Coaching in a More Complicated Game

Not long ago, I had the chance to spend some time talking with Anthony Levrets, the former University of Utah basketball coach who has moved from the sidelines into a different kind of coaching through his NEXT PITCH podcast. What stayed with me from that conversation wasn't anything about systems or results or even specific experiences from his years in the game. It was the way the conversation kept returning to something simpler, and at the same time more challenging — how to help young athletes grow in an environment that has become genuinely complicated.

If you've spent any time around youth sports over the years, the changes are hard to miss. There are more opportunities now, more exposure and more structure than ever before. But there is also more noise. Expectations present earlier and decisions seem to come sooner and feel more permanent. Every performance can carry a kind of weight for the young athlete that didn't always exist before. And as we talked, it became clear that much of what coaches are navigating today isn't just about the game itself; it's everything that surrounds it.

That's where the role of a coach starts to look a little different. It's no longer only about teaching skills or preparing for competition. It's about helping athletes, and often their families, understand what matters, what doesn't and how to move forward without losing perspective. Anthony spoke about how easily young athletes can start to feel as if every sports moment defines them. Confidence rises and falls when everything feels like it carries more weight than it should. And he kept coming back to something that felt both obvious and easy to lose sight of: very little of that weight is actually real.

The best development still happens the way it always has — through repetition, patience and steady guidance over time. What has changed is how difficult it can be to stay grounded in that when everything around the athlete seems to be speeding up. In that sense, one of the most valuable things a coach can do today is not just push improvement but create space. Room to think. Room to reset. Room to understand that growth is not as immediate as we wish or as fragile as it feels.

I found myself thinking about that while watching the recent Olympics. The setting is obviously different, but the underlying challenges are familiar. Even at the highest levels, athletes are still working through pressure, expectations and the need to recover quickly from mistakes. What stands out isn't perfection. It's how they respond and how they stay present in moments that could easily feel overwhelming. Those responses don't just appear. They are built over time, often through the steady influence of coaches who model consistency and perspective long before there's a spotlight.

That same process is playing out every day in much quieter settings: on college campuses, in high school gyms and on youth fields where the stakes feel nearly as big to the people involved. Coaches in those environments are doing more than teaching a game. They're helping young athletes develop habits that carry forward. How to handle failure without losing confidence. How to stay grounded when things don't go as planned.

What struck me most in my conversation with Anthony was how intentional that kind of coaching has to be right now. It doesn't happen by accident. It requires a willingness to slow things down, to resist the pressure to treat every moment as decisive and to remind athletes that development is something that unfolds over time. It can't be rushed. Those ideas aren't new, but they feel more urgent in a landscape that seems to push in the opposite direction.

One of the things I hope this Corner can do over time is highlight coaches who are finding ways to do exactly that. Not by drawing attention to themselves, but by helping the people around them navigate the game, and life, with a little more clarity. Because while the structure of sports continues to evolve, the purpose at its core hasn't really changed. And the coaches who understand that are still the ones worth watching.