Step Into the In-Between

I think that little girl’s silhouette is one of the main reasons I keep pushing myself to write this series.

I was walking back with the group of students toward the classroom when I turned and noticed one girl still standing alone on the basketball court. Earlier that afternoon, when the mentor team had been organizing the high schoolers into a game, she’d quietly stepped aside. When I reached her, she said, in a calm, firm voice: “I’ve never played basketball. I won’t be able to throw the ball at all. I don’t have any talent for sports.”

She was shorter than most of her classmates, and stood a little apart from the rest. One of our mentors walked over and joined the conversation, smiling, greeting her warmly. That afternoon unfolded in waves of curiosity, surprise, and laughter — more than a few students admitted they’d never thrown a ball before either — and it ended with nobody wanting to leave the court.

That’s when I looked back and saw her still there, alone, the late-afternoon sun catching her hair, holding the basketball, adjusting her stance again and again, throw after throw.

A few years have passed. Her voice, and the way she kept trying, have stayed with me. They remind me what all of this is actually for.

I didn’t have a name for what I was watching that afternoon. It took years of doing this work to understand what actually happened on that court — and to be able to say, plainly, what we were building toward.

This is a corporate CSR case I’ve consulted on over the past ten years, where a designed mentor structure and a tailored toolkit turned a set of psychology theories into practical approaches that reached thousands of high schoolers. The details unfold across the pieces that follow.

Resilience is the word underneath everything in this series. Not resilience as a slogan, and not resilience as a personality trait some students happen to have and others don’t — resilience as something built, deliberately, through design.

The vehicle for that design was mentorship. Not a curriculum delivered at students, but a relationship — one adult, one student, meeting regularly, over time. Everything else in this series happens inside that relationship, or doesn’t happen at all.

Inside each mentor-mentee pairing, three things were always meant to be happening at once: a student learning to name and sit with what they felt; a mentor praising effort and progress until self-efficacy had something to stand on; and a peer group, slowly, becoming its own source of support.

In the research, these three are distinct, and layered — different literatures, different mechanisms, different evidence bases. We knew that. And we flattened them anyway, on purpose, into one simultaneous practice a volunteer mentor with no clinical training could actually hold in their hands. That’s not a shortcut we’re embarrassed by. It’s the whole argument of this series: a framework only matters once someone without a PhD can use it on a Tuesday afternoon with a fifteen-year-old in front of them — one throw at a time.

I’m grateful for every mentor I’ve worked with over these ten years — close to three hundred of them by now. Few came from a background in education or psychology. What they brought instead was heart, and effort, and a willingness to keep polishing the details of a session until midnight, in a simple hotel room near the school, trying to get the support exactly right for the kids in front of them. They adapted when things got hard, because things got hard often, and they adapted anyway. Without them, no design — however thoughtful, however evidence-based — would ever have reached the students who needed it most.

I know they’re as proud as I am, watching what those years added up to: so many students like the girl on the basketball court, playing their first game of anything, picking maths back up when they’d given up on it, asking for help instead of hiding, imagining a future for themselves, walking into their lives a little steadier than before.

We grew up together, in this. All of us.