Ecological dynamics has become one of the most discussed ideas in modern sports coaching, but it is also one of the most misunderstood. Mention the term to a tennis coach and there is a reasonable chance the response will be something along the lines of, “Isn’t that the approach where you don’t coach? You just set up a game and hope the players figure it out?”
I understand why that misconception exists. Those of us who talk about ecological dynamics have probably contributed to it. Social media rewards short, provocative statements. “Basket drills don’t work.” “There is no perfect technique.” “Stop telling players what to do.” Those phrases can start useful conversations, but without context they can make ecological dynamics sound like a rejection of coaching itself.
That is not what ecological dynamics is.
In relatively plain English, ecological dynamics is a theoretical framework for understanding skilled behaviour through the relationship between the individual and their environment. It brings together ideas from ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory, and in sport it asks us to consider how movement, decisions and skilled behaviour emerge through the interaction of the performer, the task and the environment.
For a tennis coach, that creates some very different questions. Instead of immediately asking, “What is wrong with the forehand?” we might ask, “What is shaping this forehand?” Instead of asking how we can make a player repeat one supposedly ideal movement more consistently, we might ask whether they can adapt their movement to the changing information available in a match.
That shift sounds subtle, but once you start following it through, it changes almost everything about coaching.
Ecological dynamics is not a coaching method
This is probably the first thing coaches should understand. Ecological dynamics is not a new collection of tennis drills. It is not a toolbox where you replace basket feeding with games, add a few constraints and become an “ecological coach”.
It starts much deeper than that.
Every coaching method contains assumptions about how people learn, even if the coach has never consciously thought about them. Coaching is rarely theory-neutral. If I believe the player needs the correct movement stored and reproduced, it makes sense for me to demonstrate that movement, explain it, repeat it and correct deviations from it. If I believe the coach possesses the solution and the player needs to acquire it, my coaching behaviour will naturally reflect that belief.
Ecological dynamics starts from different assumptions. The performer is not viewed simply as an empty vessel waiting for the coach to fill them with information. Skilled behaviour is understood through the continuously changing relationship between performer and environment. Different players bring different bodies, histories, intentions, emotional states, capabilities and experiences into the same task, so the same problem may not produce the same movement solution.
This is why changing towards ecological coaching is much harder than learning five new games. You are potentially challenging some of the beliefs on which your entire coaching career has been built.
The role of the coach changes, but it does not disappear
One of the laziest criticisms of ecological dynamics is that the coach becomes redundant. If players self-organise, why have coaches at all?
I would argue the opposite. Good ecological coaching requires enormous skill because the coach’s expertise moves away from simply providing answers and towards designing learning environments.
A more traditional coaching model often positions the coach as the expert who has the solution. The coach demonstrates, explains, identifies an error and prescribes a correction. There may then be repetition until the player can reproduce what has been shown.
An ecological coach is still an expert, but the expertise looks different. They observe how the player interacts with the task. They identify what information might be guiding behaviour. They manipulate the environment. They change space, scoring, equipment, opposition, rules or intentions. They listen to what the player is experiencing and then shape the next challenge.
This does not mean an ecological coach never speaks, never demonstrates or never gives instructions. Language itself changes the behaviour of a learner and can therefore act as a constraint. The issue is not whether the coach is allowed to communicate. The more interesting question is what that communication is trying to achieve.
Am I telling the player exactly what solution they must reproduce, or am I helping them become more sensitive to the problem they need to solve?
Those can produce very different coaching environments.
Does ecological dynamics mean technique does not matter?
This is another question I am asked constantly, and I increasingly think it is the wrong question.
Traditional tennis coaching often separates performance into technical, tactical, physical and psychological components. We then work on those components independently. We have technical sessions, tactical sessions, fitness sessions and mental training. Technique itself can become something that belongs to the player independently of the situation in which it is being used.
Ecological dynamics challenges that separation.
The movement solution I organise is influenced by what I am trying to achieve, what my opponent is doing, where I am standing, how quickly the ball is travelling, my physical capabilities, my emotional state, the score and many other interacting constraints. From that perspective, technique cannot be completely separated from the context that produces it.
So rather than asking, “Does technique matter?”, I would ask:
What is shaping the movement solution I am seeing?
Imagine a player whose forehand suddenly becomes shorter and more restricted during competition. A conventional explanation might be that their technique has broken down under pressure. An ecological coach might look more widely. Has the player’s intention changed? Are they now frightened of missing? Has the opponent taken away time? Has their court position changed? Is the ball arriving differently? Has their attention shifted towards protecting the result rather than attacking space?
