The Voice in the Next Room

I’m on level 61 of life. Most of the young men I coach and organize are on level 18.

That gap is the whole reason I do this work. From where I stand, I can see things they can’t see yet. The long road. The cost of a shortcut. The way a small habit at seventeen turns into a whole life by forty. That’s what older men are supposed to offer. A look down the road.

But the gap runs both ways. And the older I get, the more I respect what’s coming back up the road toward me.

Here is the mistake men my age make. We sit across from a teenager, we watch him go quiet, and we decide there’s not much there yet. He doesn’t have the words. He doesn’t push back. He nods and gives us short answers. So we count him out. We assume the force hasn’t arrived.

It has arrived. We’re just not the audience for it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson saw this in 1841, in an essay called “Self-Reliance.” I reread it often. This is the line that stops me every time:

“Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.”

Read that last part again. He will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.

That should be the goal of every coach, every teacher, every father. Not to be needed forever. To build a young man who can stand on his own and lead the room you were never invited into.

Because that room is real. I’ve stood outside it for thirty years. The boy who can barely string a sentence together in my office is a different person in the locker room. On the field at practice. In the truck with his teammates after a game. The voice you couldn’t get out of him with adults is loud and clear and certain the second he’s with his own people. He’s already leading. He just isn’t leading you.

Once you understand that, the job gets simpler. My job is not to speak for these young men. It’s to build the room where they find their own voice, set the standard inside that room, and then hold the line.

That last part matters. There’s a temptation, when you love these kids, to rescue them. To smooth the road. To carry the weight you should be letting them carry. There’s an opposite temptation too, especially when you’re old or tired. To check out. To leave them to figure it out alone. Both are a failure of nerve. The work happens in the middle. You stay close enough that the standard is real, and you stay back far enough that the win is theirs.

Set the standard. Then get out of the way.

This is why the All-State Game exists. We bring together the best young football players from small towns all over Colorado and we give them a stage that’s worthy of the force they already carry. We don’t water it down. We don’t hand them anything. We tell them what’s expected, we hold them to it, and then we let them show a crowd what eighteen years of effort looks like when it finally has somewhere to go.

And here’s the part I’d ask every adult reading this to sit with. Pouring into a young man on level 18 is the best investment I know of. The return doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet. It shows up ten years later, in a hometown, in a marriage, in the way that grown man coaches his own son. The force was always there. What we add is the standard, the stage, and an adult who refused to leave and refused to carry it for him.

Emerson was right. If we do this work well, these young men will make us unnecessary.

That’s not a loss. That’s the whole point.

— Coach Craig Ball Executive Director, The All-State Foundation