Make One Play
Impact Your Success
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Success doesn’t have to be complicated. Whether it’s business, sports, or life in general, following some basic principles can put the odds forever in your favor. Tim Selgo’s latest book, Make One Play: Impact your success, offers a simple method to find success. Selgo’s techniques and ideas will help you drill down and then level up.
Tim was a collegiate athlete at University of Toledo, where his coach, Bob Nichols, instilled in his players the idea of making one play, because you never know where it will lead. Tim has taken that advice to heart as a high school and collegiate coach, administrator, athletics director, parent, consultant, and author.
His first book, Anchor Up: Competitive Greatness the Grand Valley Way, explains how to build a successful organization through the lens of Grand Valley State University’s athletics department, which became one of the most well-rounded, successful programs in all of college athletics. Make One Play takes those ideas to a more personal level to impact your personal success.
The son of a coach, with a lifetime of experience in winning athletics, Tim has seen what works and what doesn’t. He’s been able to identify the key fundamentals that allow you to make one play, one move, one innovation and see your good fortunes soar. His principles apply no matter what your goals may be.
About the Author
A promoter of a well-rounded athletics department, Tim Selgo has been a key figure in Grand Valley State’s rise to the top of Division II athletics the past twenty years. GVSU had never won a national championship prior to Selgo’s arrival, but since, they have won nineteen NCAA Division II titles and 173 Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference crowns. The Lakers have finished among the top two in the Learfield Sports/NACDA Directors’ Cup standings for fifteen consecutive years, including eight straight titles (2003-04 to 2010-11) and winning eleven of the last thirteen. GVSU has also won eighteen straight GLIAC Presidents’ Cup titles as the top athletics program in the conference.
Selgo graduated from Toledo in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education and a minor in mathematics. Following graduation, Selgo remained at Toledo as a graduate assistant for the Toledo men’s basketball program and earned his master’s degree in education administration in 1982. Before coming to Grand Valley, he taught and coached at the high school level, coached women’s basketball at Toledo, and served as Toledo’s associate athletics director for eight years.
Currently, after retiring from GVSU in July of 2016, Selgo is an adjunct professor at Davenport University and a consultant with Athletics Staffing & Consultants. Selgo and his wife Terry recently celebrated their thirty-seventh wedding anniversary. They have three children, Jennifer, Rachel, and Daniel, and five grandsons, Tray, R.J., Tucker, Hank, and Burke.
For more information on Tim Selgo and his work, you can visit Athletics Staffing & Consulting at www.ascwinners.com/asc
You can also find him on Social Media:
Origins of Make One Play
Excerpt from Make One Play: Impact Your Success
"You never know what one play will lead to, fellas." ~ Coach Bob Nichols
That’s a reminder I heard often as a college basketball player from my coach at the University of Toledo, Bob Nichols. His point was any one play during the course of a game—diving for a loose ball to retain possession, executing the proper screen to free up a shooter, making a hard cut to the basket that shifts the defense and clears the lane for a teammate to score an uncontested layup, anticipating and preventing an opposing player’s drive to the basket—could influence the outcome, regardless of when it occurs.
Though the highlights on ESPN’s SportsCenter might have you believe otherwise, basketball games aren’t always decided by showy dunks and three-pointers, but more often by the plays that lead to them.
Our Toledo team featured a player who demonstrated this concept. Kevin Appel was a six-foot-seven forward who was not all that athletic and did not accumulate much in the way of stats. However, he did a lot of the little things well: set good screens, blocked out in rebounding situations, and was an excellent passer for a big guy. There was one play in particular in an NCAA Tournament game versus Iowa in 1979 when one of our guys missed a free throw and “Apps” reached up and, although he couldn’t quite grab the rebound, he got just enough of the ball to tip it out and our team retained possession.
It was at an important part of the game that led us to victory, and Coach Nichols replayed the sequence in our next film session over and over and praised Kevin for a seemingly minor play that did not result in any stats for him. Coach Nichols pointed out that retaining possession led to a score for us, in a game in which we won by only two points, 74-72.
In the more than three decades since my college playing days, I find myself regularly revisiting Coach Nichols’ advice. He was trying to win on the courts, of course, but over the years I’ve realized time and again his strategies apply beyond them as well.