When you watch your child practice, what are you actually seeing?

Most parents will answer this honestly if you push them: they are watching the ball. Whether it goes in. Whether the shot looked the way they think it should look. Whether the session appears to be going well by the standard of things that are easy to observe from the outside.

These are not nothing. But they are also not the most important things happening on that court.

What actually determines how a player develops over time is harder to see. It is in the quality of the decisions being made, not just whether the shots land. It is in how a player responds after an error, whether they reset, sulk, adjust, or go quiet. It is in whether the practice environment is putting them in situations that require genuine thinking, or whether it is asking them to execute pre-arranged patterns in conditions that will never occur in a match.

A session full of ball-striking and a session full of learning can look identical from a distance. The difference is in what is being asked of the player. Are they being put in situations they have to solve? Are mistakes being used as information or avoided as inconveniences? Is the practice gradually developing something that will hold up in competition, or is it producing performance that looks good in the moment and disappears when things get complicated?

These are not easy questions to answer from outside the fence. But they are the right ones to be asking. Because the wrong question, did it look good, can be satisfied by training that leaves a player completely unprepared. And the right session, the one that is actually building a competitor, can look messy, frustrating, and inconclusive from a parent’s perspective.

If you want to understand what is really happening in your child’s development, ask the coach what problem they were trying to create today, not what they were trying to teach. The answer to that question will tell you more than anything you can see from the fence.