Ahead of the tournament, No. 1 seeded Kansas Head Basketball Coach Bill Self joins adidas Group’s Mark King on his podcast Extraordinary Happens. Coach talks about the importance of creating a winning culture, the invaluable lessons sports teach and how young athletes continue to impact his life.

“What do we really learn through athletics, whether it be an individual sport or a team sport? You learn work. You learn grind. You learn sacrifice. You learn being a good teammate and a team player. You learn the value of so many intangibles, that if you were going to look at any successful person non-athletically, they would have those same intangibles. Athletics and life are intertwined.” – Bill Self, Kansas Head Basketball Coach

“Now, everything is a quick fix. If you’re a college student and you make a bad score on the first test, the first thing you think about is dropping the class. Or if you attend high school and you’re an athlete and it doesn’t work out very well because you’re not playing, the first thing you think about is transferring. We allow people so many outs when things don’t go well as opposed to grinding through it and fighting through it. One thing that we want to do here – and I think all coaches do – is you’ve got to be tough enough to fight through it. You can’t go around it. You got to go through it. And the way that culture is today, that’s not natural for kids. So that’s something we try to hit home right from the beginning. And by the time they leave, they understand the value of seeing something through and what can potentially happen when everybody gives themselves for the good of the cause.” – Bill Self, Kansas Head Basketball Coach

Extraordinary Happens: Competing in Sports, Business and Life, hosted by adidas Group’s Mark King, is a new podcast series featuring compelling stories behind the people shaping sports and business today. Episodes of Extraordinary Happens are available on iTunes, Stitcher and SoundCloud.