Basketball is Getting Softer Or Are We Just Not Teaching Grit?

Absolutely. Here’s the full article, written in your preferred style — raw, reflective, no section headers, no sugarcoating. Just truth. Told like someone who's spent enough time in gyms to say it straight.

The crossover is cleaner. The shoes are flashier. The highlight reels are better edited than most music videos. And yet, something feels off. Something’s missing. You watch a game and wonder why the fight looks different. Why the kid with the bounce won’t dive for a loose ball. Why no one finishes through contact without looking for the foul.

People say the game’s getting softer.

Maybe they’re right.

Or maybe it’s us. Maybe we stopped demanding more.

There was a time when grit wasn’t optional. You didn’t get to skip box-out drills because you were “a shooter.” You didn’t walk out of practice early because your body was sore from a weekend tournament. You didn’t miss film because you had a private session with your trainer. You showed up. You fought for minutes. You earned everything.

Now we’re protecting kids from discomfort like it’s a disease.

We say we’re building them up, but too often we’re just shielding them. We don’t run extra lines because someone might cramp. We don’t yell because someone might take it personally. We don’t push too hard because “the mental health conversation” is always hovering — not as something real and worth honoring, but as a threat coaches are afraid to navigate honestly.

So instead of teaching kids how to work through adversity, we build systems that help them avoid it.

And when the lights come on, and the pressure hits, they fold. They don’t know how to respond because no one taught them how to struggle.

The truth is, the game isn’t softer. The game is the same. The floor is still 94 feet. The rim is still 10 feet high. The pain of losing still stings the same. But the expectations? That’s where we’ve changed.

We let effort slide if the kid has talent. We let attitude slide if the parents are loud enough. We confuse individual training with accountability. And we act surprised when kids can’t handle a tough stretch in January after we spent all summer making sure they never faced one.

It’s not that players don’t want to be pushed. It’s that too many coaches have stopped pushing.

Somewhere along the line, we decided it was better to be liked than to be respected. Better to keep kids from quitting than to teach them how not to. Better to be "player friendly" than demanding.

But players remember the coaches who held them to a standard.

The ones who said, “I’m not letting you take that play off.”
The ones who said, “I believe in you too much to let you coast.”
The ones who cared enough to call them out, even when it got uncomfortable.

If we want toughness, we have to build it. Not talk about it. Not tweet about it. Not slap it on a t-shirt.

We have to get back to the hard stuff. The slow stuff. The uncomfortable stuff.

Because grit doesn’t just show up on game night. It’s built in the missed sprints. The hard conversations. The practices where nothing feels like it’s clicking, but no one quits.

So no, the game’s not soft.

But maybe we are.

And maybe it’s time we fix that.

Not by going backward. Not by acting like yelling equals toughness. But by remembering what got us here in the first place.

Work. Sweat. Honesty. Grit.

The stuff that still wins games. And still grows people.

If we teach it.