ABSTRACT
This article uses a reflective “letter to my younger self” to explore how coaching beliefs and behaviours evolve. By revisiting my early coaching experiences, the article highlights how inherited practices and cultural expectations shaped my initial approach, particularly my reliance on technical instruction and repetition. Reflective distance allowed previously unnoticed assumptions to surface, especially the tension between drill performance and match performance in skill transfer. Drawing on insights consistent with Szedlak et al. (2021)the letter serves as a reflective scaffold that exposes tacit beliefs and prompts deeper inquiry into coaching practice. The reflections illustrate a transition toward a nonlinear, ecological perspective on learning and practice design. Based on this journey, three recommendations are proposed: moving beyond imitation, engaging in deliberate reflection, and building reflective learning communities. The article argues that reflection remains an essential yet underused mechanism for meaningful coach development.
KEYWORDS:
Reflective practice; Ecological dynamics; Coach learning; Nonlinear pedagogy; Autoethnography
INTRODUCTION
This article contributes to the coach learning literature by demonstrating how reflective letters can expose tacit assumptions and serve as a practical bridge between theory and lived coaching experience. Developing expertise in coaching requires navigating the complex fields of formal coach education, informal education such as mentoring, academic publications, and popular online content. Combined, these often convey conflicting messages about what effective coaching entails. Coaches experience uncertainty because the literature presents mixed messages about how players learn. This creates further difficulty for tennis coaches trying to interpret the findings in on-court coaching environments. This tension is reflected in recent research with epistemological, conceptual and pedagogical differences being debated. Several scholars have researched principles such as opposed versus unopposed practice (Parry et al., 2025), representative learning design (Krause et al., 2018), the role of coaching beliefs (Anderson et al., 2021) and traditional motor program theories (Schmidt & Lee, 2011), which conflict with ecological views of emergent movement. These contrasting perspectives often leave coaches navigating between incompatible models.
Together, these studies highlight that coaching requires more than technical knowledge alone. This diversity of perspectives aligns with Cushion et al.’s (2003) view that there is no single or universal way to coach. In the conceptual review, Cushion proposes that coaching is constructed through practice, experience and context. Adding to this complexity, Reid et al. (2007) note that tennis coaches face increasing demands to integrate emerging scientific insights into practice, challenging traditional learning pathways. Pill et al. (2016) expand on this by revealing that tennis coaches frequently model their practice on how they were coached, often unaware of the theoretical assumptions underpinning their methods. This suggests that coaches may not always be aware of the learning theories shaping their coaching. Historical analyses also suggest that practice methods are partly shaped by long-standing socio-cultural constraints. Moy and Renshaw (2009) demonstrated that drill-based, teacher-centred approaches in games teaching emerged from militaristic and managerial traditions rather than learning theory, which helped explain why such methods persist today. These inconsistencies highlight the need for tools that help coaches interpret theory through lived experience in meaningful ways. Given these challenges, reflection becomes essential.
Taken together, these inconsistencies highlight the need for reflective tools in coaching. While reflective letters are used in qualitative research, their potential as coach education tools has been underexplored in tennis. Reflective letters can help coaches examine how their beliefs align with underlying learning theories such as ecological dynamics. Szedlak et al. (2021) demonstrated that reflective ‘letters to my younger self’ can act as a scaffolding tool for coach learning, helping novice coaches reflect on values, beliefs, and decision-making. This article aims to offer a reflective account, written as a letter to my younger self, to illuminate the lived experience of transitioning from traditional instruction to a nonlinear pedagogy. The intention is to model reflective practice as a legitimate form of professional learning and to connect this personal evolution with contemporary coaching theory. My own coaching journey reflects many of these themes, and the lessons to my younger self will act as a tool for tennis coaches by providing a reflection framework. By making tacit beliefs visible, reflective letters provide a simple but powerful developmental tool for coaches. The next section outlines the reflective method underpinning the letter.
