Can Technology Scale Human Attention?

A bridge note between Part II and Part III of “Rebuilding the System.”

If you stand on a busy court long enough, you can feel the limits of human attention settle around you. One coach working a group. Players moving through drills at different speeds. A dozen different learning styles unfolding within a few feet of each other. One kid processes through rhythm. Another through imagery. Another through feel. The coach tries to see everything, but attention has a ceiling. It always has.

This is the part of coaching no one argues about. We can scale courts. We can scale schedules. We can scale tournament calendars. What we have never been able to scale is the thing that determines whether learning happens at all. Attention.

Once a coach focuses on one player, they lose someone else. Once they choose a cue, they cannot reshape it for a different mind without stopping the drill. Once they are reading one body, they are missing another. There is nothing wrong with the coach. This is simply the nature of human bandwidth.

A few weeks ago, I watched a coach at ATA run a group of six through serve patterns. The sun was dropping and the courts had that late-afternoon hum. He was doing everything right by old standards. Players stayed moving. Reps stayed high. No one waited long for a ball. But every few minutes, he had to choose which player to help. The rest kept going, repeating the same habits. You could see him trying to stretch his attention across the whole group. He wanted to give each of them more, but the structure would not allow it.

That moment is the point. Human attention cannot scale through human labor alone.

For generations, individual attention could not scale. The question now is whether that constraint still holds.

What has changed is not coaching philosophy. What has changed is the architecture underneath it. We finally have tools that can capture patterns coaches do not have the bandwidth to track. Tools that can show which cues actually changed behavior. Tools that can reveal when a player’s attention opened and when it shut down. Tools that can help identify how a player processes information and remember it tomorrow, even if the coach is tired or juggling three courts.

None of this replaces coaching. It supports it. It gives coaches space to notice the things only humans can see. Facial expressions. Timing. Posture. Rhythm. It frees them to sense when frustration is rising or curiosity is waking up. It gives them back the part of coaching that cannot be automated.

This is what parents care about too, even if they do not use this language. They do not actually want more technology. They want communication that fits how their child learns. If a system helps a coach do that more consistently, they will feel the difference long before they understand the architecture that produced it.

Technology cannot create connection. It can remove the barriers that prevent it.

The question is whether it can carry some of the weight human attention cannot. If it can help coaches adapt communication instead of defaulting to the same cue for every player. If it can lighten the mental load so coaches can read people instead of reading the drill. If it can help scale the kind of individualized learning that was impossible when all attention had to come from a single human source.

Maybe technology can extend what coaches already know how to do. Maybe we are finally near the point where a coach does not have to choose between depth and scale. Tomorrow we see what that looks like when one coach refuses to make that choice.