Walk past almost any club court on a weekday afternoon and you will see a version of the same lesson. A line of kids behind a cone. A basket at the net. One ball, one swing, one correction, next player. “Bend your knees.” “Follow through.” “Watch the ball.” An hour later the basket is empty, the kids have hit perhaps a hundred balls each, and very few of them have had to make a single decision.
I watch those sessions without judgment, since I have taught some of them myself. What strikes me is how familiar they are. They look like the lessons most of us had as juniors, and that is no coincidence.
Most people who teach tennis arrive there through playing. They were good juniors or college players, someone offered them hours at a club, and they started teaching. Nobody sat them down to talk about how skills are learned, how feedback works, or why some practice transfers to matches and some does not. So they did the natural thing. They reproduced what they had been through, without much reason to think critically about it, because it had worked well enough for them.
Coach education research has described this for a long time. In their review of how coaches learn to coach, Cushion, Armour and Jones showed that coaches learn mostly through experience and by watching other coaches, and that this kind of learning tends to reproduce existing practice rather than question it. Methods survive because they are familiar, whether or not they help players learn.
The consequences are easy to miss because they are quiet. Players who receive a correction after every ball come to depend on the voice at the net, which I wrote about in Feedback That Sticks. Strokes built in closed feeding drills, with no opponent and no score, tend to come apart when a real match asks something of them, the subject of The Technique Trap. Groups with four different levels get one drill. Sessions sit on their own, unconnected to the week before or the month ahead. Most of the instructors I see work hard and care about their players. They were simply never taught how to teach.
This is also why I am careful with two words: instructor and coach. An instructor teaches the game. Grips, swing shapes, rallying, the basics of scoring and play. Most of the people teaching tennis in the US are instructors, and many are excellent with beginners and adults. I reserve the word coach for people who work with competitive players. Coaches usually have a competitive background of their own, and it lets them help in many areas beyond technical instruction: tactics, match preparation, competition planning, the emotional side of tournaments, and the long arc of a junior’s development.
The distinction matters to me because the two roles ask for different things. It also matters less than it seems, because both share the same blind spot. A former college player can be a gifted competitor and still know very little about how a twelve-year-old learns. Playing experience gives a coach a feel for the game, and passing that feel on takes a method of its own.
When I rebuilt the junior program at a club in Arizona, coaching education was one of the changes that mattered most: a shared curriculum, a shared language, and regular time for the staff to learn together and watch each other teach.
I have come to believe that knowing tennis and knowing how people learn tennis are two separate skills. Most of us teach the lessons we were given. The players in front of us deserve teachers who have thought about whether those lessons were any good.