REFLECTIVE APPROACH
Building on this need for interpretive tools, this article adopts a reflective, practice-based approach for coaches to generate knowledge by reflecting on their own actions, decisions and environments. A letter to my younger self goes far beyond a simple writing task. It is a systematic way to analyse coaching behaviour. The reflective stance adopted in this article is grounded in the recognition that coaching is complex, the literature is conflicting, and practices vary. In my professional experience, reflection is not a ‘nice to have’ option but is structurally required in progressive learning environments. Reflection provides coaches with a means to make sense of experience and adapt their practice to the specific demands of their environment. It enables the coach to understand why they act, not just what they do. Knowles et al. (2001) argue that genuine reflective practice extends beyond self-review, requiring consideration of context, education and application within tennis coaching. This supports the view that reflective inquiry generates situated knowledge. Writing to a past version of oneself creates distance that makes blind spots easier to recognise. Creating temporal distance reduces defensiveness and allows assumptions to surface without self-judgment. As Schön (2017) suggested, coaches often operate with intuitive ‘theories-in-use’ that they don’t realise they hold. Reflective letters help expose these hidden theories. Letters become shared reflective tools that help other coaches recognise similar patterns in their own development.
Studies show that reflective letters to provide a structured way to surface tacit knowledge, challenge assumptions, and support psychosocial skill development. Szedlak et al. (2021) found that when expert coaches wrote letters to their younger selves, novice coaches used these letters as a reflective scaffold, prompting insight, confidence, and re-evaluation of their own coaching journeys. Reflective letters are one tool among many and work best when embedded within ongoing reflective cycles. This approach aligns with self-study and autoethnographic traditions, where personal narrative is used as legitimate data for professional learning.
This article adopts the reflective approach consistent with practice-based inquiry, where the act of examining and improving one’s own professional practice becomes a legitimate form of research. In his conceptual argument, Kemmis (2009) describes such inquiry as a practice-based practice in which practitioners critically engage with their own actions, intentions, and contexts to generate meaningful knowledge. Practice-based inquiry aligns with coaching because both rely on situated meaning-making in real environments. Within tennis coaching, this reflective stance enables a deeper understanding of coaching decision-making, such as practice design or interventions and situational dynamics, aligning the research process with the realities of on-court practice. This leads directly into the observations and experiences that shaped my coaching philosophy. In my example letter, I will discuss a turning point of my coaching career in which reflective practice changed my coaching epistemology.
OBSERVATIONS LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF
Hello Younger Self,
Looking back on my younger coaching years, it was all so new, exciting and also quite daunting. Entering a tennis coaching world where your experience, knowledge and expertise are on show for everyone. Your fellow coaches with their trusty ball baskets and swagger, delivering lessons seemingly from the top of their heads, “I’ve been doing this a long time” they chirped, but unfortunately, you haven’t. You don’t have the experience or wisdom of your fellow tennis pros just yet.
The unsettling nervousness of planning and preparing a lesson. What did you know about player development? While everyone around you seemed so confident and brash, you often felt insecure, self-conscious and unsure about how even tennis players could learn very complicated movements. Tennis seemed very technical, the position of the elbow, grips and complicated footwork patterns. So many factors to remember, tennis seemed like a highly dynamic game where anything could happen. The ball seemed to move in multiple different ways, the opponent was unpredictable, and so was the British weather. Yet you often feel you don’t have the answers. Not knowing is not a weakness; it becomes the starting point of curiosity. This letter will offer you some guidance that will save you from unnecessary frustration.
Tennis is full of mistakes!
Both by the players and you as a coach. Mistakes are all around you, coaches looking at the wrong information, players trying to organise their movements into strict models and errors or mistakes in general being viewed as something effective coaches’ should eliminate from lessons. The path ahead may seem unclear, and you will question yourself often, but remember this: you can only do your best with what you have today.
And this letter will give you some comfort and confidence along your journey. One day, the lessons you’re learning painfully will guide others more gently.
Right now, you’re thinking effective coaching means giving your players the ‘right technique’, you’re frantically watching other coaches and picking up key technical cues such as split step, turn, beat the bounce and move your feet. At this stage, you believe in hard work, intensity and discipline. At that time, you believed improvement was primarily a function of effort and volume. You closely observe the best players at the club train, you obsess over how hard they work, how much the coach shouts and how great they look when they strike the ball clean from the coach’s feed. Sitting on the balcony every day at the club, watching coaches like Nick, Phil, and Andy work, some of the best coaches not only in the area but in the country. There is no wonder why you copied them, they were the best and they worked with the best players. Nick’s intensity and discipline, Phil’s humour and terrible jokes and Andy’s attention to detail all helped shape how you coached your players.
Over the next few years, you will achieve success, players and parents will approach you for lessons, and your players will win tournaments. Over time, you copied and learned from some of the best coaches; your lessons are intense, highly disciplined, and players are required to work hard. High repetition and attention to detail become your trademarks; players understand that when they step on a court with you, everything has to be done not just once to a high standard but multiple times. But something kept troubling you, no matter how many serves your players practised in lessons, it would look so substantially different in a match.
