For years, I believed great tennis coaching looked intense. I thought good coaching meant constant communication, high energy, technical correction, and always having the answer. If players were running hard, if the coach was loud, if the session looked busy and demanding, then learning must be happening. Looking back now, I realise I was often creating the illusion of learning rather than actual learning.
That is a difficult thing to admit because much of what I now critique within traditional coaching methods was once my own coaching behaviour. When I discuss ecological dynamics, representative learning design, or player-centred coaching approaches, I am not attacking coaches from the outside. I am describing my own transformation. For nearly two decades, I coached in a highly traditional way, heavily influenced by the environments around me, the coaching systems I worked within, and the beliefs I held about how learning occurred.
One of the most important insights from my recent MRes systematic review was that coaching behaviour is rarely shaped by coach education alone. Instead, coaches are deeply influenced by occupational culture, previous experiences, peer behaviour, organisational expectations, and inherited assumptions about learning itself (Whelan, 2026). Coaches often coach the way they were coached. They absorb behaviours from mentors, performance systems, and surrounding environments, frequently without critically examining the theoretical assumptions underpinning those practices.
My own journey reflects this perfectly. Early in my coaching career, I worked alongside some incredibly positive coaches who valued play, exploration, humour, and player interaction. Even before concepts like player-centred coaching became widely discussed, there were coaches creating engaging learning environments where players were encouraged to explore and enjoy the game. However, later experiences inside high-performance environments dramatically shaped my coaching behaviour in a different direction.
Within those environments, intensity became the dominant coaching currency. There was constant shouting, constant correction, and a heavy emphasis on visible hard work. Coaching sessions became highly directive and coach-controlled. If players made mistakes, the coach immediately intervened. The assumption was that players required technical correction, biomechanical instruction, and constant guidance in order to improve. Coaches were expected to always have answers. Silence was often interpreted as disengagement or poor coaching.
At the time, I genuinely believed this was elite coaching. The environment reinforced that belief. Players achieved rankings. Some were selected for national camps. Parents often loved the intensity because it looked serious, demanding, and professional. The sessions appeared productive from the outside. But underneath that apparent success, significant problems were emerging.
Many players became highly dependent on me during practice. They performed well within the training environment because the environment itself was heavily controlled. The patterns were predictable. The coach constantly provided solutions. Decision-making was often predetermined before points even began. However, once those players entered competitive matches, things frequently changed. Technique broke down under pressure. Tactical behaviours became inconsistent. Players struggled to adapt independently. What initially appeared to be successful learning often failed to transfer into competition.
This became one of the most important turning points in my coaching journey. For years, I assumed the issue was psychological weakness or poor discipline from the players. I believed players simply needed to work harder, become mentally tougher, or execute more effectively under pressure. But eventually I began asking a different question: what if the environment itself was the problem?
Much of my coaching at the time removed the very thing players needed to learn how to handle: uncertainty. Practices were tightly structured and heavily scripted. Short balls required predetermined responses. Movement patterns were repeated over and over again. Technical solutions were constantly prescribed by the coach. Players were learning how to perform inside controlled training environments rather than learning how to adapt within the unpredictable realities of competitive tennis.
This is where the idea of the illusion of learning becomes important. A player looking good within a controlled practice does not necessarily mean meaningful learning has occurred. Sometimes players simply become adapted to the practice conditions themselves. The environment becomes predictable. Feedback becomes constant. The coach becomes the primary problem-solver. But tennis matches do not function like that. There is no coach shouting technical corrections between every shot. There is no predictable sequence of incoming balls. The game requires players to perceive information, adapt to changing situations, and solve problems independently under pressure.
Ecological dynamics completely changed how I understood this relationship between learning and the environment. Rather than viewing learning as something delivered by the coach through instruction and correction, ecological approaches view learning as emerging through interaction between the player and their environment. That shift fundamentally transformed my role as a coach.
I stopped trying to control every movement. I stopped trying to immediately fix every technical error. I stopped assuming louder coaching meant better coaching. Instead, I started observing more carefully. I became increasingly interested in player behaviour, intention, decision-making, emotional responses, and how players interacted with information within the game itself.
One of the biggest changes in my coaching was learning to become quieter. If someone watches my sessions now, they will often notice long periods where I say very little. For many parents and coaches, this initially feels uncomfortable because traditional coaching culture has conditioned us to associate constant communication with expertise. However, real coaching is not always about filling every second with instruction. Often, the most important information emerges when coaches stop talking long enough to observe what players are actually doing.
