Long before Winchester Field, before the clipboard and the lineup card, I coached basketball.
Early in my career, I was still figuring out who I was as a coach, in a gym that smelled like floor wax and old radiators, running a JV team most people who know me now have no idea I ever coached. There was a kid on that team who was always the first one through the door. Not by a few minutes—by twenty, thirty, sometimes closer to an hour— sitting on the bleachers with his shoes already laced before I’d even gotten the gym unlocked. I used to think it was hustle. Turned out it was something else.
He was quiet, one of those kids who did everything right and never made you notice him doing it. Partway through that season, I found out his parents had separated a few months earlier, and the house he used to know wasn’t the house he was going home to anymore. Two addresses now. Two different sets of rules about bedtime, homework, and who was picking him up on which nights. The one thing on his calendar that hadn’t changed was practice — same gym, same time, same teammates, same me standing at the same spot under the basket.
That’s why he was early. Not because he loved shooting drills that much. Because that gym was the only place left in his week that looked the same as it did before.
I didn’t find out from him. I found out from another coach on staff who’d noticed he was getting dropped off way ahead of schedule on the days his mom had him, because it was easier for everybody’s logistics if he just sat in the gym and waited. When I finally asked him about it directly, he shrugged like it was nothing. “It’s just easier here,” he said. He didn’t mean the drills were easier. He meant something else was easier, and he didn’t have the words for it yet, so that’s the sentence he gave me.
The Turn
I didn’t create the gap in that kid’s life, and I sure wasn’t going to close it. But I found out that season that a program can still be part of what fills it — not by fixing what’s broken at home, but by being the one thing that refuses to move.
Name the Gap Before You Try to Fill It
Every roster you’ve ever coached — any sport, any level — has kids carrying something you don’t know about. A parent’s job disappeared. A grandparent who used to make every game just died. A dad who’s deployed, or gone, or drinking again, or simply not there in whatever way that kid needed him to be there. Circumstances don’t check with you before they show up. That lands on a fifteen-year-old and expect hto show up still up for a 5:30 practice like nothing’s different.
Here’s what I’ve learned to watch for: the gap rarely announces itself as sadness. It shows up as something else wearing a different jersey — a kid who’s suddenly overly compliant, doing everything asked without a word, because at home compliance is currently the safest posture he knows. A kid who’s first through the door and last to leave, not because he’s chasing a starting spot, but because that gym or that field is the one square mile of his life where nothing has changed lately. A kid whose attitude flips overnight and you assume it’s about the game, when the game is the last thing actually bothering him.
If you’re only scouting talent — the swing, the shot, the arm angle — you’ll miss all of it. The Red Dirt only tells you what a kid can do. It doesn’t tell you what he’s carrying to get there.
What a Program Can Actually Offer (And What It Can’t)
I want to be careful here, because I’ve seen well-meaning coaches try to be something they’re not equipped to be, and it costs everybody. You are not that kid’s therapist. You are not a replacement parent. You cannot mend a marriage, resurrect a grandfather, or bring a dad home who isn’t coming home. Trying to be all of that isn’t compassion — it’s a coach with an unsecured identity looking for a hole he can fill to feel needed, and that’s its own version of the Red Dirt Tax.
What a program actually offers is small, and more durable.
Consistency. Same practice time. Same expectations on Monday as Friday. Same voice at the same volume whether we won by ten or lost by one. For a kid whose home just became unpredictable, a program that shows up exactasway it said it would not a small thing. It might be the only predictable thing left in his week.
A seat that’s already his. He doesn’t have to earn his spot on that roster again every day. He knows where he stands with the team before he walks through the door — not because nothing’s ever hard, but because the standard doesn’t move based on what happened at his house last night. That kind of stability is rare enough right now that a kid will sit on bleachers for an hour waiting on it.
Presence that doesn’t require an explanation. You don’t need the whole story to ask a kid how he’s doing and mean it. You don’t need to fix his home to notice he got there early again and say something other than “let’s get some extra reps in” — sometimes it’s just, “glad you’re here.” That sentence costs you nothing and might be the only one he hears all week that isn’t attached to a demand.
None of that replaces what he’s missing. But it’s real, and it’s within your reach, and a kid who’s short on stability everywhere else will take every ounce of it you’re willing to give.
There’s an old line I think about here: God sets the lonely in families. A program isn’t a family in the full sense — don’t let it become a substitute for the one a kid actually needs — but it can be one of the places where that principle plays out in miniature. Nobody on your roster should be walking through a gap completely alone, even you can only stand in a small part of it.
What This Costs You If You Miss It
Here’s the part that should sting a little. If you’re too locked into the scoreboard to notice which of your players is carrying something, you will coach that kid wrong all season and never know why. You’ll read his overcompliance as a great attitude and never ask what it’s protecting him from. You’ll read his sudden edge as a discipline problem instead of a distress signal. You’ll manage the symptom on the field and miss the actual kid standing in the batter’s box.
You pay the tax on that. It’s paid by him — a season where the one adult who saw him every single day never once asked the real question.
This Week
Walk your current roster in your head, guy by guy, and be honest: which kid do you know the least about outside of what he does between the lines? Not his stats. His actual life right now. If you can’t answer that for every guy on your team, that’s not a character flaw — it’s just information you don’t have yet.
Pick one. This week, before or after practice, ask him one question that has nothing to do with the game. “How’s everything at home?” “How’s your grandmother doing?” “You’ve been getting here early — everything alright?” Then do the hard part: stop talking and actually listen to the answer, even if it makes practice run four minutes late.
You’re not trying to solve his circumstance. You’re trying to find out if your program is currently part of what’s holding him up, or if it’s just one more place demanding something from him. Those are two very different programs to play for, and the kid sitting on your bleachers an hour early already knows which one he’s got.
Greater Together — Coach O
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