Bill Parcells, the Pro Football Hall of Fame coach, once famously said "You are what your record says you are.''
That's not necessarily so.
Case in point: the Bethune-Cookman women's basketball team.
The Lady Wildcats are clearly a team on the rise under third-year coach Vanessa Blair, their 9-9 overall record and 3-4 MEAC mark aside, after being also-rans during most of their time in the conference.
The Lady Wildcats were last or next to last in the conference in each of the four seasons before Blair took over. They climbed to ninth place in her first season and had their first winning record since the 2002-03 season last year when they were 17-12.
This season the Lady Wildcats are in position to have back-to-back winning seasons for the first time since the 2001-02 and 2002-03 campaigns despite playing most of the season with an injury-depleted roster that has left Blair with just seven players.
Blair attributes the strides that the Lady Wildcats have made to the support she has received from the administration and team members' desire to transform the culture of losing that existed.
"The biggest thing is that during the interview with (director of athletics) Lynn Thompson, I saw that he wanted the same things for the program that I wanted,'' she says. "We both wanted winning ways. It starts at the top. Everything that we spoke about, he has supported. When you have that support, it trickles down.''
Blair came to Bethune-Cookman after a highly successful coaching career at Mount St. Mary's, where she was also a Hall Fame basketball player. Unlike the majority of coaches who come into perennial losing situations, Blair didn't make wholesale personnel changes. She took an entirely different approach and brought everyone back.
"It (all the losing) was not their fault,'' she says. "They were recruited to come here. No one wants to lose. It was a chance to have an interview, show me what they could do. I wanted to win with the kids who were here. They had made a commitment. I wanted to help them see it through.''
Blair says that in talking with team members individually, she discovered a winning spirit among them that only needed a little cultivating.
"With the will to win, you can do anything,'' she says. "It was really the culture that was the biggest thing that needed changing. The Xs and 0s are is last thing. When you lose and have lost as much as these young ladies had and the massive losses keep piling up, losing becomes contagious. You develop a losing mentality; you say, 'Oh, we're not going to win.' The young women I inherited didn't quit. They felt they could win. It was really on the girls to do everything they could to it turnaround. They had the ability.''
Blair set about creating a winning culture during practice. Every drill the Lady Wildcats participated resulted in a winner and a loser.
"Every day at the end of practice, I wanted them to feel that they had won in some aspect,'' she says. "You don't win when you get to the game. Winning begins in practice.''
Blair's winning and losing philosophy carried over to the classroom as well. The Lady Wildcats had a goal of attaining GPA of 3.2 for the first semester and were required to sign in at the basketball office that they had gone to class - the idea being that when someone didn't go to class, it was a loss for the team. At the end of the semester, the team's overall GPA was 3.5.
"It was about showing up,'' Blair says, "standing up and showing up and giving your best. We made everything accountable. You have a goal; you have a standard. It doesn't matter how you feel; you have to meet the standard.''
Thompson says the progress the Lady Wildcats have made under Blair is exactly what he envisioned when he hired her
"I knew her approach to the game and motivation of the kids would bring immediate change,'' he said. "She instilled a winning attitude; she set goals.''
Blair arrived with an impressive resume, which included two Northeast Conference (NEC) Player of the Year Awards as a student-athlete at Mount Saint Mary's, NEC Player of the Decade, NEC Coach of the year and a two-year professional playing career in Sweden.
But Thompson says he was really sold on Blair by her appearance when she interviewed.
"She walked into the office looking like a banker or CEO of Fortune 500 company,'' he says. "The most important thing we wanted us, being a United Methodist Church affiliated school, was someone who could walk into a house on a home visit and have the parents say, 'I want my daughter to be like her.' What we've been getting is a role model who has motivated the young ladies and showed them what basketball can do for them as a career. She has taught them so many other things, things more important than the strategy of basketball.''
Blair was a rising star among NEC coaches before leaving for Bethune-Cookman. She was eighth among NEC coaches in career conference victories with 87 in eight seasons at Mount St. Mary's, and was third in wins among active coaches.
"I felt like where I was in my career at the time I was missing something,'' she says of her decision to leave her alma mater. "I couldn't put my finger on it.''
She says what was missing was a sense of making a difference in the black community, a void that coaching at an HBCU fills.
Blair, whose parents were in the military, grew up in Upper Marlboro, Md., around Howard, Morgan State and Coppin State, but she nor did her siblings attend an HBCU.
"I felt there was something I could give to these young ladies other than Xs and Os that was not needed at the university where I was,'' she says, "and these young ladies who look like me had something to give me.''
Says Thompson: "It has been a perfect marriage.''