To honor the 99th birthday of coach John Wooden, one of Coach Carroll's all-time mentors, we're publishing this first-person perspective from Carroll that highlights Wooden's impact on him. It showcases the turning point in Carroll's coaching career, an epiphany of all epiphanies that occurred just before he got the USC job in 2000, with Wooden being a main catalyst for the inspiration. Here's the story, in Carroll's words:

When I read about how it took Coach Wooden 16 years of coaching at UCLA before he won his first championship, I involuntarily slammed the book shut, stunned. Like everyone else who grew up around California sports, I knew the rest of the story: After that first title Coach went on to win 10 out of the next 11 National Championships before retiring, falling just one very close game short of winning all 11. For whatever reason, though, I'd never realized just how long it had taken him to get his UCLA team to that level.

It was an epiphany: once Coach Wooden figured out what it took to win that first National Championship, I realized, he absolutely owned it.  

It had taken him all those years, winning conference championships and having winning seasons that didn't quite make it, but once he got there, he knew exactly what it took - and that knowledge put him in a position to do it again and again and again.

I realized that, for him to have done that, he must have figured out absolutely everything about his program -- his delivery, his belief system, his philosophy, everything that made that first championship possible -- so completely that he could re-create it year after year after year. More importantly, he didn't only have to know all those details, but be able to explain them and tie them back into a clear, moral vision that brought it all together into a single team effort.

Of course, after a brief stretch of euphoria, that eureka moment was immediately followed by the less thrilling reminder that with two head coaching failures already on my resume, not only was I unlikely to get 16 years to figure all that out for myself -- I'd be lucky to get 16 months.

I spent the following weeks and months in a fever of notes, binders and ideas. For years, I reminded myself, I'd been challenging position groups, defensive squads and teams that I'd coached to do things in an extraordinary way, but I had never had a way to articulate my thinking similarly to the clarity and succinctness that Coach Wooden had finally arrived at. And so I made myself go through the process of nailing it down, and it was the discipline of working at it that made it happen. By the end, I had a lot of stuff but most importantly I finally had my philosophy, my vision, and a set of core values I could build my program around.

If I ever coached again, my team was going to be built on the foundation of a single, basic principle: "We want to do things better than they have ever been done before." That has always been, and will always be, the philosophy of our program.

So thank you, Coach Wooden, for all the time and inspiration you've given me over the years. Happy birthday!

- By Pete Carroll