If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that nobody goes through life unscathed—no matter how rich, how smart, how talented, or how fortunate they may be. White collar, blue collar, or no collar, there is an undeniable commonality to the raw emotion that strikes people when they are knocked down.

University of Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari has experienced his share of public setbacks, but he has learned that bad situations are permanent only if you allow them to be. What Coach Cal—as players, peers, and his legion of fans that make up the Big Blue Nation call him—learned from his experiences was the importance of having the right attitude when dealing with life’s major impediments. On the court and off, he emphasizes to his players that a big part of success is being able to handle obstacles. Now he is offering you the chance to learn the same strategies that he teaches the young men who play for him. By becoming an active participant in your own resurrection—through practice exercises and tips from Coach Cal and his deep bench of highly successful people—you too will gain the tools and insight to understand that it’s never a matter of how far you have fallen, but instead it’s about how high you bounce back.

In Players First, John Calipari relates for the first time anywhere his experiences over his first four years coaching the Kentucky Wildcats, college basketball’s most fabled program, from the doldrums to a national championship, drawing lessons about leadership, character, and the path to personal and collective victory.

At its core, Calipari’s coaching philosophy centers on keeping his focus on the players—what they need to get the best out of themselves and one another. He is beloved by his players for being utterly honest with them and making promises that he always keeps, no matter what. He knows that in this age, they come to Kentucky to prepare for the NBA; every year he gets players who in a previous era would have gone directly into the pros from high school but now have to play college basketball for one year. Calipari has fought against this system, but he has to play within it, and so he does, better than anyone.

The result is an extraordinary leadership challenge: every year Coach Cal gets a handful of eighteen-year-old kids who have been in a bubble for the previous four years at least, filled with hype about their own greatness, and they come to Kentucky feeling sure that they will play for their coach only for seven months before they go on to greater glory. Every year, he has to reinvent his team. After his 2012 NCAA championship, it was particularly dramatic; he lost his first six players in the first round, meaning that someone who couldn’t even start for Kentucky was a first-round draft pick.

The overall record at Kentucky, and for his career, puts Calipari in the pantheon of the greatest coaches in the history of the game. Bold, funny, and truthful, like Coach Calipari himself, Players First is truly the first deep reckoning with the meaning of his experiences and the gifts of insight they offer.

Kentucky’s charismatic coach shares the secrets of creating one of the premiere programs in college basketball, revealing how he transforms a group of former high school superstars into selfless, cohesive teams–including a remarkable squad last year that fell just one game short of a perfect season.

Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari is known for his unparalleled ability to recruit the nation’s best young players, some of whom will spend just one year with him before going to the NBA, and convincing them to commit to the team without sacrificing their personal goals. It is a promise he makes to them: “Fully invest in the present–and each other–and I guarantee it will serve your future.”

Here, for the first time, he distills his team-building methods in ways that apply to CEOs, business owners, coaches, teachers and leaders of all kinds–lessons for anyone seeking to inspire talented individuals to reach for their best selves and contribute to a greater good.

A basketball team is an intimate workplace, in which blend is everything and character matters. As such, it is a window into the nature of successful leadership. Calipari views each new team like a startup business–one composed of new players, new relationships, and new challenges. Each season is a series of discoveries as he learns how to unleash the extreme talent in each of his players and mold them into championship material as college basketball comes to a crescendo every spring. While he can’t control everything, he is responsible for everything–just like a CEO.

An enlightening look at leadership, management, and team building, Success Is the Only Option offers the keys to winning, on and off the court.