Terry Bowden
Building teams and winning football games seem to be a part of Terry Bowden’s DNA
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From outstanding student-athlete, to 1993 National Coach of the Year, to one of college football’s leading television personalities, to much sought after keynote speaker, Terry Bowden has known what it takes to be a success at whatever he does.
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From outstanding student-athlete, to 1993 National Coach of the Year, to one of college football’s leading television personalities, to much sought after keynote speaker, Terry Bowden has known what it takes to be a success at whatever he does.
After lettering two years as a running back at West Virginia University and graduating magna cum laude in Accounting, Terry went on to earn his Law Degree from Florida State University, and do post-graduate work at Oxford University in England.
He then became the youngest head football coach in America at the age of 26 and the youngest Div1A head coach at the age of 36. In 1993, at Auburn University, Coach Bowden became the first coach in history to go undefeated in his very first year in Div1A and was named the unanimous National Coach of the Year.
Following his stint at Auburn, Terry went on to become one of college football’s leading television broadcasters hosting the ABC Studio Show at Times Square in New York City.
In 2009, Terry Bowden followed his heart back into his first love of coaching. He is currently the head football coach at the University of Akron, and in 2015 led the Zips to their best season ever and first bowl victory in school history. He has a career record of 164-99-2 which ranks him as the sixth winningest football coach in Division 1 football.
Bowden is a member of one of the most famous and successful college football families of all time. His father, Bobby, won two National Championships at Florida State and his 377 victories rank second in Division 1 history. Brother, Tommy was the head coach at Tulane and Clemson, and, brother, Jeff, has been a long-time assistant.
Bobby (at FSU) and Terry (at Auburn) became the first father-son combo to serve as head coaches in Div1A football at the same time and Bobby (at FSU) and Tommy (at Clemson) became the first father-son combo ever to coach against each other as head coaches.
During the decade of the nineties, in a feat that will likely never be repeated, all three Bowden head coaches went undefeated in Div1A and were named National Coach of the Year. Together they amassed 631 victories and stand as the winningest family in the history of college football.
Building teams and winning football games seem to be a part of Terry Bowden’s DNA as he has taken five losing programs and turned them all into winners.
Terry will share his knowledge and insights into building a winning team or organization through motivation, leadership and teamwork. Using a balanced mix of his unique humor, relatable stories, and entertaining anecdotes, Terry leaves his audiences with real world skills to implement in their own businesses, careers, and lives.
Being a winner is not always about having the best players, but having the players that play their best together. Teamwork is the ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organized objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results. You can throw money at all your problems if you want, but it doesn’t cost one thin dime to motivate each and every person within your organization to be their very best. Ultimately, it’s about getting our eleven to play better than their eleven.
No leader has ever accomplished anything great without audacity. If a leader is filled with high ambition and he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles. After our undefeated season at Auburn University in 1993, I asked our football team what they wanted to accomplish in 1994. Every single young man said they wanted to go undefeated again. My first impression was that this was crazy – nobody wins every game two years in a row. Then I thought again. This was not crazy…it was audacity!
I knew my father (Bobby Bowden, the winningest coach in college football) was going to be a great football coach twenty-five years ago. We were sitting around the Thanksgiving table and he said, “I’m so disappointed that I don’t have any grandsons that I’ve created a trust and I’ve put $100,000 in that trust and I’m going to put that trust in the name of the first one of my children that provides me with a grandson.” Then he said, “Let’s bow for a word of prayer”…and when he looked up….. we were all gone. Now that’s motivation!
You don’t need to motivate that top salesman any more than you do the star running back. Those guys were born to win. If you want to build a winner then you better find a way to inspire the back up lineman, the walk-on, and the guy who never gets off the bench. Those are the guys who are ultimately going to get you over the top. I call it the But For Rule. Getting each and every person in the organization to believe that but for their effort, but for their ability, but for their very job, we can not be successful.
A man was walking down the beach and noticed that there were thousands of starfish all across the sand that had crawled out of the ocean due to the red tide. Although the water had cleared, the sun was taking its toll and the starfish were drying up and dying. As the man continued to walk down the beach, he noticed that another man walking in front of him was bending over every now and then to pick something up, and each time that he did he got a little closer. Finally, the man caught up with the other fellow and asked what he was doing. The man said that the starfish were dying in the sun and that he was putting them back in the water. “But there are millions of them. What kind of difference do you think you can make?” To that, the man bent over and picked up another starfish, tossed it into the water and said, “Well, I guess I made a difference to that one.”
Each of us has the ability…no, the obligation…to make a difference in the lives of others. So often we want to pat ourselves on the back when we do something special even for our own children. However, true success comes from making a difference in someone else’s child…or more importantly, in a child you don’t even know. I call it planting shade trees under which you’ll never sit.
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