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Motivation Quote by Hayden Fry

"If you stay with this game long enough, the worm is bound to turn"

About this Quote

Coaches don’t promise justice; they promise the clock. Hayden Fry’s line borrows a folksy proverb - the worm turns - and repurposes it as a philosophy of endurance in a sport built to punish impatience. It’s not motivational in the Instagram sense. It’s practical, almost transactional: stay in the fight long enough and the game will hand you a break, not because you deserve it, but because chaos eventually visits both sidelines.

The intent is to keep players from flinching when momentum tilts. Football is a sequence of small humiliations and sudden reversals: a tipped pass, a missed assignment, a weird bounce. Fry’s sentence anticipates that volatility and turns it into a coaching lever. He’s telling his team to keep executing even while they’re losing, because the opponent will eventually make a mistake, fatigue will set in, emotions will spike, and the script will loosen. “Bound to” is doing heavy lifting here; it’s certainty as a calming agent, a way to stop athletes from chasing hero plays that usually make things worse.

The subtext is also about power. A coach can’t control injuries, officiating, or luck, but he can control belief long enough for probability to do its work. In context - Fry’s career as a program-builder who preached discipline and poise - the quote reads like a cultural cue: resilience isn’t a virtue lesson, it’s a competitive strategy. Stick around, stay sharp, and let the other side blink first.

Quote Details

TopicPerseverance
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Fry, Hayden. (2026, January 15). If you stay with this game long enough, the worm is bound to turn. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-you-stay-with-this-game-long-enough-the-worm-144004/

Chicago Style
Fry, Hayden. "If you stay with this game long enough, the worm is bound to turn." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-you-stay-with-this-game-long-enough-the-worm-144004/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"If you stay with this game long enough, the worm is bound to turn." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-you-stay-with-this-game-long-enough-the-worm-144004/. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Hayden Add to List
Hayden Fry on Persistence: The Worm Will Turn
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About the Author

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Hayden Fry (February 28, 1929 - December 17, 2019) was a Coach from USA.

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