It was never my fault.

For twenty years, I thought I was coaching. I started in 2000, like most coaches do, by following the methods of those around me, adhering to how I had been coached, and consuming every coaching book I could get my hands on. It was all about closed practices, rigid progressions, and meticulous attention to technique—build the fundamentals, understand that tennis is difficult, focus on long-term player development, and make sure to squeeze in those 10,000 repetitions. Deliberate practice. Basket feeds. And millions of them.

What I didn’t realize was that for two decades, I wasn’t really coaching; I was just running drills. I would get frustrated when my players couldn’t transfer what we worked on into matches. They weren’t improving fast enough, they lacked focus, they weren’t giving enough effort—at least that’s what I told myself. Never once did I stop to question my methods. Why would I? Everyone else was doing the same thing, following the same framework, the same structure. I was doing what I’d been trained to do.

By 2020, I was burnt out. Twenty years in, and I was ready to walk away from coaching for good. The world was locked down, and I was mentally drained—frustrated, stressed, and wondering why it just wasn’t working. So, with time on my hands, I tried to find an answer. My first thought was that it must be the mental side of the game; maybe my players just weren’t mentally tough enough to succeed. I enrolled in an online sports psychology course, hoping to find the magic formula for transferring practice success to competition. But the course wasn’t great, and I ended up spending more time on YouTube trying to make sense of the academic jargon.

One day, completely by accident, a video played on autoplay. The presenter, Ric Shuttleworth, was talking about why athletes perform well in practice but fail to transfer that skill into competition. His solution? The Constraint-Led Approach (CLA). Suddenly, something clicked. This was what I had been missing all along. Over the next few weeks, I went down a rabbit hole, reading everything I could about CLA and ecological dynamics. It was overwhelming, but one thing became clear: it’s not just about what we coach, but how we coach. I realized that the problem wasn’t my players—it was me.

Looking back now in 2024, it’s obvious why my old methods didn’t work. I was trying to polish small, isolated pieces of a dynamic game and then expecting my players to seamlessly integrate those into the chaotic reality of a match. Tennis is a fast, unpredictable, and complex sport, yet I had spent twenty years imposing a structured, rigid, and linear approach on my players. I had reduced tennis to a series of “if this happens, do this” instructions—completely disconnected from the actual flow of a game. I didn’t consider the opponent, the environment, or the human being holding the racket.

I also made the mistake of coaching everyone the same way. Regardless of age or stage, I had a “how to hit” or “how to play” framework that I applied to every player. But humans aren’t machines. Each player has their own unique dynamics, movement solutions, and physical capabilities. What works for one player won’t necessarily work for another, yet I spent years trying to copy and paste the same technical model onto everyone.

But it wasn’t just me—most of the coaches around me were doing the same thing. Coach education, for the most part, is built on traditional methods. Many of those methods are handed down through generations, based on what worked for a few top players rather than on solid scientific evidence. Much of the research that our coaching is based on is outdated, and sometimes not even relevant to the way humans actually learn to move.

Over the last four years, I’ve immersed myself in understanding how humans learn and move in dynamic situations, how emotions drive our actions, and how we make movement decisions. If you’re reading this, I doubt you would argue that these aren’t essential skills for a tennis player. Yet, traditional coaching methods don’t account for them.

Since my awakening, my approach has changed entirely. I’m less stressed, I love my job, and I enjoy every minute I spend on court. If you asked my players, I think they would say the same. Coaching is fun now. It’s a challenge, not a chore. Every session is unique, and every player brings a different lens to the game.

My name is Steve, and for four years, I’ve been a coach. For the twenty years before that, I was a drill instructor.