At Huali, if you wanted to join the school team and get playing time, you had to earn it with your skills.
That atmosphere made the veteran coaches feel comfortable, too.
Everyone did their part to uphold it, so Coach Li couldn't break that rule now.
Wang Yi had seen that, too. He didn't call it out, but simply said to Coach Li:
"Looks like banning phones at school is unavoidable."
Coach Li shook his head. "Actually, we've banned phones before. Haven't we been doing that for years? Students weren't allowed to bring phones to school."
"Didn't it work?" Wang Yi asked.
Coach Li replied, "The students couldn't use their phones at school, and it drove them crazy. As soon as they went home for summer or winter break, they'd cling to their phones and never put them down. They wouldn't review their schoolwork or practice basketball. When they came back after the holidays, many had barely improved at basketball—and some had even gotten worse."
"After the school looked into it, we decided we couldn't be too strict. This is the internet age, after all. Almost everyone outside has a phone. If we don't let students use theirs, they can lose touch with society, and as soon as they leave school, they'll go overboard with their phones."
Wang Yi nodded. "I hadn't considered that. The world's changed. It's not like before, when nobody had phones and everyone could focus on what they were doing. Now everyone has a phone. We can never go back to an era when people were completely focused on their tasks."
Coach Li said, "So now the school lets students bring phones, but we limit how much time they spend on them. They can use them for half an hour on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and