OK, as someone biased towards all things Flint, this is normally the type of thing I'd just include in a Linking Laconically post. But because it's Mateen Cleaves, he gets a full post.

Cleaves watched the Flint Mott Community College basketball team clinch a regional championship last week and Mott's coach, Steve Schmidt, brought Cleaves into the locker room to deliver a pep talk, which was caught by the Flint Journal's Eric Woodyard. Cleaves starts talking around the 1:20ish mark in the video.

My favorite part was Cleaves mentioning how he wasn't expecting to talk and acting like he was caught off guard, then delivering a passionate speech about what it takes to win a championship filled with comments like this:

"It's about sacrifice, and everybody can't do it. The only thing people remember is who won. I got asked a year later, 'who'd y'all play for the national championship?' That's crazy!"

I know Cleaves is doing analyst work right now, but if he ever goes into coaching as many predict, he's already got the locker room speech part down.