This past weekend, my family spent three days in the Black Hills.
I knew a little about Mount Rushmore before we went. Crazy Horse was different. I knew almost nothing about it.
We first noticed the Crazy Horse Memorial while driving from our hotel toward Mount Rushmore. Something about it caught my attention. I was curious about the memorial and the Native American history behind it, and I told my family that we should come back and visit.
So, first thing the next morning, we did.
At the memorial, we began by watching a film about its history. I went into the theater knowing almost nothing about Crazy Horse or the family behind the sculpture.
I came out thinking about time.
The story began in 1948 with Korczak Ziolkowski and grew into something much larger than the work of one man. His wife, Ruth, became deeply involved, their ten children grew up around the project, and the work continued beyond Korczak’s lifetime.
The size of the mountain was impressive.
But what stayed with me was the size of the vision.
After the film, we boarded a bus that took us closer to the mountain.
An older couple sitting near us mentioned that they had visited Crazy Horse before, sometime around 2004 or 2005. Another gentleman heard them and asked what the Crazy Horse sculpture had looked like when they visited more than twenty years earlier.
One of them answered simply:
“They’ve come a long way.”
That sentence stayed with me.
More than twenty years had passed between their two visits. They weren’t asking why the mountain still wasn’t finished.
They could see how far it had come.
And somewhere during that morning, I started thinking about youth soccer.
It is difficult to stand there and fully comprehend the timeline.
Korczak arrived in the Black Hills in 1947 after years of correspondence with Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear, who had invited him to create a memorial honoring Native American people. Work on the mountain began in 1948.
There wasn’t a large construction company waiting for him or the infrastructure that surrounds the memorial today. In the early years, the work was physical, slow, and demanding. Ruth arrived as a young volunteer and helped Korczak prepare logs for their home and build a 741-step wooden staircase to the top of the mountain. They eventually married and raised ten children there. The family’s dairy farm and timber mill helped support both the household and the work.
I tried to imagine that life while watching the film.
A mountain outside your home. South Dakota winters. Old equipment. Seven hundred forty-one wooden steps just to reach the top of the mountain. A family growing up while, year after year, the mountain changed a little more.
And hanging over all of it was something even harder for me to imagine.
Korczak knew the project was larger than his lifetime.
He knew he might never see it finished.
And still, he worked.
Most of us like evidence that our work is paying off. We finish the project. Publish the paper. Build the business. Win the tournament. Reach the goal. There is satisfaction in being able to stand back and see the result.
Korczak was working on a different horizon. He could climb those steps, drill into the rock, remove stone, build infrastructure, and devote decades of his life to something while understanding that someone else might have to continue what he started.
He died in 1982.
The mountain was unfinished.
The work continued.
Ruth carried it forward, and she did something that makes the story even more interesting to me: she changed the plan.
After Korczak’s death, Ruth shifted the carving effort from the much larger horse’s head to Crazy Horse’s face. She inherited the vision without treating every part of the original plan as untouchable.
A long-term vision does not mean following the same plan forever. Sometimes the plan has to change precisely because the vision matters.
After Ruth died in 2014, the work continued again. Later generations of the Ziolkowski family have remained involved in carrying the project forward.
By the time I stood there in 2026, nearly eight decades had passed since the work began.
The mountain was still unfinished.
But the vision had survived.
That is the part I kept bringing back to soccer.
What would it mean for a young player to have a vision that reaches beyond the next game, the next tryout, or even the next season?
Children who love soccer often dream far ahead: college soccer, professional soccer, a national team, a World Cup. Adults know how difficult those destinations are. A dream is not a prediction, and hard work guarantees none of them.
But that doesn’t make the dream useless.
The real value of a distant dream may be what it does to the work happening today.
A player can dream about where she wants soccer to take her. Beneath that dream is a more useful question:
What kind of player do I want to become?
Technically excellent. Comfortable receiving under pressure. Able to use both feet. Quick at seeing the next play. Strong enough to compete. Intelligent away from the ball. Resilient after mistakes. Curious about the game. Willing to keep learning.
The first touch matters. The weaker foot matters. Scanning matters. Strength and speed development matter. Recovery matters. Watching soccer matters. Playing against stronger players matters. Thousands of ordinary touches begin to belong to something larger.
That may be one of the things that impressed me most about Korczak’s story.
The vision was enormous.
But the work still had to happen one day at a time.
You can imagine a sculpture across a mountain.
Then you still have to climb those 741 steps.
A young player can imagine playing at the highest level.