The visible movement is still important, but it becomes part of the evidence rather than automatically being treated as the cause of the problem.
That is a very different way of looking at technique.
Every coach uses constraints
The phrase constraints-led coaching has become a buzzword. I hear coaches regularly describe themselves as constraints-led because they change court sizes, introduce rules or use scoring systems.
The slightly uncomfortable truth is that every coach uses constraints.
A basket feed is a constraint. A technical demonstration is a constraint. Telling somebody to finish their racket over their shoulder is a constraint. Marking a target on the court is a constraint. The racket itself is a constraint.
The Constraints-Led Approach is an applied framework grounded in ecological dynamics, where behaviour emerges through interacting individual, task and environmental constraints. Research and theoretical literature typically describes these as performer or organismic constraints, environmental constraints and task constraints.
The important difference is therefore not simply whether we constrain. It is what we are constraining for.
I often describe this as the difference between constraining to constrain and constraining to afford.
A traditional coach might manipulate a drill to encourage one specific movement. Perhaps they basket-feed a predictable ball and repeatedly ask the player to finish their racket over their shoulder because they believe this will produce a longer swing and therefore greater depth.
An ecological coach may start with the actual tennis problem instead. Perhaps the opponent is continually stepping inside the baseline because the player’s ball does not push them backwards. Instead of prescribing the follow-through, I can create a practice that makes depth more valuable. I might increase the space available behind the opponent, manipulate the scoring, change where the opponent can start or otherwise exaggerate the opportunity to keep them deeper.
The environment now invites certain behaviours without guaranteeing one movement solution.
That word affordance is central to ecological psychology. In simple terms, affordances are opportunities for action that exist in relation to what a performer can actually do.
The constraint highlights the opportunity. The player still has to find a way of acting on it.
The ecological language is difficult, but it matters
Ecological dynamics has a language problem. Terms such as affordances, attunement, perception-action coupling, self-organisation and representative learning design are not terms most tennis coaches encounter during their initial qualifications.
It is tempting to remove all the terminology and simply replace it with easier coaching language. I understand that temptation, but language matters because these words describe ideas that are often fundamentally different from the assumptions sitting underneath more traditional coaching language.
Fortunately, coaches do not need to understand everything immediately.
If I were starting again, I would probably begin with Representative Learning Design because it gives coaches something tangible to examine in their own sessions.
Representative Learning Design asks us to consider whether practice retains the information and functionality that matter in the performance environment. The concept was introduced into sport by Pinder and colleagues, who argued that learning environments should preserve important information-movement relationships and action fidelity from competition.
In tennis, Lyndon Krause and colleagues later applied Representative Learning Design directly to common tennis practice tasks and developed the Representative Practice Assessment Tool, or RPAT, to examine how practice design changes behaviour compared with match play. Their study found meaningful differences between common practice tasks and competition, illustrating why the way we design tennis practice deserves attention.
That gives coaches a very practical starting point.
What information is available in my practice?
Is there an opponent?
Does the player’s action affect what happens next?
Is there a meaningful consequence?
Are the ball and racket interactions similar to the problem I eventually expect the player to solve?
You do not have to understand every aspect of ecological psychology before asking those questions.
Representative practice does not mean “just play matches”
This is another misconception.
If representativeness is important, why not simply play matches all day?
Because practice has a different purpose.
The match court tells us what is currently happening. Practice allows us to manipulate particular problems so players can explore more functional solutions. The aim is therefore not to create a perfect copy of competition every second of every session.
For me, coaching works from the match court backwards.
Something happens in competition. Perhaps my player continually allows an opponent to dominate after a short second serve. I bring that problem back onto the practice court and try to recreate enough of the relevant information for the player to work on it. I may exaggerate certain aspects, manipulate scoring or change space, but I still want the player’s actions to be connected to the opponent and the consequences of their decisions.
Representativeness should also be thought of as a continuum rather than a binary label of representative or non-representative.
Sometimes a player is overwhelmed by the amount of information available. We might deliberately simplify the task. Occasionally we might even temporarily decouple part of the problem to draw attention to something very specific.
Learning can occur in those environments.
The important caution is what we expect that learning to transfer to. Ecological theory gives us strong reasons to expect transfer to be more difficult when the information supporting the movement in practice differs significantly from the information available in competition. Representative Learning Design therefore concerns the potential for transfer rather than providing a guarantee that a highly representative task automatically creates better players.
