Most coaches can tell you what their player needs to fix. The second serve lands too short. The backhand breaks down under pressure. Movement to the wide ball in the ad court is half a step slow. This kind of observation is what coaching looks like from the outside: identifying problems, designing drills, correcting errors. It is necessary work, and most experienced coaches do it well.

But there is a harder question. Can you describe, precisely, how your player needs to play in order to succeed at the next competitive level? Not which stroke to improve. How the game itself needs to look.

A paper published in the ITF Coaching and Sport Science Review puts the challenge plainly. The author, a coach educator with decades of experience, observes that coaches can often identify which strokes or tactics need improvement but frequently struggle to define how their players should play to succeed at a specific level of competition. The distinction is more consequential than it first appears.

The paper proposes a framework built around what it calls “drivers,” the prerequisites that must be integrated before a player can leap to the next stage of competitive ability. At the stage where players learn to use open space effectively, the essential driver is inductive thinking: the cognitive capacity to draw conclusions from patterns and apply them in real time to shot combinations. At the stage where players begin to impose their game style, the driver is abstract strategic thinking, specifically the ability to read an opponent’s weaknesses and adapt accordingly across a match. At the final stage, managing match flow under pressure, the driver is emotional regulation. Not composure as a personality trait, but as a trainable capacity to maintain focus and adjust tactics as circumstances change.

The driver is the underlying condition that makes a stroke, a tactic, or a competitive identity actually function at the next level.

The implication for session planning is significant. Drilling a forehand without identifying whether the player has the cognitive or tactical driver to deploy it in the situations the next competitive level demands is improving a shot in isolation. The shot may get cleaner and still not produce better results, because the gap was never in the technique. It was in the condition that allows the technique to transfer under match pressure against players who create real problems.

The question worth sitting with before each development cycle is not “what does this player need to improve?” Most coaches have a working answer to that within minutes of watching a match. The harder question is what does this player need to understand, recognise, or be able to do tactically and mentally before the technical work will actually carry over to the next level of competition?

A coach who can answer that question is developing the player. A coach who cannot is developing the strokes and hoping the game follows.