“We are very grateful to Coach Devaney and the Nebraska players for taking time from their pre-game preparation period to provide this exciting experience for boys and girls who have difficult physical problems to cope with.”

“I came to believe that the best way to change behavior was if you could catch somebody doing something right and reinforce it. Sometimes people see coaching as continually criticizing and fault finding and chewing people out. But that gets pretty old, and it really doesn’t do a whole lot to promote better behavior. I remember Lou Holtz coming up to visit us. He was coaching at Arkansas at the time. I’d never had a coach ever ask me to come up and watch our practices and sit in our meetings during the season. He was the only one that ever did and so he was there for about two days, and before he left, he said the one thing that really jumped out at me about this place was how positive your coaches were. He said he’d never seen anything like that before. I said, Well, I’m glad you saw that, because I guess that’s the way I would want it to be. And so it didn’t mean that there was never an unkind word, you know, in coaching, but for the most part, we did try to be positive. And if we caught somebody doing something wrong, we wanted to make sure that they understood how to do it right. So often people just criticize, and they really never explain very clearly what it is they want, and and, you know, there’s, there are ways to correct improper behavior in a positive way. And so that’s what we tried to do. And I think that made a difference. And in the athletic department, I try to create a culture or an environment that’s fairly positive.”