She Didn't Know She Could Be Good
We got a message from a parent recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
She told me that her child — let’s call her Player X — never thought about being good at basketball until we started working together. Never considered it a possibility. Just showed up, played, went home. And now? Now Player X outside working on her own. Talking about the game. Thinking about it.
The parent said thank you. And I appreciate that. I genuinely do.
But here’s the thing that keeps eating at me: Player X had been playing basketball for years before we started working together. Years. With coaches. In programs. On teams.
And nobody said “Hey, you could be good.”
Or even worse, helped that player BELIEVE they could be good.
Let that sit for a second.
Anyone can say it. That’s easy. But who’s got what it takes to make them BELIEVE it.
Not that nobody helped her reach her potential. Not that the coaching was just average. Player X went years inside the basketball ecosystem and came out the other side believing — at the core — that being good simply wasn’t possible. That it wasn’t something that Player X was allowed to think about.
That is not a neutral outcome. That is damage.
I want to be careful here because I know this isn’t always about bad people. Some coaches are perfectly decent human beings who have no business being in charge of a child’s development. They don’t have the skill. They don’t have the patience. They don’t have the vocabulary or the personality to reach a kid who needs something specific. That’s not evil — but it’s still negligence. You are shaping how a child sees themselves. If you don’t take that seriously, you shouldn’t be coaching. When you’re responsible for a team, or a bunch of teams, and you can’t do that…that’s borderline child abuse.
And then there are the coaches who are just bad people. Who use youth sports as a stage for their own ego. Who play favorites, embarrass kids publicly, and treat practice like an audition they get to judge. Those people are in youth sports right now. Today. Tonight at 6pm in some gym in your city. And parents are dropping kids off with them like everything is fine.
Because here’s the brutal part: most parents don’t know. The kid doesn’t come home and say, “My coach makes me feel worthless.” Kids don’t have that language. They just go quiet. They stop caring. They say they don’t like basketball anymore and everyone assumes it’s just a phase or a personality thing. It doesn’t occur to enough people to ask whether the environment broke something in them.
And the coaches who are doing the damage? They often look completely fine from the outside. They run organized practices. They shake hands after games. They say the right things at parent meetings. The harm is happening in the margins — in how they respond when a kid makes a mistake, in who they talk to and who they ignore, in the messages they’re sending a hundred times a season that nobody else is recording.
Players aren’t stupid. They feel all of it.
What kills me is that this is common. I’m not describing some rare horror story — I’m describing a pattern that shows up across youth sports at every level. The majority of kids who play organized basketball will spend significant time under coaches who are either unqualified, indifferent, or actively harmful. That is the default. The exception is the coach who actually sees a kid as a person with potential worth investing in.
Something is wrong with a system where a player can spend years in the game and never once hear, directly or indirectly, that he or she has the capacity to be good at it. And then backed up with the skill and ability to help that player actually improve so that they can see that they can be good.
I’m crazy enough to think I have the answer to fixing youth sports culture at scale. But that’s for another day. Right now I know what I can do. I can make sure that every player who walks into Hoops College hears clearly — not as empty motivation but as a real assessment — where they are and what’s possible if they work. I can make sure they leave every session with more belief, not less.
That’s not a high bar. It shouldn’t be a distinguishing feature. But right now, in the landscape we’re actually in, it is.
Player X is outside working. Thinking about the game. Believing that good is somewhere inside.
That should have happened years ago. The truth is, it almost didn’t happen at all.
Aram runs Hoops College, a basketball training program in Charlotte. The program is the offer that follows from the argument. → hoopscollege.com