MORE LIKELY TO SAY THEIR ABILITIES ARE ‘ABOVE AVERAGE.’

them weigh themselves.

Something more is going on here than a new awareness of bullying, and rebellion against fossilized methods. Talk to coaches, and they will tell you they feel their players are harder to teach, and to reach, and that disciplining is beginning to feel professionally dangerous. Not even U. Conn’s virtuoso coach Geno Auriemma is immune to this feeling.

“Recruiting enthusiastic kids is harder than it’s ever been,” he said. “They haven’t even figured out which foot to use as a pivot foot and they’re gonna act like they’re really good players. You see it all the time.”

Coaches are so concerned about this that at the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association meeting they brought in no fewer than three speakers to address it. Youth motivator Tim Elmore lectured on “Understanding Generation iY.” And a pair of doctors discussed “Promoting Mental Health Strategies and Awareness.”

It doesn’t take a psychologist to perceive that at least some of today’s coach-player strain results from the misunderstanding of what the job of a coach is, and how it’s different from that of a parent. This admittedly can get murky. The coach-player relationship has odd complexities and semi-intimacies, yet a critical distance, too. It’s not like any other bond or power structure.

A parent may seek to smooth a path, but the coach has to point out the hard road to be traversed, and it’s not their job to find the shortcuts. Coaches can’t afford to feel sorry for players; they are there to stop them from feeling sorry for themselves.

Coaches are not substitute parents; they’re the people parents send their children to for a strange alchemical balance of toughening yet safekeeping, dream facilitating yet discipline and reality check. The vast majority of what a coach teaches is not how to succeed, but how to shoulder responsibility and deal with unfairness and diminished role-playing, because without those success is impossible.

Players can let that demoralize