The Car Ride Home: Connect First, Correct Later

My boys have very different personalities, but during the basketball season that began in the winter of 2021, I began to notice a strong similarity. They were on separate travel teams that winter, which meant a lot of long drives home—sometimes close to an hour—with just one boy in the car at a time. Those drives became a natural space to talk about the game and how they experienced it.

After each game, I’d ask what they saw, what they were thinking, or how they felt they played. I wasn’t trying to coach them from the front seat. I genuinely wanted to hear how they processed things. But just about every time, both boys went straight to something outside themselves. The refs, a kid who pushed them, someone talking trash, a teammate who didn’t pass—the conversation always started somewhere else.

Even though I had asked about their game, their first instinct was to talk about everyone but themselves. As someone who spent years coaching professionally, that got to me. I kept trying to bring the conversation back to their own decisions and their own effort. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes I had to remind them of a specific play. Other times it didn’t move at all, no matter what I tried.

What I didn’t fully understand then—and wish I had realized earlier—is that the emotional moment right after a game isn’t always the best place to ask a kid to look inward. Their feelings are still fresh and loud. Kids don’t naturally slide into reflection when their emotions are high. They need a little time to settle. Parents know this intuitively in other areas of life, but for some reason sports has a way of making us forget. I certainly did.

At some point, it hit me that the car ride gives us a captive audience. We have their attention in a way we rarely do. And if that’s true, then we need to be clear about our priorities. For me, I realized the car ride home is more of a place to connect than a place to correct. That shift changed everything about how I approached those conversations.

There was another piece I was slow to understand: kids that age simply don’t have the same internal tools we expect older athletes to have. They’re still learning how to separate what happened to them from what they did. They’re not being defensive; they just haven’t developed the maturity to sort through all the layers of a game. Their world is still very external. That’s normal. It’s part of growing up.

Once I accepted that, the way I approached those conversations changed. I still cared about teaching them accountability, but I stopped expecting them to get there immediately. I let them talk through the outside stuff first. Sometimes that alone helped them settle enough to think about their own play. And other times, the car ride just wasn’t the moment to get into it—and that was okay too.

Over time, I noticed something encouraging. As the pressure in the car went down, their willingness to look inward went up. Not every drive, and not in some dramatic way, but enough that I could see they were learning the right things at the right pace.

Those car rides taught me that accountability develops in kids the same way most things do—slowly, with patience, and in an environment where they feel safe to be honest.

Reflection Question:
What tone do you want to set for your child during those car rides home this season?