Rick Pitino Character Analysis

Rick Pitino is a college athlete on the basketball team of the University of Massachusetts. When his team plays the Fordham Rams, Pitino is astounded as he sits on the bench and watches the Rams—who are significantly worse than UMass—beat them using the full-court press. Taking this as a lesson, Pitino adopts the full-court press when he becomes the head basketball coach of Boston University’s team. He later teaches the press to his team at Providence College and when he starts coaching other basketball coaches. Despite the full-court press’s success rate, though, Pitino knows that not everyone is willing to adopt it as a strategy because it takes hard work. To address how physically tiring it is to play such constant defense, Pitino spends a lot of time doing cardiovascular training with his players—something not all coaches are willing to do. Gladwell uses this as an example of why not everyone embraces alternative techniques, arguing that underdogs have to be genuinely desperate and motivated by their disadvantages to gravitate toward such strategies in the first place.