“We want to thank everyone for their love and support for our father. We will miss him more than words can express,’’ his son, James, and daughter, Nancy Muehlhausen, said in a statement.

“He has been, and always will be, the guiding light for our family. The love, guidance, and support he has given us will never be forgotten. Our peace of mind at this time is knowing that he has gone to be with our mother, whom he has continued to love and cherish.’’

In 1989, Sports Illustrated described Mr. Wooden as “the greatest basketball coach ever.’’ He won seven of his 10 NCAA championships in a row. The basketball coaches with the second-most NCAA titles, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp, won four.

Mr. Wooden’s 1971-72 team set an NCAA record for average margin of victory, 30.3 points. Four times he coached an unbeaten team. He had a winning percentage at UCLA of .808 — and a career winning percentage of .813. He did all this despite a regular turnover of personnel. The one constant at UCLA, other than its powder-blue-and-gold colors, was Mr. Wooden.

Himself a standout player, Mr. Wooden was a three-time All-American guard at Purdue University. He is one of only three individuals to be enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame as both player and coach. (The others are Lenny Wilkens and Bill Sharman).

The John R. Wooden Award, honoring college basketball’s player of the year, has been given since 1977.

Among players Mr. Wooden coached were Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (or, as he was then known, Lew Alcindor), Bill Walton, Sidney Wicks, Curtis Rowe, Henry Bibby, Gail Goodrich, Dave Meyers, Marques Johnson, Lucius Allen, Keith Erickson, Walt Hazzard, and Willie Naulls.

“It’s kind of hard to talk about Coach Wooden simply, because he was a complex man. But he taught in a very simple way. He just used sports as a means to teach us how to apply ourselves to any situation,’’ Abdul-Jabbar said in a statement released through UCLA.

“He set quite an example. He was more like a parent than a coach. He really was a very selfless and giving human being, but he was a disciplinarian. We learned all about those aspects of life that most kids want to skip over. He wouldn’t let us do that.’’

Mr. Wooden’s coaching style was a throwback to his Midwestern upbringing. “George Patton is not my idol,’’ he liked to say. “I prefer Omar Bradley.’’

Personally reserved, he abhorred flashiness both on and off the court. “Three things are vital to success in basketball,’’ he wrote in his 1972 autobiography, “They Call Me Coach,’’ “condition, fundamentals, and working together as a team.’’ All three were essential to the successful execution of the two hallmarks of Mr. Wooden’s brand of basketball, a fast-break offense and pressing defense.

Mr. Wooden had a fondness for enumerating precepts. He liked to say there are four laws of learning: explanation, demonstration, imitation, and repetition. “The goal is to create a correct habit that can be produced instinctively under great pressure,’’ he said.

Walton, for one, would frequently say UCLA practices were far more taxing than even most tournament games because Mr. Wooden had them so highly organized and was so exacting in his supervision. “I felt that running a practice session was almost like teaching an English class in that I wanted to have a lesson plan,’’ Mr. Wooden wrote in his 1997 book, “Wooden.’’

It was not an idle comparison. Mr. Wooden, a devotee of 19th-century poetry, had taught high school English in Indiana. “He wasn’t just teaching us about basketball,’’ Walton wrote in the introduction to “Wooden,’’ “he was teaching us about life.’’

Mr. Wooden liked to cite what he called his “Pyramid of Success,’’ a combination of 15 virtues — such as industriousness, loyalty, and self-control — he considered essential to winning in life and basketball. It exemplified his attachment to the homiletic and didactic.

Mr. Wooden’s conservative style and strict discipline came to seem increasingly anachronistic in the ’60s and early ’70s. There were clashes with players, most notably Walton, who was arrested at an antiwar demonstration. Yet in key respects Mr. Wooden was ahead of the time. As early as 1947, when coaching at Indiana State Teachers College, Mr. Wooden withdrew his team from a championship tournament that was segregated.

“St. John,’’ Los Angeles Times sportswriter Jim Murray dubbed Mr. Wooden, who in addition to being a devout Protestant neither drank nor swore. (Mr. Wooden, who started smoking while serving in the Navy during World War II, would quit during each basketball season so as not to set a bad example for his players. He eventually stopped altogether.) “He’s so square he’s divisible by four,’’ Murray wrote.

