In 2016, Shane Pill, Mitchell Hewitt, and Ken Edwards published a landmark paper in the Baltic Journal of Sport and Health Sciences titled “Exploring Tennis Coaches’ Insights in Relation to Their Teaching Styles.”

The study interviewed 13 Australian tennis coaches to explore how they understood and applied different coaching methods, particularly the so-called “Game-Based Approach” (GBA), a model promoted across Tennis Australia’s education pathway.

The findings were eye-opening, and they remain just as relevant today.

The Reality Gap: What Coaches Think They Do vs. What They Actually Do

The research revealed a striking mismatch between coaches’ perceived behaviours and their actual practice.

Every coach interviewed believed they were delivering sessions that:

• Asked players questions to promote decision-making.
• Encouraged problem-solving through game play.
• Reduced feeding and direct instruction.

Yet when their sessions were filmed and analysed, the footage showed something else entirely:

• Coaches dominated sessions through explicit instruction and heavy ball feeding.
• Players spent large portions of time listening rather than acting.
• Discovery learning was talked about far more than it was practiced.

As one coach put it after watching themselves on video:

“I thought my lessons were all really game-based… but I did all this feeding of balls. I thought I used guided discovery, but having watched the session, I didn’t ask that many questions.”

This “reality gap” between espoused theory (what coaches believe they do) and theory-in-use (what they actually do) highlights a deep-seated issue in tennis coaching.

The Influence of Mentors Over Education

Most coaches said their biggest influence came from the head coach they worked under — not from Tennis Australia accreditation or coach education courses.

This finding echoes other research showing that coaching practice is shaped more by apprenticeship of observation(Cushion, 2010; Lemyre et al., 2007) than by formal learning.

In short: coaches tend to replicate what they’ve seen, not necessarily what the evidence supports.

As one coach admitted:

“I still do what my coach did. Same drills, same explanations, because they worked for me.”

But this cycle of imitation perpetuates outdated, mechanistic traditions, where tennis is taught as technique reproduction rather than as a dynamic, perception-action process (Davids et al., 2015).

The Language Trap: Words Without Understanding

The study also exposed confusion around terminology. Coaches used words like “game-based,” “discovery,” “modern,” and “constraints-led” interchangeably — but their explanations showed little understanding of the theoretical principles behind them.

This confusion mirrors the epistemological gap described by Light (2008): coaches often use constructivist language while teaching through behaviourist methods.

In other words, they talk about “letting players discover,” yet design practices that remove discovery entirely.

Without shared definitions or grounding in theory, terms like “Game-Based Approach” become marketing slogans rather than meaningful frameworks.

Why This Still Matters

Nearly a decade later, tennis still battles this same contradiction.

Coach education materials promote “learning through play” and “guided discovery,” yet certification assessments still reward tidy, technical sessions where the coach controls every detail.

This reflects a broader problem in sport: modern language layered on traditional foundations.

As the study concluded, the coaches’ sessions were “thought to be game-based but were largely technique-centred and directive.”

That’s not just an Australian issue, it’s a global one.

The Deeper Lesson: Awareness Before Change

Perhaps the most valuable takeaway is this: the coaches in the study only became aware of their contradictions once they watched themselves coach.

Video feedback combined with reflective discussion helped them see their real behaviours and question long-held assumptions.

This aligns with later findings by Partington and Cushion (2011), who argued that self-awareness is the missing link in coach development.

If coaches are to change, they must first see — and accept — what they actually do.

What We Can Learn From This

For today’s tennis community, this research still holds vital lessons:

1. Coach education must go deeper than drills.
   • Understanding learning theory is not optional. It shapes every decision on court.
2. Mentoring needs rethinking.
   • If mentors model outdated approaches, the system just reproduces itself.
3. Language must match behaviour.
   • Saying “game-based” doesn’t make a session representative. The design must reflect real tennis problems.
4. Reflection changes everything.
   • Watching yourself coach — without ego — is one of the most powerful professional development tools available.
5. Adaptation beats imitation.
   • Coaching should evolve with evidence, not tradition.

Towards Truly Ecological Coaching

The findings echo the principles of Ecological Dynamics, where learning is seen as a self-organising process shaped by interactions between the player, task, and environment (Renshaw et al., 2019).

In this view, the coach’s role is not to control movement but to design conditions that allow perception, decision, and action to emerge naturally.

That means less feeding, less telling, and more designing.
Less structure, more adaptability.

As Pill et al. (2016) ultimately showed, coaches want to teach this way — but few have the tools or theoretical grounding to do it effectively.

The challenge for modern tennis is not awareness, but alignment: aligning language, theory, and practice so that what we believe about learning actually shows up on the court.

References

• Cushion, C. (2010). Coach behaviour. In J. Lyle & C. Cushion (Eds.), Sports Coaching: Professionalism and Practice.
• Davids, K., Renshaw, I., Pinder, R., Araújo, D., & Button, C. (2015). Designing Practice for Skill Acquisition: The Constraints-Led Approach. Routledge.
• Lemyre, F., Trudel, P., & Durand-Bush, N. (2007). How youth sport coaches learn to coach. The Sport Psychologist, 21, 191–209.
• Light, R. (2008). Complex learning theory: Its epistemology and assumptions about learning. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 27, 439–453.
• Partington, M., & Cushion, C. (2011). An investigation of practice activities and coaching behaviours of top-level youth soccer coaches. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 13(2).
• Pill, S., Hewitt, M., & Edwards, K. (2016). Exploring tennis coaches’ insights in relation to their teaching styles. Baltic Journal of Sport and Health Sciences, 3(102), 30–43.
• Renshaw, I., Araújo, D., Button, C., Chow, J. Y., Davids, K., & Moy, B. (2019). Why the constraints-led approach is not teaching games for understanding. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 24(5), 441–454.*