they were strengthened by not being favored, not playing on the “A” team right away. That prompted them to build muscle and character, which came to serve them later on. It saddens me seeing the confused and despondent look on an athlete’s face (and the disappointed or even angry look on their parents’ faces) when they fall short of reaching a certain objective, whether it be starting on their high school team or getting a free ride in college or playing professionally—especially since I’ve been around sports long enough to see it coming, akin to watching a car crash unfold in slow motion. Having watched that scenario play out over and over again, I’ve often thought to myself, If only they knew . . .  

This book is my invitation to know.  

I had the great privilege to befriend three‑time NBA champion B. J. Armstrong through my work covering the NBA, which in turn gave me insight into one of his teammates, the greatest basketball player I’ve ever seen, Michael Jordan. B.J. was the first to bring to my attention what Jordan claimed was the secret to his success. It wasn’t the body control that earned him the nickname “Black Cat” or the athleticism that allowed him to glide through the air as if suspended on some invisible wire. None of that. Not his pterodactyl wingspan, either—arms that seemed to engulf opponents and earned him nine first team All‑Defensive Team awards and a Defensive Player of the Year award, something generally reserved for shot‑blocking and rebounding big men. Nor his hands, so massive and nimble he could palm a basketball with either one like a grapefruit. Nor his foot speed—4.4 seconds in the forty‑yard dash as a college sophomore—that made it impossible for defenders to stay between him and the basket short of knocking him to the ground.  

The aforementioned gifts all served as the raw material for being a six‑time NBA champion and five‑time league MVP—an award now named the Michael Jordan Trophy—but they weren’t what separated him from all the other uniquely blessed NBA stars.  

The secret to his success? “I was coachable,” he said.  

Excerpted from Coachable: How the Greatest Performers Reach Their Highest Potential by Ric Bucher, published by Avery Publishing Group. Copyright © 2026 by Ric Bucher. All rights reserved. 

About the Author

Ric Bucher is an NBA analyst for Fox Sports and FS1, appearing primarily on The Herd with Colin Cowherd. Ric’s writing has been recognized by the Pro Basketball Writers Association and he has built an international podcast network, United We Cast, that includes his personal show, On The Ball with Ric Bucher, that has nearly one million downloads. He has previously covered the NBA for The Washington Post, ESPN and TNT. Ric raised two extremely coachable collegiate athletes and currently lives in Northern California with his wife, Corrine, and two frisbee-catching dogs, Frank and Beans.