An Open Letter to High School Coaches: What You’re Actually Building This Season

Ok, coach, quick gut check before your first practice.

Your freshmen this year? They were seven or eight years old when the world shut down in the spring of 2020. Second grade, learning to read through a laptop screen, birthday parties canceled, playgrounds taped off like crime scenes. Your seniors hit sixth and seventh grade during those years — which, if you think about it, is basically the window kids are supposed to be figuring out how to read a room full of people. A lot of them spent it alone in a bedroom instead, on a screen.

And it’s not just a vibe. More than a third of high schoolers in this country were chronically absent from school last year — not skipping, just gone enough days that it wrecked their momentum before the season even started. One in three teens describe using social media “almost constantly,” which works out to something like five hours a day. Their parents had maybe one.

I’m not telling you this so you feel sorry for the kid walking onto your field this week. I’m telling you because it’s the actual air she’s breathing right now, and it changes what she needs from you.

Here’s the thing I want you to sit with before you say a single word to your team: you were never just hired to coach a sport.

You’re one of the only adults in that kid’s whole week who’s allowed to hold her to a standard, watch her fall short of it, and stick around anyway. That’s rare. It’s rarer than it was even five years ago. And honestly? It’s the actual job. The scoreboard is just the part everyone else can see.

The Glow-Up

Ok, here’s the old story we tell ourselves: the character stuff — discipline, communication, grit — is the soft stuff that happens around the real job of winning games.

Here’s the reframe: it is the job. And it turns out there’s real research behind that, not just a nice quote for a locker room poster.

There’s a study that followed thousands of teens over years and found that having a coach as a mentor was tied to finishing high school and finishing college — and that held up even after accounting for grades and just playing the sport itself. Coaches are the third most-named mentor kids point to in school, right behind teachers and counselors. And the National Federation of State High School Associations has been tracking this for years: kids in athletics have higher GPAs, show up to school more, get in less trouble, and stick around to graduation more than kids who aren’t playing.

And here’s the part that’s a little harder to say out loud: if this year’s group feels like it needs more from you than the group you had five or ten years ago, you’re not imagining it. One 2025 analysis found that self-reported cognitive struggles among 18-to-34-year-olds have nearly doubled in the last decade. Researchers keep landing on the same suspects: more time online, less time outside, and for a lot of your roster, a pandemic that hit during exactly the years kids are supposed to be practicing independence.

That’s not a knock on them. It’s not “kids these days” — it’s just what they were handed. Which means practice matters more than it used to, not less.

So here are the four things I’d actually be intentional about this season.

Make the standard visible, not just enforced.

Showing up on time. Doing the conditioning when nobody’s watching. Owning the drop pass instead of side-eyeing whoever threw it. None of that is natural at 16 — it gets built through reps, and practice is one of the last places left where the consequences are immediate and fair. Employers who are hiring their first wave of young employees are already noticing this stuff: inconsistent habits, no follow-through, a real gap in professionalism. Not a stereotype — a pattern they’re seeing show up repeatedly. So say the standard out loud in week one. Hold your star to it exactly like you hold your bench kid. Don’t assume they already know what “showing up” means — for a lot of them, you might be the one who actually teaches it.

Turn every huddle into a communication rep.

Telling a teammate she blew the assignment without it becoming a whole thing. Talking to a ref and staying composed when the call goes against her. These are reps most of your athletes just aren’t getting anywhere else — more of their social life happens through a screen than face to face these days. And it shows: 70% of business leaders surveyed recently named poor communication as the defining weakness in their newest hires. Every time you make a kid say something out loud, to an actual human, in real time — that’s the rep. Doesn’t matter if that’s not why you called the huddle.

Let effort earn the confidence — don’t just hand it out.

There’s a difference between confidence someone gives a kid and confidence she builds by doing something hard over and over until it’s not hard anymore. Only the second kind holds up when things get tense, and that’s exactly what practice is for. One recent survey found young professionals’ self-reported confidence dropped from 59% to 39% in a single year — even as “you’re doing great!” became the background noise of basically everywhere except competitive spaces like yours. Real work ethic doesn’t come from being told she’s crushing it. It comes from the extra rep, the miss, the rep again, and then finally making it — with you standing right there the whole time.

Coach the fall, not just the shot.

This one matters most, and it’s the one your freshmen have had the least practice with. There’s research on what happens when kids lose unsupervised, slightly risky, unstructured play — the researchers behind it describe kids as needing to be “stress wood”: trees that grow stronger because they got hit with wind, not despite it. Take the wind away, and the wood never learns to hold itself up. Your practice field is one of the last places that still applies the wind on purpose — the missed shot in front of everyone, the benching, the loss she has to carry until Monday’s film session. You’re handing her a safe place to fail exactly when she needs the reps most. Don’t rescue her from the fall. Coach her through what happens next.

Real, Not Perfect

You’re not going to do all four of these every single day. Some practices you’ll be too tired, too shorthanded, too buried in the scouting report to turn a huddle into a life lesson. That’s fine — genuinely. This isn’t a checklist you’re failing if you don’t nail it. It’s just a direction to lean toward, on the good days and the rough ones.

Kids don’t need a coach who’s perfect at this. They need one who’s actually trying, out loud, in front of them — and who shows back up the next day even after the practice that went sideways. That’s the thing they’re really watching. Not any single drill.

If four feels like a lot, just start with one.

Try this tomorrow:

• Catch a kid doing something right before you correct anything. Out loud, specific, before the next whistle.

• Ask “What was the best part of today?” instead of “Did we win?” — try it on a kid who wouldn’t normally get asked either question.

• When someone screws up, count to five before you jump in. Let her sit in it a beat before you coach her out of it.

Try this over the season:

• Say the standard out loud in week one — what “showing up” actually means on your team — and hold everyone to the same version of it in November that you did in September.

• Build one recurring moment into the schedule where kids have to actually talk to each other, not just perform: a weekly check-in, a post-game one-word share, a captain-run huddle you stay out of.

• Watch who’s gone quiet on the bench. That’s usually your flight risk, and it’s usually fixable with five real minutes of your attention.

None of it needs to be perfect. It just needs to be real, and it needs to be repeated.

Lead Anyway

Here’s what nobody tells you when you take this job: it doesn’t pay enough to explain why you actually stay.

You stay for the kid who couldn’t make eye contact in August and is calling out plays by October. You stay for the parent who grabs your arm at the banquet and says, “I don’t know what you said to her, but she’s different this year.” You stay for the group text from a kid who graduated four years ago and is still checking in, still calling you Coach. You stay because somewhere in all the running and film and long bus rides home, you become the adult she measures herself against for the rest of her life — and half the time you don’t even find out that’s what happened. Maybe ever.

Nobody does this job for the win column. You do it because you remember what it felt like to be handed belief before you’d earned it, and you already know which kid on this year’s roster needs that exact thing. The sport was never really the point. The point was always the woman she gets to become because someone stood on a sideline and refused to give up on her before she’d figured out how to stop giving up on herself.

That’s the job underneath the job. That’s what you actually signed up for.

So on the days that go sideways — drills falling apart, someone crying in the parking lot, you running on fumes with nothing left to give — remember that showing up tired and human still counts as showing up. The kid watching you push through a hard day is learning more from that than she’d learn from a perfect one.

You’re not just building athletes. You’re building the adults they’re going to become. One practice, one huddle, one hard conversation at a time.

Coach anyway.