Why an ICS Bangkok Coach Keeps Preaching 'Don't Give Up'

Every season, George, a PE teacher and longtime coach at the International Community School of Bangkok (ICS Bangkok), tells his players the same thing: don't give up, don't ever give up. It's not his line. It belongs to Jim Valvano, the college basketball coach who spoke it into a microphone at the 1993 ESPY Awards, two months before he died of cancer. George didn't just borrow the phrase for a locker-room speech, he lived a smaller version of it, and on a recent episode of Students Incorporated, he explained why it's the one thing he can't stop repeating to teenagers.

A Speech Written for Cancer, Applied to a Bench

Valvano's 1993 address is one of the most replayed moments in American sports television. He had months to live, could barely walk to the podium, and used the time to announce the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research with the words "don't give up, don't ever give up." According to the V Foundation, that eight-word close is still played at the start of the NCAA basketball tournament every year, more than three decades later. George cited the speech directly, unprompted, when asked what advice he gives young athletes.

Valvano earned the platform ten years earlier by coaching one of the least likely champions in college basketball history. His 1983 North Carolina State team, nicknamed the "Cardiac Pack," entered the season unranked, lost its best player to a broken foot in conference play, and limped into the ACC Tournament at 17-10. It then won the conference tournament and six more straight NCAA games, including an overtime win over rival North Carolina, before beating a heavily favored Houston team, starring future NBA Hall of Famers Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, on a last-second putback dunk, according to SLAM and NC State's athletic department. It's the kind of season the phrase "don't ever give up" was built to describe before it ever applied to Valvano's cancer.

What makes the reference land for George is that he has his own smaller version of the same story. He didn't make his college soccer team for two years running, including a sophomore season where, by his own account, four players he knew he was better than made the roster and he didn't. He nearly quit trying out altogether. A teammate talked him into one more attempt his senior year. He made the team.

"I could have given up right then and there. But I didn't. And I'm so glad I didn't."

It's a small story, not a dramatic one, and that's the point George keeps making to his players at ICS: persistence doesn't usually look like a comeback movie. It looks like showing up to one more tryout after two years of getting cut.

The Age Where Kids Quit

That message is aimed at a specific window in a young athlete's life, and the data on youth sports backs up why it matters most in the teenage years. Youth sports participation in the United States peaks around age 12 at roughly 65%, then falls off sharply through adolescence, down to around 35% by ages 15 to 17, according to Aspen Institute Project Play's 2025 State of Play report. A widely cited American Academy of Pediatrics survey puts it more starkly: roughly 70% of kids who play organized sports have quit by age 13. Researchers point to a familiar list of causes: lack of enjoyment, early specialization, burnout from year-round travel schedules, and rising costs that Project Play found have jumped 46% since 2019, pricing out lower-income families in particular. The same report found kids from households earning $100,000 or more are now twice as likely to play travel-level sports as kids from households under $50,000, meaning the dropout curve isn't just about age. It's increasingly about who can afford to stay on the team long enough to hit a rough patch at all.

George's own résumé, high school football and baseball in the US, a stint playing semi-pro in Bangladesh, then college football, followed by more than 15 years coaching soccer at ICS, puts him on the other side of that dropout curve: an adult who almost became one of the statistics and instead built a career convincing kids not to become one either.

What Staying On the Team Actually Buys You

The two student athletes interviewed alongside George, Dylan Nishiyoko, a senior on the varsity soccer team, and Natty, a senior on the varsity volleyball team, didn't frame their years on ICS teams around trophies. They framed them around belonging. Dylan described teammates becoming "somewhat family" over time, and said playing forced him out of his comfort zone socially in a way nothing else did. Natty, who joined ICS midway through middle school, said sports were what let her build friendships and adjust to a new school when nothing else was working yet.

That's not just a nice sentiment, it tracks with where youth mental health research has landed recently. The 2023 U.S. Surgeon General's advisory on loneliness singled out Gen Z, ages 16 to 24, as carrying some of the highest loneliness rates of any age group, and named structured group activities like sports among the protective factors that build peer connection. A 2026 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry went further, running a six-week trial with middle schoolers and finding that team-based competitive sports, specifically football, basketball, and volleyball, the exact sports discussed on the episode, measurably increased students' sense of belonging to their school, and that the increase in belonging was what drove down loneliness and self-harm risk, not exercise itself. It's not the running around that helps. It's the team.

Losing the Final and Still Getting Cheered

Natty's clearest example of that belonging came from a loss, not a win. This year's ACSC tournament, hosted at Faith Academy in the Philippines, put ICS Bangkok's volleyball team in the finals, where they lost. She described her team at its lowest point after the match, in tears, and then hearing the crowd keep cheering for them anyway. ACSC, the Asia Christian Schools Conference, was founded in 2013 by six member schools including ICS Bangkok, Dalat International School in Malaysia, and Faith Academy, the same circuit where George says his own favorite coaching memory happened: also 2013, the year ICS won the tournament with a team that had barely trained for the 11-a-side format before pulling it off.

The tournament itself is a small case study in what the pandemic did to school sports broadly. Natty's freshman-year ACSC trip to Taiwan in 2019 was followed by two pandemic years with no travel at all, just local scrimmages, before international competition slowly resumed as borders reopened. Her senior-year trip to the Philippines was the first time in three years the team got back on a plane for it.

The Job Nobody Assigns You

Both students also raised something coaches rarely get asked about: the pressure of being watched by kids younger than you. Dylan talked about how younger players pick up a senior's habits, good or bad, down to things as basic as swearing on the field. Natty made a similar point about volleyball being "a mental sport": one player's bad energy spreads across the whole team, and someone has to actively counteract it. George, for his part, described managing 20 to 30 personalities on a roster as the hardest part of the job, harder than any tactical decision: negotiating playing time, disappointment, and the outside-of-sport decisions that get players suspended.

None of it circles back to winning. George's closing advice to the show's teenage listeners wasn't about trophies at all: find something you're passionate about, whatever it is (sports, radio, science) and don't give up on it. It's the same line again, dressed differently. Not because it's clever, but because for a coach who nearly walked away from his own sport twice, it's the only advice he's ever fully tested on himself.

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