Firstly, I have to apologise for my audio, which gives up on my 20mins or so into the podcast, my quality goes down but Coach Itoudis’ works well and that’s the person you need to listen to the most anyway, so please enjoy!

Head Coach Dimitris Itoudis’ path to coaching is an unusual one. After leaving his junior soccer team because his long hair was not in line with the coach’s rules he decided to switch to basketball at a young age and the rest is history. In 1990, he chose the path of studying abroad, outside of Greece and ‘abroad’ meant Zagreb at that time. While studying in Zagreb University and learning the language, he also started to coach in the youth divisions and started to leave his first marks as a coach. After expanding his network in the Balkan region he eventually made his path back to Greece and became the Assistant Coach at PAOK in 1995. After becoming a Head Coach at PAOK in 1996 and making his first appearance in the Cup of Cup Finals he worked his way through Panionios and MENT to eventually become Zeljko Obradovic’s Assistant Coach at PAO, where his biggest successes as an Assistant came (8 Final Four appearances & 5 EL titles). From there it was clear that his time as a Head Coach has come and he arrived to Banvit in 2013, which ended up becoming an unintended short stop-over before taking over CSKA Moscow in 2014, where he still is paving his way to new records. Currently has 6 Euroleague Final Four appearances with 2 titles amongst them.

Dimitris and me had variety of topics today. Beside his background and inspiring story from working as an Ice-Cream company sales representative to becoming a head coach, we talked about what it means to trust your team, when to let go and when to reflect & remind the team of tough losses in order to avoid history repeating itself. What role gut & intuition plays in his decision-making, the relationship he has with his captains, off course we also talked about the expectation from his staff, things he changed his mind on over time as well as what it means to stay persistent when you are working a job and want to be impactful. Lots of GREAT advice for upcoming coaches as well as regular people on what it means to follow your values and principles in life. Listen in to hear all the goodies!

Topics:

- Intro
- Knife Story
- Counting Final 4s
- Path to Basketball
- Sliding Door Moment

1st Quarter (Coaching):

- “Trusting the Orchestra”
- Reflecting on adversity
- Trusting Gut & Team
- Defining ‘Playing Well’

2nd Quarter (Communication):

- Relationship with Captain
- Coaching Staff Expectations
- Length of Video Analysis

3rd Quarter (Reflections):

- Change in Practice Philosophy
- Commitment to Your Job

4th Quarter (Philosophy):

- Value System
- Books

Finding Dimitris:

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dimitris_itoudis/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/ItoudisD

Affiliate Links to Dimitris' favourite books:

“Leaders Eat Last” by Simon Sinek - https://amzn.to/3wryTBB
“Pep” by Pep Guardiola - https://amzn.to/3fbotA7

Support my Podcast on Patreon here (Ačiu!!):

https://www.patreon.com/bmatke

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