Most coaches leave workshops feeling inspired.
Two weeks later, very little has changed.
The drills look familiar.
The language shifts slightly.
But when pressure arrives, busy sessions, mixed groups, parents watching, coaches revert to what they’ve always done.
This article is for coaches who have been to workshops, tried new ideas, and quietly wondered why those ideas didn’t survive contact with real coaching environments. It explains why most workshops fail to change practice, how ecological design offers a different way forward.
Why This Problem Exists
Coach education has become very good at delivering content.
It is far less effective at changing how coaches see learning.
Most workshops follow a predictable pattern:
- Show exciting practices
- Reduce theory to avoid resistance
- Offer “take-home drills”
- End with motivation and energy
It feels logical. Coaches want usable ideas. Time is limited. Theory can feel heavy.
But this approach creates a problem. Coaches leave with activities, not understanding. When those activities stop working, there is nothing underneath to adapt them. The result is predictable reversion.
This is not a motivation issue.
It is an epistemological one.
Without a shift in how coaches understand learning, practice design remains superficial. Ecological ideas become decoration, not structure.
What the Common Explanation Gets Wrong
Workshops Fail Because Coaches Are “Resistant”
Resistance is often blamed on mindset.
In reality, most coaches are pragmatic. They test ideas. When something fails under pressure, they abandon it.
If a workshop does not change how a coach interprets player behaviour, the coach has no reason to persist.
Resistance is not stubbornness.
It is a rational response to unclear learning signals.
Simplifying Theory Makes It Accessible
Theory is often stripped back to avoid discomfort.
But removing explanatory depth creates fragile understanding.
When ecological dynamics is presented as “just games” or “just constraints,” coaches copy the surface without grasping the mechanism. Without understanding perception–action coupling, intention, or information, they cannot diagnose why a practice works or why it doesn’t.
Simplification without structure leads to dilution.
Drills First, Understanding Later
This is one of the most damaging assumptions in coach education.
Copying without comprehension creates dependency. Coaches can reproduce a drill, but they cannot design one. When context changes, age group, skill level, space, time, the drill collapses.
Understanding does not emerge automatically from repetition.
It must be designed into the learning experience.
What Actually Happens Instead
Learning, whether for players or coaches, is adaptive, not additive.
Coaches do not “store” new methods and retrieve them later. They reorganise how they perceive problems. This takes time, experience, and destabilisation.
Ecological dynamics reframes coaching as:
- Designing environments
- Shaping attention and intention
- Manipulating constraints
- Observing behaviour, not positions
- Responding to information, not errors
Workshops that change practice do not overwhelm coaches with theory, nor hide it. They make theory visible through experience.
The goal is not inspiration.
The goal is re-attunement.
A Practical Example: Serve Coaching
Serve coaching exposes the workshop problem perfectly.
Traditional workshops often present serving as:
- Technical checkpoints
- Repetition-based drills
- Unopposed execution
Coaches may leave with “better” serving drills. But serving performance in matches rarely improves.
Why?
Because serving is not a motor skill performed in isolation. It is a perceptual–decision problem shaped by the opponent.
When workshops design serve practices with an opponent present, several things change:
- Attention shifts outward
- Intention becomes tactical
- Variability increases naturally
- Errors become information
Coaches begin to see serving differently. Not as a movement to fix, but as a situation to shape. This is not a drill change. It is a conceptual shift.
Without that shift, new drills collapse under match conditions.
Why EcoD Workshops Often Fail Too
Ecological dynamics is not immune to poor delivery.
When ecological ideas are reduced to:
- “Fun games”
- “Let them explore”
- “No technique talk”
They lose their explanatory power.
Exploration without intention is chaos.
Constraints without clarity are random.
Games without representation are entertainment.
Effective ecological workshops do three things well:
- They expose flawed assumptions
- They replace them with functional explanations
- They allow coaches to feel the difference on court
This is why gradual complexity matters. Not to protect coaches from theory, but to allow perception to recalibrate.
What This Means for Coach Workshops
If workshops are meant to change practice, they must:
- Design learning, not inspiration
- Challenge how coaches explain behaviour
- Use representative tasks from the start
- Make theory explicit, not optional
- Accept discomfort as part of learning
- Provide follow-up to stabilise change
Drills do not transfer understanding.
Understanding allows infinite adaptation.
Why This Matters Now
Tennis does not struggle because coaches lack effort.
It struggles because practice environments often contradict match demands.
When workshops reinforce activity-based coaching without changing how learning is understood, they unintentionally maintain the problem they aim to solve.
This is why ecological dynamics must be taught as a learning framework, not a coaching style.
And this is why workshop design matters as much as practice design.
I no longer aim to convince coaches.
I aim to help them see differently.
When perception changes, practice follows.
