Five freshmen, six sophomores and two upperclassmen gather around, hold their breath and maintain contact with her bloodshot eyes. Some bite at their bottom lip as Kelly’s voice becomes the only sound in the Manassas gym. Every 12th word is an expletive. They are “mentally f—ing weak.” She can’t “be a cheerleader for a weak mentality.” They can “go home and cry to mommy and daddy.”

It’s the fourth time this practice she’s gone down this road. Finally, she throws everyone out of the gym. They’re done an hour early, speechless and covered in sweat as they file out with their backs to Kelly. The No. 14 Yellow Jackets (12-3) are one of the most talented teams in the area, but she doesn’t see the effort level she demands.

It is a strange time to be a tough coach, said many who sit at the helm of local varsity programs — boys and girls — and are reconsidering old habits and approaches. Players are different. Society is different. Basketball is different. With each passing year, many wonder if a heavy hand can still work the way it did even a decade ago. Many have tapered back or sought more palatable ways to teach old standards.

While there is no consensus on whether tough coaching is more effective for boys or girls, many coaches said boys were less likely to leave the sport because of hard coaching. However, coaches said anecdotally, boys also seemed less likely to benefit long-term from harsh criticism by a coach.

“That type of rigid, militaristic coaching isn’t going to do much for the type of guys you have now because they’re a little bit more free thinkers,” Patriot boys’ coach Sherman Rivers said. “You really need to explain the reason behind what you’re asking them to do to get through to them.”

Kelly, for one, trusts her gut — and has resisted change.

She pushes because she cares. She wants better for her players when they enter the real world. She’s unsure if that’s lost on her team. Asked several days later, Angelina Yann, the team’s lone senior, admits the younger players likely hear Kelly’s tone more than her message. Some will probably cry, as she used to. Yann tries to help them.

Between curses, Kelly, 49, tells her players to take accountability for their mistakes rather than point fingers. She needs a leader, needs it to be louder in the gym and needs them to compete. She doesn’t see an effort level that would close the gap from a 41-point loss four days earlier against Thomas Dale, one of the country’s top teams and the favorite to win the state title in Osbourn Park’s classification.

Throughout practice, she leaves the final tally, 81-40, on the scoreboard. It’s adjacent to their girls’ basketball banner, which recounts the Yellow Jackets’ recent accomplishments: five straight district titles and three consecutive region championships.

Several minutes later, Kelly stands next to two assistant coaches, looks out at empty hardwood and reflects. She doesn’t know if her message resonates the way it once did. She has tested out a softer approach; that didn’t generate the results she wanted. So she has stuck with what she knows best.

“If she didn’t come at me this way, I think that would mean she doesn’t think I’m worth it,” Yann said. “But she has these expectations because she knows I have more potential. Which is why she does what she does.”

One refrain of Kelly’s is for certain: gyms are quieter these days.

Oakton girls’ coach Fred Priester, who has coached in Northern Virginia since the 1980s (and Kelly’s former AAU coach), said he spends more time building culture now than at any point in his career. Each new class, he has found, has more trouble communicating than the previous one.

Multiple coaches cited the cellphone as an obstacle to reaching players on a deeper level, a problem that only grew worse after the pandemic.

But coaches said an old-school approach is impossible without open communication. A “family” mentality, albeit a cliché, is crucial. Difficult conversations come from an underlying trust. Increasingly, coaches said, players are keeping their thoughts bottled up. They’re accustomed to communicating through their phones. Basketball offers a chance for a direct line of contact.

“It is important to make sure that you have the right relationship with the kid, but that’s hard to tell now. Because kids don’t talk. They kind of just look at you,” Priester said. “You have to try to show in any way that you can where you’re coming from.”

Priester asks more questions than ever during practices. Rivers has his players interviewed in a web series to give them experience with public speaking. He also holds one-on-one meetings where he insists on honesty. In the meetings, he never yells. Rivers said he simply wants to familiarize his players with “normal interactions.”

