What Coaches/Mentors Can Learn from iGen
A youth soccer coach notices his new group of fifteen-year-olds behaves differently than the team he coached a decade ago. Fewer have jobs outside practice. More check their phones between drills, not out of disrespect, but because a group chat about the game plan is already running before they've left the field. One player, usually the most driven on the team, admits after a tough loss that she feels oddly isolated despite talking to teammates constantly online. The coach, who built his own toughness through unsupervised pickup games and long bike rides to practice, wonders whether his old methods for resilience still apply to kids who got here differently.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The people you coach reached independence on a later timeline than you expect
Twenge's research shows this generation reaching milestones like driving, dating, and working later, spending more adolescence at home and connected to a phone rather than gaining early independent experience. A player or mentee who seems less self-directed than you remember being at their age may simply have had fewer chances to practice initiative, not less potential for it. Building that muscle deliberately, rather than assuming it should already be there, often gets better results than frustration.
Assuming a mentee's hesitation to take initiative reflects low drive rather than limited prior practice with independence.
Assign one small, real decision each week that the mentee owns fully, then debrief what they learned from it.
More caution, more reported anxiety, often in the same athlete or mentee
Twenge documents this generation taking fewer physical risks, alongside more reported loneliness and anxiety than previous generations at the same age. This can show up as someone disciplined and careful but visibly rattled by pressure or evaluation in front of others. Treating the discipline as strength while dismissing the anxiety as softness misses the connection between them; both often reflect the same shift, and addressing the anxiety directly tends to unlock the confidence the discipline was already pointing toward.
Praising careful, disciplined behavior while ignoring visible signs of anxiety in the same person.
Name the pressure explicitly before a high-stakes moment, and give one specific, practiced action to focus on instead of the outcome.
Team friendships, family pressure, and school life all show up in your sessions
Twenge's four everyday contexts, school, family, work, and friendship, don't stay separate for the people you coach; a rough night in the group chat, a tense family conversation, or a hard day at school follows a mentee straight into your session. Recognizing that an off day likely has an invisible backstory, rather than assuming poor effort or attitude, changes how you respond to inconsistency without needing every detail.
Assuming an off day at practice is about commitment rather than something carried in from another part of a phone-connected life.
Open sessions with a quick, low-pressure check-in rather than assuming everyone arrives ready to perform.
Coaching this generation well means adapting your approach, not just your drills
Twenge's central recommendation for adults supporting this generation, coaches and mentors included, is to understand the shift rather than judge it, adjusting expectations around independence and resilience to match how young people arrived at this point. That means building confidence deliberately rather than assuming it should already exist, and taking reported anxiety seriously rather than reading it as weakness, while remembering the person in front of you may not match the pattern at all.
Sometimes the structure that helps an anxious mentee feel safe can also slow the independent risk-taking that builds real confidence over time. There's a genuine balance between support and stretch, and it shifts person to person. Twenge's description comes from broad survey averages, not any individual athlete or mentee; some need far more structure than the pattern suggests, others far less, and reading the specific person matters more than applying the label uniformly.
Name one thing, honestly
- Where might you be expecting a level of independence your mentee hasn't had the chance to build yet? - Whose visible caution might actually be paired with anxiety worth addressing directly? - Are you checking in on what's happening outside your sessions before judging what shows up inside them?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Open sessions with a quick, low-pressure check-in rather than assuming everyone arrives ready to perform.