Listening became one of the hardest skills I had to develop. Coaches often feel pressure to constantly provide information because many believe their value lies in always having answers. But players do not necessarily need endless technical solutions. Sometimes they need space to explore, opportunities to adapt, and environments that encourage independent problem-solving. Rather than constantly telling players what to do, I now spend far more time guiding their attention toward useful information within the environment.
Instead of prescribing technical solutions directly, I may ask questions that encourage exploration. More importantly, I increasingly manipulate the practice environment itself. If a player is struggling with serving aggressively because they are fearful of missing, I may simply enlarge the target space or adjust the constraints of the activity rather than providing a detailed technical lecture. Players often learn more through interacting with environments than through listening to explanations.
This led to another major conceptual shift for me: the coaching is not the drill. The coaching is the design of the environment. Traditional coaching often treats drills as the coaching itself, with coaches constantly searching for the perfect activity or progression. But effective coaching is not about delivering pre-planned routines regardless of player behaviour. It is about observing players in real time and shaping environments that encourage more effective interactions with the game.
That may involve manipulating space, altering scoring systems, changing constraints, or guiding players’ intention and attention toward different informational variables. The role of the coach becomes less about controlling movement and more about designing environments that invite adaptive behaviour.
Psychological safety also became a major area of reflection for me. Looking back, many of my earlier coaching environments were not psychologically safe. Players were often afraid to fail, afraid to make mistakes, and afraid to say the wrong thing. Fear created dependency. Players became reliant on the coach for solutions because mistakes were constantly highlighted and corrected.
Today, I view psychological safety as central to player development. Players must feel able to explore, fail, experiment, and adapt without fear of constant judgement. Interestingly, this often leads to calmer, more emotionally stable performers. In groups where we have intentionally reduced fear and increased player ownership, we have seen improvements not only in enjoyment and emotional regulation, but also in decision-making and adaptability under pressure.
One of the strongest findings from my systematic review was that coaches frequently struggle to align their stated philosophies with their actual behaviour in practice. Studies combining interviews with direct observations consistently found that coaches often describe themselves as player-centred or exploratory while continuing to rely heavily on directive instruction and tightly controlled practices (Anderson et al., 2021). Importantly, this inconsistency is not necessarily a sign of dishonesty. Coaching behaviour is deeply shaped by culture, systems, and inherited norms.
Stoszkowski and Collins (2016) described coaches as being “more like magpies than filing cabinets,” collecting fragmented ideas, drills, and methods from multiple sources without always critically evaluating whether those approaches align with coherent theories of learning. This often creates coaching environments built upon contradictory pedagogical assumptions, what might be described as a “Frankenstein pedagogy.”
This is why meaningful coaching change is so difficult. Coaches do not simply need more drills or more information. They need opportunities to critically examine their assumptions about learning itself. Without that deeper conceptual understanding, coaches often continue reproducing inherited practices regardless of how much contemporary terminology they adopt.
For tennis coaching specifically, this has major implications. The sport is increasingly discussing concepts such as ecological dynamics, representative learning design, constraints-led coaching, and player-centred pedagogy. However, unless coaches critically examine the assumptions underpinning their practices, meaningful pedagogical change will remain difficult. Modern terminology alone does not guarantee modern coaching behaviour.
Perhaps the future of tennis coaching is not about becoming louder, more technical, or more controlling. Perhaps it is about becoming better observers, better listeners, and better designers of learning environments. Because real coaching is not about performing expertise for parents or players. It is about helping players become adaptable problem-solvers capable of functioning independently when the coach is no longer there.
Ultimately, the most important question coaches may need to ask themselves is not “What drill should I use next?” but rather: “What assumptions about learning are shaping the environment I create every day?”
References
Anderson, R., et al. (2021).
Stodter, A., & Cushion, C. (2017). Coach learning and workplace affordances: Exploring the connections between learning and social structure in sport. International Sport Coaching Journal, 4(1), 7–21.
Stoszkowski, J., & Collins, D. (2016). Sources, topics and use of knowledge by coaches. Journal of Sports Sciences, 34(9), 794–802.
Whelan, S. (2026). How epistemological beliefs of coaches shape coaching practice and decision making (Unpublished MRes systematic review, University of Winchester).
Based on podcast transcript: “The Illusion of Learning in Tennis Coaching.”