However, you will discover that learning is not the controlled, linear process you assumed.
Even now, at this very early stage of your coaching journey, something is annoying you. Players perform great in drills however not in matches. In your lessons, despite the hundreds of balls fed and hit, players seem to fall apart when it matters the most, in the points at the end of the lesson. It frustrates you, despite the fact that you show them with expert demonstrations, you even remove the majority of the chaos and isolate the technique. And like any effective coach, you start with a drop feeding, progress to hand feeding, eventually to a racket feed. This is what everyone around you was doing; it’s also what you have just learned in your coach qualification. And no matter how many times the player hits that forehand, it seems to disappear when it’s in a game. You speak to your fellow coaches and they offer solutions such as ‘they need more reps’, ‘it’s not quite embedded in the muscle memory yet’ or ‘maybe they are just not focused enough’.
You drill, feed and shout more, yet nothing seems to stick.
In the coming years, you will learn a very valuable lesson. At a high-level tournament, despite your player spending six weeks developing their serve in lessons, they will fail to achieve several serves in during the match. The car journey home will be one filled with frustration, disappointment, embarrassment and a sense of failure.
This will become a pivotal point in your journey, and you will learn in time that players don’t store movements; they solve problems.
For years, you will stick to what you know, what brought not just you but others success. The basket feeding, the intensity, the demonstrations and you will blame many players for just not trying hard enough. Despite the questions you ask yourself, you will stay true to the methods and want to keep your head coach and parents happy; this is the type of coaching they want. You didn’t know this then, and you were genuinely doing your best with the knowledge you had at the time.
Be ready to challenge the methods you have inherited; just because we have always done something, it doesn’t make it right. If so many players use the same coach, the same coaching method, why out of all the players you currently coach, so few improve? Despite what appears to be success, you will uncover that most tennis coaches don’t work from a clear learning theory or perspective; they often just follow what has traditionally been coached.
My gift to you is the power of research and exploration. Research human learning theories, search for alternative models to what you currently know to be true. Start with James Gibson and direct perception. These moments will shape how you see learning itself. You will discover that mistakes will become central to your learning, not textbooks or checklists. You will start to appreciate the uniqueness of every player, errors become information rather than interference, and you will unlock a creative side to your coaching that you currently wish you had. It will be uncomfortable at first, you will have doubts, people will question your coaching, however, your players will love the autonomy, freedom, and your lessons will become a fun learning environment.
Reflection will become your most powerful tool; you will quickly learn that drills are just templates and every player will interact with them differently. What will be more surprising is that the same player, the same drills will produce different outcomes on different days. Players learn through interaction with the environment and the task. As a coach, your role in the process is to guide and shape that interaction by ensuring the player has a clear intention, and you will guide their attention. Every intervention, cone or line you place on the court will affect the player. Over time, you will start to reflect and ask yourself: Why did I intervene there? What did the player see that I missed? It will become very obvious that you don’t see the same world as the player; you see it through a different lens, and you must work with the player to help shape the practice, not structure a world that you see. In time, reflection will reshape your beliefs about learning and coaching. The drive home, the diary you keep next to your bed and the conversations you have with your players will all lead to better questions, better practice designs and better connections with your players.
I wish you knew sooner that players need variability, not predictability. Representative learning design is a phrase that will guide your coaching to far greater heights and better connections with your players. Tennis is a simple sport: put the ball into a position where your opponent can’t get it back. You will start to shape practices using constraints that amplify this basic intention. The result will be players who are more connected to the game, who are sensitive to valuable, rich information in the environment and less focused on that bent elbow.
You will make mistakes on numerous occasions, but each one will move you forward. Every error you will use as valuable information, a time to recalibrate and fine-tune something else. Trust yourself, stay curious and don’t rush the journey. You will coach in ways you can’t imagine right now, and you will help players far more than you think. You will love your job, and your players will love your lessons.
The best coaching you will ever do will not come from a basket; it will come from connection. And the connection will help you understand the world your players see.
