Your athlete is not their position
When the identity becomes the sport, the off-season gets dangerous. Here's how to widen the frame.
There is a stage in every football family where the kid stops being "your kid" and starts being "your quarterback." It happens slowly. It comes from coaches, from social media, from us.
The risk isn't pride. The risk is that when football is hard — a benching, an injury, a non-offer — there's no version of the kid left over to land on. Identity built entirely on one game is a brittle identity.
A simple test: in the last week, did you ask anything about your athlete that wasn't football? About a class, a friend, a song, an opinion? If you can't think of one, that's the work.
You're not raising a position. You're raising a person who plays one for a while.