 |
Lou Holtz |
Lou Holtz is widely recognized as one of the most successful college football coaches of all time. Among his many accolades, he is in the record books as the only collegiate football coach to lead six different teams to a bowl game and have four different college teams ranked in the final top 20 poll.
When Holtz took over as Notre Dame’s 27th head football coach back in November of 1985, he brought with him a well-proven reputation as a fixer of football programs following a series of spectacular repair jobs at William & Mary, North Carolina State, Arkansas and Minnesota.
He enhanced that track record quickly and demonstrated that he could take the Irish back to the ranks of college football’s elite and keep them there on a consistent basis. He needed only two years to put Notre Dame back into a major post-season bowl game, and in 1988 he took the team to the consensus national championship, after a record 23-game winning streak that ranks as the longest in Notre Dame history.
In addition to his accomplishments on the football field, Lou Holtz is a well known as a distinguished motivational speaker, demanding disciplinarian and someone who relishes challenges and hard work. His twenty-six seasons as a collegiate head coach earned Holtz a sterling reputation for turning pretenders into contenders. He utilizes the skills honed as a winning coach as he speaks on overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles by setting your own goals and working to achieve them.
Holtz has authored three New York Times best-selling books The Fighting Spirit, a chronicle of Notre Dame's 1988 championship season, Winning Everyday: A Game Plan For Success, and an autobiography titled Wins, Losses and Lessons.