Enjoy the journey
Your Future Self
One key issue raised in the coaching literature is the role of path dependency in coaching. Coaches rely on inherited practices because ‘this is what we have always done.’ These traditions persist even when the underlying theory is flawed. Gray (2024) highlights the path-dependent nature of coaching, where inherited practices persist regardless of their theoretical nature. This mirrors Pill et al’s (2016)findings that coaches teach as they were taught, often without questioning the assumptions behind their methods. This conflict in learning theory underpins many common coaching frustrations, including the gap between drills and match play. These insights align with my own early coaching experiences, where I relied heavily on technical instructions and demonstrations. My reliance on repetition and demonstrations reflected a deeper belief in internal models (Schmidt & Lee, 2011), a belief that operated implicitly within my practice. These inherited practices persist largely because coaches seldom engage in systematic reflection.
Additionally my early coaching was influenced by the social and cultural context of my coaching environment, and my coaching behaviour was that of imitation of my peers; I never questioned it because of the status and apparent success of these coaches. These practices often rest on assumptions about internal representations and stored movement templates (Schmidt, 1975). Jones and colleagues (2005)demonstrated that copying peers’ coaching methods becomes part of the coaching culture. This combination of social imitation and formal instruction reinforced the path-dependent habits described in the literature. The combination of my early formal coach education, which was informed by structures and frameworks, provided a foundation of technical and organisational knowledge; however, it also framed my understanding of coaching within a predetermined instructional model. Nelson et al. (2006) argue that while formal pathways offer important initial guidance, they often promote prescriptive methods that may restrict coaches’ ability to adapt and reflect critically within real-world environments. Over time, this realisation prompted me to question the assumptions underpinning my own practice and seek more contextually grounded ways of learning.
The tension illustrated in my reflective letter parallels the ecological argument that skill emerges from performer–environment interactions rather than stored motor programmes.
Furthermore, this tension is most visible in the long-standing gap between drill performance and match performance. The pivotal point in my journey was my player’s inability to serve at a tournament, despite weeks of training. The coaching belief of isolated, highly repetitive practice was central to my coaching methods. Recent tennis-specific research has demonstrated that many on-court drills fail to incorporate the perceptual and decision-making demands of match play, thereby limiting their effectiveness for skill transfer. For example, Krause et al. (2019) observed common practice tasks and drills lacking in representative information and variability were less likely to support adaptability in competitive conditions. Krause’s work provides a theoretical explanation for the mismatch between the drill performance and match performance that I describe in my reflective letter. Reflection allowed me to surface the IP-based assumptions I had absorbed through coach education without realising it. Reflection enables coaches to identify the discrepancy between practice performance and match performance.
Consequently this mismatch between the practice court and match court prompted me to explore alternative learning theories. A foundational book in my journey was ‘Dynamics of Skill Acquisition: A Constraints-Led Approach’ (Davids et al., 2008), which formally introduced me to Ecological dynamics in the context of motor learning and sport. The integration of ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory helped shape my understanding of how players learn in contexts that closely mirror match conditions by maintaining the perception-action coupling. Early studies Bernstein (1967) demonstrated the importance of variability and what Bernstein referred to as “repetition without repetition” to enhance retention and generalisation of skill. Can players solve the same problem but with different movement solutions? This contrasted sharply with my formal coaching education, which recommended model-based solutions. Additional research by Chow (2016) further developed and supported concepts such as affordances. This phenomenon is when players focus on exploring opportunities for action rather than memorising ideal techniques. Players become independent problem-solvers able to adapt to variable match situations. If coaches design a representative, game-like environment, players find it more meaningful and enjoyable. This ecological viewpoint fundamentally reframed my understanding of how players learn. Players experience autonomy and challenge, supporting intrinsic motivation (Renshaw, 2012). This perspective contrasted sharply with the IP assumptions I had implicitly adopted. The literature provided me with a systematic method for practice design via a constraint-led approach. Engaging with ecological literature required a reflective re-evaluation of my prior assumptions about learning and skill acquisition.
Moreover reflective practices prompted me to question my own coaching methods and the impact it had on my players. In 2020, when the world had time on its hands, I conducted several reflection tasks such as mind maps, reflective diaries and informal coach education. “Coaches’ experiential learning involves a cyclical process of reflection before, during, and after practice situations.” (Gilbert & Trudel, 2001). Coaches learn and evolve primarily through experience and reflection, not formal instruction. The time away from tennis in 2020 during lockdown provided me with the space and time to truly look back on my coaching methods and question their effectiveness. Reflective inquiry helped me see that I had been coaching from an implicit information-processing perspective without recognising it. This turning point illustrates how reflection helps coaches identify the limitations of prescriptive models. Today I use diaries, a podcast and a blog to reflect on my learning and coaching. The process provides me with clarity, questions and a space for creative thinking.
