After speaking at the BTCA Coaches Conference, I kept coming back to one question.
It’s not new, but it feels more important each year:

Are we giving coaches what they want… or what they truly need?

The two are not the same.
And the gap between them is becoming one of the biggest barriers to improving coaching standards in tennis.

The Problem With Giving Coaches What They Want

Most coaches arrive at conferences or workshops hoping for the same things:

• drills
• activities
• quick solutions
• something they can use “tomorrow”
• ideas that feel familiar and comfortable

It’s easy to understand why.
Drills are simple to copy.
They give the appearance of improvement.
They don’t challenge beliefs or identity.
They don’t ask the coach to think differently.

But there’s a cost.

When we only give coaches drills, we keep them dependent on content, instead of helping them understand the processthat creates skilled performers.

It leads to a culture where the solution to every problem is assumed to be:

“Find a better drill.”

This is the exact issue highlighted in coach-development research:
coaches often rely on inherited practices and habits because they lack a framework for understanding how learning actually works (Cushion et al., 2003; Stodter & Cushion, 2017).

In tennis, this habit has become normal.
But normal doesn’t mean effective.

What Coaches Actually Need

What coaches need is very different:

• an understanding of how humans learn
• why players behave the way they do
• how perception and action are linked
• how constraints shape every decision
• how variability supports adaptability
• how representative learning drives transfer
• why skill does not come from repetition alone

Ecological Dynamics provides a clear explanation for this.
Skill emerges from the interactions between the player, the task, and the environment (Davids et al., 2008).
If coaches do not understand this relationship, they remain limited to changing activities, instead of shaping the conditionsthat create learning.

This is the difference between collecting drills and designing environments.

Coaches don’t need more content.
They need better reasoning.

They need to understand why a player chooses a particular shot.
What information they were attending to.
What opportunities they perceived or missed.
How task constraints guided or misled them.
How the session design shaped their behaviour.

This is the foundation of coaching.
Everything else sits on top of it.

The Tension in Coach Education

So here’s the dilemma in every presentation I give:

Do I make the room happy… or do I make the room think?

Giving coaches what they want feels good in the moment.
They leave with pages of drills and activities.
They feel “equipped.”

But giving coaches what they need creates a different kind of reaction.
It challenges assumptions.
It disrupts habits.
It exposes gaps in understanding.
It asks them to reflect on their identity as a coach.

And reflection is uncomfortable.

This discomfort is not a flaw — it is the beginning of learning.
Research consistently shows that meaningful coach development requires dissonance, questioning, and exposure to alternative perspectives (Nelson et al., 2013; Renshaw & Chow, 2019).

In other words:

If coach education never makes you uncomfortable, it probably isn’t helping you grow.

Why Drills Keep Coaches Dependent

There’s another issue here.

When we give coaches more drills, we keep them dependent on external solutions.
When we help coaches understand learning, we empower them to generate their own solutions.

Drills create short-term comfort.

Understanding creates long-term capability.

A coach who understands learning can:

• adapt any activity
• design any session
• work with any player
• solve any problem
• make sense of what they see
• adjust to the needs of the moment

A coach who only collects drills is always waiting for the next one.

The sport doesn’t need more drill collectors.
It needs more decision-makers — coaches who can reason, adapt, and design.

A Call for a Different Kind of Coaching Culture

If tennis is going to move forward, we need to shift the emphasis from:

“Give me drills,”
to
“Help me understand why learning happens.”

From
“Give me answers,”
to
“Help me ask better questions.”

From
“Give me what feels comfortable,”
to
“Give me what challenges me.”

This shift is not about theory wars.
It’s about grounding our decisions in evidence, not tradition.
It’s about equipping coaches to guide players through a game that is complex, dynamic, and unpredictable.

Drills don’t prepare players for that world.
Understanding does.

And that’s why the future of coach education cannot be built on recipes.
It must be built on reasoning.

Because tennis doesn’t need more coaches who can repeat activities.
It needs coaches who can design learning.

References

Cushion, C. J., Armour, K. M., & Jones, R. L. (2003). Coach education and continuing professional development: Experience and learning to coach. Quest, 55(3), 215–230. https://doi.org/10.1080/00336297.2003.10491800

Davids, K., Button, C., & Bennett, S. J. (2008). Dynamics of skill acquisition: A constraints-led approach. Human Kinetics.

Nelson, L. J., Cushion, C. J., & Potrac, P. (2013). Enhancing the provision of coach education: The recommendations of UK coaching practitioners. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 18(2), 204–218. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2011.649796

Renshaw, I., & Chow, J. Y. (2019). A constraint-led approach to sport and physical education pedagogy. Routledge.

Stodter, A., & Cushion, C. J. (2017). What works in coach learning, how, and for whom? A grounded process of soccer coaches’ professional learning. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 9(3), 321–338. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2017.1288698