The Kids Are the Same Kids

Why consistency across environments is the foundation of culture

I’ve always been drawn to coaching—to understand how people grow and look for ways to help them do it. I’ve been lucky enough to do my own growing in rich agars: different sports, different roles, different cultures. I coach Olympic Weightlifting, Athletic Performance, and competition logistics for Powerlifting at The Resilient Strength, but that isn’t really the important part. It isn’t the consistent thread.

The constant is growth: How do we create an environment that not only allows for it, but actively fosters it—without pruning every new thing into a copy of whatever grew before?

I was fortunate enough to serve as an offensive line coach, run-game coordinator, and athletic performance coach at one of the best high school football programs in the country. I learned a lot there, and it helped shape the coach I became, and all that standard coaching-realization patois. But this isn’t really about me. Forget me. This is about consistency and connection.

Connection is a non-negotiable in elite football programs: the strength program, the film room, the team meeting, the practice field, the competition, the big game. It is especially important in places where both the desire and the expectation are greatness, whatever form that greatness takes. So it’s not unique to football, it’s a required piece of consistent programs.

And here’s the connection: the kids are the same kids. The athletes are the same athletes.

Maybe that’s a touch tautological, but let it sit for a minute. Then check it against the coaching decisions your organization makes.

I’m hella not the first person to say it: you gotta coach the whole athlete. I know Pete Carroll’s big on that. We certainly were. We talked constantly about how it all mattered: the strength program, the film room, chapel—or team meetings, or however a group gathers for its version of the sacred and vulnerable—the practice field, and the game. Coach the whole athlete, singular, not 10 versions. The kid in the weight room was the same kid watching film, the same kid sharing about their home situation, the same kid lining up beneath the lights on Friday night.

The sooner we really accept that, the greater our impact can be. The growth becomes more profound—which means, eventually, they aren’t the same athletes at all and the cute title of this essay falls apart. But that’s kind of the point.

Here’s where I fucked it up.

We were in film preparing for a big game. All season we had preached being masters of the mundane. We were going to get really good at inside-zone. All that good no-huddle spread shit. Simple but flexible and easy up front with lots of window dressing in the backfield. We were going to run it against any front and win through execution and physicality. That was how we lifted, how we ran, how we practiced, and how we protected one another. We kept it simple and trusted our preparation.

In chapel, we told everyone on the team, “I love you,” and meant it.

We were blue collar, simple, brutal and true. That was us. Then the game gained weight, and I got cute.

It’s Monday. We’re talking fronts and stunts and X’s-and-O’s stuff offensive lines discuss. Then I started adding tweaks and wrinkles. I wanted to install a different concept or tag or check to deal more cleanly with what their defense showed us.

Smart coaching, right?

No. It was a mistake, and it undermined my kids.

They were the same kids, dude. The same kids who had busted their butts all summer. The same kids who had taken the risk of telling another teenage boy that they loved him. The same kids who had spent drill period after drill period building the skills to express their talent and teamwork against exactly this challenge: a good opponent.

They hadn’t fundamentally changed, but I let the stage affect me; I started coaching them differently.

On game day, we couldn’t run the ball. We play confused and slow. We were lost. I had asked them to become different people—to put on a mask instead of trusting what we knew: we were a good football team and we had worked really hard and we were prepared to meet a difficult thing together.

At halftime, frantic and searching for an answer, talking checks on the checks until, “Isn’t this just day-one stacks?”

And it was.

The circumstances hadn’t become complex. I had made them into something else. The kids hadn’t changed. Football hadn’t changed. I had asked them to abandon the identity we had spent a season building, and we were lost. The path back was simple: be us. Get connected. Trust your legs. Finish. Love your teammates.

That was it. We came out, did that, and kept doing that. We didn’t change, but we grew.

That memory has stayed with me. Seven years later, I finally understood the dumbest connection of all: the kids are the same kids. The athletes are the same athletes. Of course this wasn’t just something that happened on a football field. It is true no matter the coaching medium.

You have to coach people consistently across the whole environment. Otherwise, you ask an athlete to split their identity—to become one person in training and another in competition, one person when learning and another when being tested. You ask them to wear a new mask every time the stakes change.

If you ever get a chance to be in a powerlifting warm up hall as any sort of coach, go, you’ll see it all. Calm athletes have a routine back there. Anxious athletes do random shit. Prepared coaches walk athletes through the plan. Anxious handlers invent technique changes and have athletes take sets for an hour before first lift. There’s no exotic warm up routine or hour long “primer” or magic warm up rep scheme that’s gonna better prepare the athlete. The strength is built, get primed, go express it.

Culture is what remains consistent when the moment becomes important enough to tempt you into abandoning it.

That doesn’t mean rigidity. Circumstances change. Athletes grow. Good coaches adapt. But adaptation has to remain an expression of the culture rather than a rejection of it. If your values disappear when the weight gets heavy, the opponent gets good, or the outcome begins to matter, then they were never your culture. They were decoration.

For a weightlifter or powerlifter consistency may mean we don’t vary the cue or change the focus simply because it’s week five of a cycle and it feels like time to change something. Sometimes it is the same cue and the same focus, session after session, because the athlete is the same human being they were in week one. Hopefully they are a little more skilled, a little stronger, and a little more confident. But they may not need a magic tweak or a new drill. They may just need the time and repetition required to get better.

We don’t need something extra or exotic because the weights got heavier. If we believed it was good preparation in week one, let it see the light of day in week twelve.

The same is true beyond programming. Treat athletes with the same kindness, care, honesty, and high expectations everywhere. They deserve the chance to be fully themselves, not to put on a different mask for every room, every season, or every turn of a coach’s vanity.

Set the expectations. Teach the skills. Guide the work. Then allow it time to grow. Allow your athletes to be who they are but more.

Or don’t, but you risk killing something beautiful because the moment made you feel like you needed to prove you could coach. You might arc your right tackle on a five-tech when what your athletes needed was the chance to connect their hips and work together and do a hard thing. You might give your lifter 3 cues at the chalk bowl when they needed “Decide” or “Stay aggressive” or “Legs.”

Listen coach, it’s not about you. It’s about the athlete. It’s about the kids. The kids are the same kids.

Trust them enough to let them become more.