The reflective letter presented earlier illustrates this tension firsthand and sets the foundation for the recommendations that follow.
PROPOSALS FOR COACHES
Based on the reflections outlined earlier, three key recommendations emerged:
First, move beyond imitation –A central aspect of this article is the limitation of imitation. This habit of copy and paste often becomes an invisible path dependency. I recognised through reflection that tennis coaching is not about the drills, it’s about the players’ interaction with the task and environment. Imitation feels safe, but it prevents coaches from developing their own epistemology – how coaches believe learning happens – and decision-making. Players don’t need your version of someone else’s model; they need your interpretation of their needs. Shift your focus from copying drills to understanding the interaction among coach, player, and environment. Ask yourself, “What information in the environment is shaping their action?”. Coaching should evolve as your players grow. Involve your players in shaping the session so their intentions guide the practice design. Let practices emerge from conversation, exploration, and shared problem-solving. Only when I stopped imitating and started asking questions did my coaching truly change.
Furthermore, secondly, reflect deliberately – Reflection is a tool, not an afterthought; deliberate reflection drives deeper coaching behaviour change. Drawing upon my professional experience, most tennis coaches reflect informally, often when elements go wrong. Without deliberate reflection, inherited habits go unquestioned. Structured tools such as diaries, voice notes or letters help make tacit knowledge explicit. Reflection becomes powerful when it focuses on why you acted, not whether the drill worked. In your reflection, ask questions such as,
- ‘How did the player interact with the environment?’
- ‘What did the player see that I missed?’
- ‘Why did I intervene at that moment?’
They are powerful prompts to deepen your reflective process. Reflection was the turning point in my coaching; it shifted my focus from drills to skills. Deliberate reflection is not time-consuming; it’s transformational.
Additionally, finally, build learning communities – reflective coach needs a reflective community. A significant element of tennis coaching is coaches working independently, which limits opportunities to challenge or question assumptions. Path dependence thrives in isolation; without community, habits and practices go unquestioned. Watching coaches is common; talking deeply with coaches is rare. Learning communities expose coaches to multiple perspectives, preventing narrow or prescriptive practice. Such a community can help distribute cognition and offer shared affordances. Hearing others’ experiences helps surface blind spots you didn’t know you had. A few ideas could be:
- Start small, two or three coaches who meet regularly.
- Discuss sessions, practice designs, and problems you’re facing.
- Share letters, diaries, voice notes, or session videos.
My greatest growth came when I collaborated with others, not when I worked alone. It was conversations, not qualifications, that changed my coaching the most. Coaching is too complex to navigate alone.
Taken together, these proposals offer tennis coaches practical ways to apply reflective principles in their own environments.
CONCLUSIONS
Taken together, these reflections demonstrate that future work could extend this method across coaching groups and communities. By revisiting my early coaching experiences, this article sought to highlight the practices that emerged from the positive impact of reflective practice for tennis coaches. My letter to my younger self illustrates how earlier beliefs about coaching were shaped by inherited practices and the cultural expectations of my environment. Over time, these reflections helped reveal how my coaching beliefs and methods evolved, and how pivotal moments, particularly the tensions I experienced around skill transfer, prompted deeper self-inquiry. My daily social media posts, weekly blog, and podcast continue this reflective journey and, I hope, support the next generation of coaches in navigating the complex world of human learning.
These experiences echo the research by Szedlak et al. (2021), who suggest that letters to one’s younger self can act as a reflective scaffold, helping coaches surface tacit beliefs, values, and assumptions that often go unnoticed in day-to-day practice. Writing to a younger version of myself offered a unique form of reflective distance that more traditional reflective methods often miss. Positioning myself as a young, inexperienced coach created a climate for a more honest appraisal of my coaching decisions, behaviours, and blind spots.
The three recommendations presented, moving beyond imitation, reflecting deliberately, and building learning communities, offer practical and psychologically safe entry points for coaches to begin a meaningful reflective practice. These approaches support not only individual growth but also collective development within coaching environments. These methods could be embedded in coach education programmes as a low-cost but high-impact learning tool. As tennis continues to evolve, reflection will remain the quiet but essential mechanism underpinning effective coach development.
Looking ahead, future work should explore how reflective letters influence coaches’ practice over time, or how they might be embedded within formal coach education programmes.
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Stephen Whelan¹²
¹ University of Winchester, United Kingdom
² My Tennis Coaching, United Kingdom
Email: steve@mytenniscoaching.com