The mother of his most famous player, Abdul-Jabbar, described Mr. Wooden as being “more like a minister than a coach.’’ A competing coach once complained of Mr. Wooden’s churchly bearing, “We thought we had a kid sewed up, but then Jesus Christ walked in. The kids’ parents about fell over. How can you recruit against Jesus Christ?’’

Some saw Mr. Wooden in a less divine light. His intense competitiveness could sometimes emerge in unattractive ways, especially in the years before he began winning NCAA titles. “I wish just once he’d swear at me,’’ a former player told Dwight Chapin and Jeff Prugh in their 1973 book “The Wizard of Westwood.’’ “He puts more venom into his ‘Goodness gracious sakes alive!’ than any Marine drill sergeant or hippie protestor I’ve ever heard.’’

Nor was he above baiting referees and opposing players. Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps once accused Mr. Wooden of verbally abusing “officials and players worse than any other coach.’’

John Robert Wooden was born in Martinsville, Ind., on Oct. 14, 1910. His parents, Joshua Hugh Wooden and Roxie (Rothrock) Wooden, were farmers. Throughout his life, Mr. Wooden carried in his wallet a handwritten copy of his father’s credo: “Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.’’

Mr. Wooden began playing basketball by throwing a rag ball through an old tomato basket nailed to a barn wall. Reaching a height of 5 feet 10 inches, he played guard on his high school team. It won a state championship and was runner-up twice. Mr. Wooden was named to the all-state team three times. Until the arrival of future Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson a quarter-century later, he was widely regarded as the finest schoolboy player produced in basketball-mad Indiana.

At Purdue, Mr. Wooden earned the nickname “the India Rubber Man’’ because he would bounce back up from the floor so fast. He was voted the Big Ten’s top student-athlete and college player of the year in 1932.

After graduating in 1932, Mr. Wooden played semi-pro basketball (there were no professional leagues in the ’30s). But he earned his livelihood as a high school coach and English teacher. He coached and taught one year in Kentucky, recording his sole losing season as player or coach, then returned to Indiana to spend 10 years at South Bend Central High School.

Mr. Wooden served in the Navy Reserve as a physical education instructor during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant.

After the war, Mr. Wooden became basketball coach at Indiana State. Amassing a winning percentage of .839 during his two seasons there, he drew offers from the University of Minnesota and UCLA. Mr. Wooden’s preference was Minnesota. When UCLA made an offer, he waited on Minnesota. Not hearing from the Gophers by the agreed-upon deadline, he chose UCLA. It turned out a freak snowstorm had delayed the call from Minnesota by a few hours.

Mr. Wooden quickly turned around the UCLA program after his arrival in 1948. He won five conference titles and took the Bruins to the Final Four in 1962, losing in the semifinals to the eventual champion, Cincinnati.

The UCLA dynasty began two years later — with a starting squad whose tallest player was only 6 feet 5 inches. It was a classic Wooden team, emphasizing quickness, speed, and conditioning. UCLA won again in 1965. Failing to repeat as champion in 1966, it was off and running the next year — thanks to the arrival of Alcindor, one of the finest pivotmen to play the game.

The highlight of the Alcindor era was a pair of games with the University of Houston, led by future Hall of Famer Elvin Hayes, in 1968. With Alcindor suffering the effects of a previous eye injury, Houston won before 55,000 spectators at the Astrodome, 71-69. Two months later, UCLA demolished Houston, 101-69, in the NCAA semifinals.

It was widely thought that after Alcindor’s graduation, in 1969, UCLA’s championship run was over. Mr. Wooden showed otherwise, with a team led by Wicks and Rowe at forward. “The saying that it’s tougher to stay on top than to get there — I don’t believe it,’’ Mr. Wooden said in a 1989 Sports Illustrated interview. “Winning breeds winning.’’

The dynasty received a further boost with the arrival of Walton, who was soon drawing comparisons with Alcindor. UCLA won its eighth and ninth NCAA titles, in 1972 and ’73. It lost in the semifinals to North Carolina State in 1974.

With Walton’s graduation, the dynasty finally seemed to have ended. But Mr. Wooden produced one last championship, in 1975. After a dramatic overtime victory in the semifinals, he announced the next game would be his last. UCLA defeated Kentucky, 92-85, and Mr. Wooden went out a winner.

In 2003, Mr. Wooden was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Mr. Wooden’s wife, Nellie (Riley) Wooden, died in 1985. In addition to his son and daughter, he leaves seven grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.