It’s Saturday evening and you’re replaying in your head the final minutes of the game earlier that day when your U12 team gave up two late goals that turned a 2-1 win into a 3-2 loss. The third tough loss in as many weeks and you feel you’ve got to get your training sessions this week just right, fix the problems from the last game or else the season might slip away. Or at least that's how it feels.

Sound familiar? Being a youth coach can sometimes feel like living in a world of very real and immediate pressures. The pressure of feeling like you’ve got to win that next game to lift the kids’ spirits, or the pressure you might feel from parents concerned their kids are having a bad experience if they lose. The week-to-week rhythm of a season can make it feel like every practice and every result carries enormous weight.

But what if there's a better way to think about all of this? What if the secret to becoming a more effective coach - and helping your players actually develop - lies in radically expanding your sense of time?

Youth sports culture has a short attention span. Clubs recruit seven-year-olds with promises of 'exposure.' Parents track playing time by the minute. Standings get posted after the first week of the season. Everything feels urgent.

This short-term focus isn't unique to sports. Stewart Brand, the writer and futurist, observed that modern civilization has developed what he calls a 'pathologically short attention span.' We optimize for the next quarter, the next election cycle, the next viral moment. The pressure for quick results shapes how we think, plan, and measure success.

In youth sports, this manifests as an emphasis on results now, even when 'now' involves 10-year-olds. It shows up in early specialization, year-round training schedules, and the subtle message that every game matters enormously. The problem is that this mindset can actually undermine the very development it claims to pursue.

Brian Eno isn't someone you'd expect to find in a conversation about youth sports. He's a musician, composer, and producer who helped shape the sound of artists from David Bowie to U2 to Talking Heads. He pioneered ambient music and has spent decades thinking about creativity, process, and how things develop over time.

In 1996, Eno co-founded an organization called the Long Now Foundation, dedicated to expanding how we think about time. The foundation's central insight is captured in a phrase Eno coined: 'Now is never just a moment. The long now is the recognition that the precise moment you're in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future.'

Read that again, but now read it with your team in mind. Every practice you run grows out of all the practices that came before it. And every practice is planting seeds for games and seasons you haven't even thought about yet. The player who's struggling with their non-dominant foot today might be the one threading passes with either foot three years from now - if you're patient enough to keep cultivating that skill.

Eno's approach to creativity offers another useful lens. In a conversation with video game designer Will Wright, they discussed how creative work often functions less like engineering and more like gardening. 'You plant seeds,' Wright observed. You create the conditions for growth. You tend and nurture. But you can't force a flower to bloom on your schedule.

Eno himself put it this way: 'The fruit takes a long time to ripen, but it falls suddenly.' In other words, development isn't linear. A player might show little visible progress for months, then suddenly something clicks. Skills that seemed stuck finally come together. The breakthrough arrives all at once, but it was built slowly, invisibly, over time.

This understanding changes how you evaluate your work as a coach. If progress were linear, you could measure it week by week. But it isn't. So the question isn't whether your players have improved since last Saturday. The question is whether you're creating the conditions for long-term growth - even when you can't see the results yet.

Adopting a 'long now' mindset doesn't mean ignoring the present. You still have practices to plan and games to coach. But it changes how you hold those moments. When your team loses because a player tried something ambitious and it didn't come off, you can see that moment differently. That player was planting a seed. They were taking a risk that might pay off next month or next year.

It also changes how you respond to pressure - from parents, from league standings, from your own competitive instincts. When someone asks why you're not running more advanced plays, or why you're giving equal playing time, or why you're working on fundamentals instead of 'winning formations,' you have an answer. You're thinking in seasons and years, not weekends.

The Long Now Foundation's mission is to serve as 'a counterpoint to the faster/cheaper mindset' and promote 'slower/better thinking.' For youth coaches, this might translate as: slower development, better players. Fewer shortcuts, more sustainable growth. Less panic about this Saturday's game, more confidence in the arc you're building.

Here's a thought experiment borrowed from Eno's world: What if you coached every practice as if you were planting something that wouldn't bloom for three years? How would that change what you emphasize? What would you stop worrying about?

The musicians Eno has worked with didn't become who they were because someone rushed their development. They grew over years, experimenting, failing, building. The same is true for young athletes. The foundations you're laying now might not show up in this season's record. But they'll show up.

Every practice you run grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The long now of youth sports is the recognition that you're not just coaching this week's game. You're part of a much longer story.

For any youth-focused club today, player care and wellbeing must come first. That means clear values, strong organisation, and a real investment in coach recruitment and training. It also means being able to show parents — simply and confidently — that their child’s development, confidence, and happiness are central to how the club defines “a winning season.”
CoachFives.com