It's not the will to win but the will to prepare to win that makes the difference
Not Bear Bryant — the saying traces to Fielding H. YostFielding H. Yost1871–1946 · University of Michigan football coach & athletic director
?Attribution status: The idea is documented from 1929–30 and credited to Yost; the polished sentence attached to Bryant has no primary source.?Reuse status: Rights unconfirmed
Quote Investigator names Michigan coach Fielding H. Yost as the leading candidate for creating this saying, tracing it to his 1929–30 Wingate Memorial Lectures and a February 1930 address — fifteen years before Bear Bryant became a head coach (Maryland, 1945). The tidy modern wording “it’s not the will to win but the will to prepare to win that makes the difference” is a later compression that no one has tied to any Bryant speech, book, or interview.
“It's not the will to win but the will to prepare to win that makes the difference” Attributed to Bear Bryant, but the saying traces to Michigan coach Fielding H. Yost (1929–30 Wingate Memorial Lectures). Source: Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Bear Bryant. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
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In context
Evoking the world of Fielding H. Yost — Michigan football coach & athletic director. Theme: "It's not the will to win but the will to prepare to win that makes the difference". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "It's not the will to win but the will to prepare to win that makes the difference". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The earliest documented form
Work
Intimate Talks by Great Coaches: Wingate Memorial Lectures 1929–1930
Speaker
Fielding H. Yost, delivered to teachers in New York City
Date
1929–30 academic year
Also
“Lasting Values in Athletics,” 13 February 1930 — a separate address, printed in The Barnwell Addresses: Volume 1, 1922–30, pp. 361–369
Documented by
Quote Investigator (11 August 2017), citing p. 18
The will and the wish to win, but there isn’t a chance for either one of them to be gratified or to have any value unless there has been a will to prepare to win.
as quoted by Quote Investigator
Yost’s phrasing is an argument, not an aphorism — which is why later coaches kept recompressing it. In a separate address, “Lasting Values in Athletics” of 13 February 1930, he put it more plainly: it is “all right to talk about this ‘will to win,’ but I tell you it is not of much worth unless you have the will to prepare.”
1929–30 — Fielding H. Yost tells New York teachers that the wish to win is worthless without “a will to prepare to win,” per Quote Investigator ↗, citing the Wingate Memorial Lectures volume, p. 18.
1965 — Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Vernon Law’s notebook version, in The Pittsburgh Press of 30 July: “Many have the will to win on the day of the contest but few have the will to prepare to win” (QI ↗).
1979 / 2002 — Bob Knight publishes it in a Greensboro Daily News column and later in his memoir; Wikiquote ↗ cites Knight: My Story (2002) for the familiar “everybody has that” form.
Today — close variants of this sentence circulate under Bear Bryant’s name on quote sites such as AZQuotes ↗, which carries “It’s not the will to win that matters—everyone has that” with no publication cited, while Wikiquote’s Bryant page ↗ does not carry it at all.
The exact popular wording has no identified first publication, so no rights status can honestly be asserted for it. The 1929–30 Yost passage shown above comes from a lecture volume whose printing date and edition we have not independently confirmed against a catalogue record, and the closest modern equivalent — Bob Knight’s Knight: My Story (2002) — is firmly in copyright to its authors and publisher.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
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Fact-check
Who really gets credited — and why it’s wrong
This is a saying with at least five claimants and one documented originator. Quote Investigator worked through the chain; Bear Bryant is not in it.
✕
The popular creditPaul “Bear” Bryant unsourced
Quote cards, coaching blogs and aggregators credit Bryant, but none names a speech, book, page or date — and Wikiquote’s Bryant page ↗ lists nothing resembling it in either its sourced or its attributed section.
✕
The documented originFielding H. Yost earliest
Quote Investigator ↗ calls Yost “the leading candidate for creator of this saying,” citing his 1929–30 Wingate Memorial Lectures and a February 1930 address in which he said the “will to win” is “not of much worth unless you have the will to prepare.”
✕
The best-sourced modern versionBob Knight sourced
Knight used it in a Greensboro Daily News column on 19 December 1979 and published it in his memoir; Wikiquote ↗ cites Knight: My Story (2002) for “The key is not the will to win… everybody has that.”
✕
Also creditedVernon Law, Vince Lombardi, Joe Paterno secondary
QI ↗ documents Pirates pitcher Vernon Law using a version in 1965, a posthumous 1996 Lombardi credit, and a 1998 attribution to Paterno — all long after Yost.
✓The thought is Yost’s, first documented in 1929–30; the sharpest surviving wording is Bob Knight’s; the Bryant credit is a later, sourceless graft, as Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗ shows.
Context
How a lecture-hall point became a locker-room slogan
Yost’s original was not a slogan — it was an argument, delivered to New York teachers, that wanting to win is worthless on its own. His phrasing sprawled: the will and the wish to win have no value “unless there has been a will to prepare to win.” Nobody puts that on a poster.
What happened next is the ordinary life cycle of a coaching maxim. Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Vernon Law wrote his own version in 1965; Bob Knight sharpened it in a 1979 newspaper column and again in his 2002 memoir; it was pinned posthumously on Vince Lombardi and on Joe Paterno. Bear Bryant, the most quotable coach in the American South, simply became the last stop — a name big enough that an unsourced line stops looking unsourced.
Yost argued it. Knight sharpened it. Bryant got the credit.
Why Bryant is such a magnet for this one
Bryant genuinely did preach preparation, so the sentiment fits him — which is exactly what makes the misattribution durable. A quote that sounds like someone rarely gets challenged.
The wording usually sold as Bryant’s (“It’s not the will to win that matters — everyone has that…”) is close to the version Bob Knight published under his own name in 2002, which is the only form of this saying that carries a real book-and-chapter citation.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1871–1946 · Michigan football coach & athletic director
Fielding Harris Yost coached Michigan football for 25 seasons between 1901 and 1926 and served as the university’s athletic director from 1921 to 1940. His early “point-a-minute” teams made him one of the most quoted figures in American sport, and he spent his later years on the lecture circuit preaching that athletics built character through preparation, not through wanting to win. That lecture-circuit theme is where the “will to prepare to win” formula first shows up in print.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented form
Fielding H. Yost, remarks in Intimate Talks by Great Coaches: Wingate Memorial Lectures 1929–1930, p. 18, as documented in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: The Will To Win Is Not Worth Much Unless You Have the Will To Prepare To Win,” 11 August 2017.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It's not the will to win but the will to prepare to win that makes the difference’?” Last verified 22 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/its-not-the-will-to-win-but-the-will-to-prepare-to-win-that/