Communication, though, isn’t the only challenge for a high school staff. Some coaches bemoaned AAU’s tilt toward games and away from tough practices and skill development, especially for players in middle school. Some said parents are more combative. One coach admitted he remains in the locker room longer after games to sidestep grievances about playing time and play-calling.

“The day that I started having meetings with parents because I’m coaching their kids too hard, you’ll be getting that farewell,” Kelly joked.

Kelly rarely blames individual players, but she’s frustrated by a culture where players “don’t know hard.” She attributes some of that to online learning, which she said gave students a longer leash — turning in work late and retaking tests without penalty — that schools have had trouble reeling in. It is, in part, why she attacked this mid-January practice with such ferocity.

“They’re great kids,” she said. “But when they get to these moments where they need to be resilient, it’s not happening,”

After her sophomore year, Alana Powell had just about had enough.

She dreaded going to workouts. She’d hit a mental wall before practice ended, unable to push herself “past the point to get better.” During a trip to Pennsylvania before her junior year, Kelly chewed out her team and benched the entire starting lineup due to a lack of effort.

Powell called her coach over to her hotel room. She told Kelly she wanted to quit.

“That was the moment I realized Coach Kelly was going to be with me forever,” Powell said.

Kelly told Powell how valuable of a player and person she was. How she would be successful in life; that her dogged attitude would help her pursue a possible music career as much as it had helped her in basketball. She made sure Powell knew her worth. That, several former players said, is a strength of Kelly’s — and what allows her to coach them as hard as she does.

Kelly reiterated she would support Powell regardless of whether she stuck with basketball.

“Even if I didn’t choose her,” Powell said, “she was going to choose me.”

Her senior year, Powell was named a first-team All-Met selection and the Virginia Class 6 player of the year. Now a freshman at Community College of Baltimore County Essex, she has been named the National Junior College Athletic Association player of the week and the region’s player of the month. She sees that her teammates have trouble with the mental adjustment to the college game. She has felt ahead of the curve and credits that to Kelly.

Osbourn Park sophomore Samia Snead said she regularly catches up with Powell when she’s confused or overthinking. But Kelly’s approach gets easier — and she understands it better — with each practice.

“She’s helped me grow as a person,” Snead said of Kelly. “Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it still affects me, but everyone’s telling me she’s preparing us for life after basketball. I’m a lot better at bouncing back from adversity. I know it’s hard right now, but you’ve got to see it through.”

Her players, past and present, said they accepted the brash approach because of her love for them off the court. Until the bell rang at 2:10 p.m., she was “Ms. Kelly,” not Coach Kelly. Every day, the entire team eats lunch in her classroom, where she teaches health and physical education. Occasionally, she brings the team to her house and cooks for them. Students at Osbourn Park, one of the area’s more diverse schools, feel they can come to her with any range of experiences, multiple players said.

If they talk, she’ll listen. And if they’ll listen, Powell said, she usually has an answer.

It becomes easier, that way, not to take her diatribes personally.

“As soon as it’s not about basketball, she’s this whole different person,” Yann said. “She’s the sweetest human being ever.”

Still, on the court, there’s no sugarcoating. Understanding where a player’s line is has always been a challenge. Kelly, though, has made a career of not crossing it.

“She never will let you get so low that you couldn’t come back,” Powell said. “Every single word she says comes from a place of love.”

Two minutes before she throws the team out, the Yellow Jackets appear to be working hard. Two exhausted players dive after a ball in a transition drill. The running barely stops. At water breaks, players suck for air and search for rest against the padded wall, hands on their knees.

Later, players will admit they weren’t working hard enough. By playoff time, they will.

Teams that win it all, Kelly says, don’t always do so because of talent. But even if they never win a title, the lesson has never been about talent. It’s to always keep pushing. When that becomes the standard, she says, she’ll shut up.