Then she still has to train Tuesday evening.
The distant vision does not replace the next step.
It gives the next step a reason.
And that matters when development becomes difficult.
Every young player will eventually encounter something that does not go according to plan. A team she wanted doesn’t select her. Playing time decreases. She moves into a stronger environment and suddenly struggles. Another player develops faster. A coach identifies weaknesses she didn’t realize she had. Something she has worked on for months still isn’t good enough. She has a terrible game.
Those moments are real. Some hurt.
But a player with a longer horizon has somewhere to put them.
A poor first touch under pressure becomes something to improve, not a definition of who she is. A weakness becomes information. A difficult season becomes part of a much longer journey. Not making one team can hurt without answering the larger question of what kind of player she can become.
The long vision doesn’t make setbacks disappear.
It keeps them from becoming the whole story.
That can be a powerful source of motivation. Instead of depending entirely on the next selection, trophy, compliment, or good game, the player has something farther away to work toward.
Not certainty.
Direction.
And perhaps one of the best things parents and coaches can give a young player is enough space to develop that direction for herself—not a ten-year plan written by adults, and not a destination she is obligated to reach.
A horizon.
When a player is young, parents and coaches naturally help her see possibilities. As she grows, more of that vision should become hers. Our role is to connect the distant vision to the work in front of her and help her distinguish between a moment that requires persistence and one that genuinely requires change.
That distinction—persistence without stubbornness—is what Ruth’s story makes clear.
She changed the plan without abandoning the larger purpose.
Soccer development works the same way. A player may need a different training emphasis, position, coach, team, level of competition, or amount of rest. Eventually, even the original dream itself may change.
Changing the route does not necessarily mean abandoning the vision. Sometimes it is how we protect it.
That is why I have started asking myself a question when soccer decisions feel urgent:
If I looked at this decision from five years away instead of five days away, would I make the same choice?
The question doesn’t tell me what to do. Sometimes the answer will still be: change something. Other times it will be: keep working.
What the question does is make the horizon longer.
Coaches need that horizon too.
A youth coach may have a player for one season, perhaps two or three. Yet some of the most important things that coach develops may not become fully visible until years after the player leaves.
Teaching a young player to receive under pressure may initially produce mistakes. Developing the weaker foot takes time. Teaching players to scan, think, and solve problems instead of waiting for instructions takes time. The payoff may come at fifteen or seventeen, when another coach is standing there to see it.
There is something of Korczak’s long horizon in that.
Can you do important work even if someone else eventually sees the result? Can you teach something now because you believe the player will need it years from now, not simply because it helps your team Saturday?
Saturday still matters. Players compete to win, and coaches prepare teams to win. But Saturday can matter without becoming the entire horizon. And clubs have to give coaches enough room for that kind of development to take time.
The more I thought about Crazy Horse, the more I realized that long-term vision changes not only how we work, but how we measure progress.
When the destination is far away, progress cannot always be measured by arrival.
Sometimes it has to be measured by movement.
That brought me back to the couple on our bus.
They had first visited around 2004 or 2005. More than twenty years later, they stood in front of the mountain again. They had enough distance to see something that might be difficult to notice day by day.
“They’ve come a long way.”
A young player needs to look forward. Vision requires that. But sometimes motivation comes from turning around.
Remember when juggling the ball five times was difficult. Remember when receiving a hard pass required all your concentration. Remember when the game felt too fast. Remember the skill that once required thought and now happens without thinking.
Look at the work still ahead.
Then look at the ground already behind you.
Both views matter.
When you are climbing, you mostly see the next step. Occasionally, it helps to turn around.
There is one more part of Korczak’s story that I find difficult to let go.
He knew he would not finish.
No coach finishes a player. Neither does a trainer, a club, or a parent.
One person contributes something and another continues. A young child learns to love having the ball. Years later, another coach teaches her to understand space. Someone challenges her technically. Teammates shape her. Competition exposes weaknesses.
And eventually, if development goes well, more and more of the work belongs to the player herself.
Some of the best work a coach does may become visible only after the player has left. Korczak understood something about that kind of work: you may never see everything your effort eventually becomes.
That does not make the work less important.
Eventually our bus turned back toward the visitor center.
The mountain slowly moved farther away.
The face was there. Much of the work was still ahead.
The couple near us had looked at that mountain more than twenty years earlier. Now they had come back.
“They’ve come a long way,” one of them had said.
I thought about young players and the journeys whose endings none of us can know.
The mountain was unfinished.
So are they.