The problem with basket feeding is therefore not that touching a basket somehow destroys learning. It is when low-representative practice becomes the dominant learning environment while we assume the movement produced there will simply reappear unchanged when the opponent, score, uncertainty and variability return.
Perception and action belong together
This brings us to another intimidating phrase: perception-action coupling.
A more traditional explanation of tennis often sounds relatively linear. See the ball, process the information, decide what to do and then send a command to produce the movement.
Ecological psychology takes a different theoretical position. Perception and action are considered continuously coupled. As we move, we create new information; that information continually shapes our next action. Sport research using ecological accounts therefore focuses heavily on the relationship between information and movement rather than treating perception and action as completely separate stages.
Think about the difference between an experienced tennis player and somebody playing for the first time.
A beginner often looks late. They wait until the ball has crossed the net, sometimes even until it has bounced, before organising meaningful movement. They run too close to the ball, get caught behind it or appear surprised by something that an experienced player anticipated much earlier.
The experienced player has developed sensitivity to a much richer range of information. They might be sensitive to the opponent’s position, racket orientation, movement, ball trajectory, their own court position, the score, environmental conditions and how all of those things relate to their current intention.
This growing sensitivity to useful information is what ecological approaches describe as attunement. Experienced performers tend to become better attuned to information that supports functional action.
That has an important coaching implication. If we continually remove the opponent and the information they provide, we should at least question how the player is supposed to become better attuned to that information.
You cannot become sensitive to information that is never available.
Ecological dynamics is not brain denial
Discussions around perception-action coupling sometimes get dragged into a false argument that ecological dynamics believes the brain does nothing.
That is not a useful representation.
The brain is obviously vital. The theoretical disagreement concerns the role we assign to it in explaining skilled action. Ecological accounts challenge models that require stored internal representations or a central executive to calculate and issue every movement command, instead explaining behaviour through the continuously coupled performer-environment system. Contemporary ecological scholarship continues to debate exactly how cognition, knowledge and neural processes should be understood within that account.
For coaches, we do not need to turn every session into a philosophy seminar. The practical consequence is more important.
Instead of thinking exclusively about what is happening inside the player, start paying more attention to the relationship between the player and the world they are acting in.
What information are they using?
What are they trying to achieve?
What opportunities do they currently perceive?
How is the task shaping their movement?
Those questions often lead somewhere more useful than simply saying their brain needs to process the ball earlier.
Self-organisation is not magic
Self-organisation may be the most misunderstood ecological concept of all.
It can sound like some kind of Jedi coaching principle: place the player on court, disappear into the clubhouse and trust that the human system will magically find perfect technique.
That is not what self-organisation means.
In dynamical systems approaches, coordinated behaviour can emerge through interacting constraints without every component of the movement being individually prescribed. Ecological dynamics applies this idea to the performer-environment relationship.
You experience versions of this every day.
Stand up and walk across the room. You do not consciously calculate the required angle of every joint before taking each step. If you encounter stairs, your movement changes. Walk uphill and it changes again. Walk on a slippery surface and you reorganise.
Tennis players are constantly doing the same thing.
Watch Carlos Alcaraz hit ten forehands and you will not see ten identical movements. One ball is higher. One is wider. One arrives faster. One requires him to defend. Another affords attack. His intention changes and the movement changes with it.
The variability is functional.
This connects nicely with Nikolai Bernstein’s well-known idea of repetition without repetition. Skilled performers repeatedly achieve task goals, but not necessarily through identical movement patterns because the conditions surrounding every action continually change.
Self-organisation does not mean every movement that emerges is automatically optimal, efficient or safe. Human systems can settle into solutions that coaches may want to help destabilise or improve. The ecological distinction is that we do not assume we already know one universal movement that should replace it.
We manipulate the problem and observe how the player adapts.
Sometimes good coaching deliberately destabilises skill
Traditional practice often aims to stabilise performance. When a player finally produces the movement the coach wants, we repeat it. Then repeat it again. The goal is often to make that solution increasingly permanent.
Ecological coaching is frequently interested in adaptability instead.
If a player can solve one problem comfortably, I may deliberately change the problem. I might alter the ball, score, opponent, space or intention so the existing solution is no longer quite enough.
That does not mean making practice random for the sake of variability. The challenge should still relate to something meaningful in tennis.
The aim is to expand the player’s solution space.
Can the forehand function when stretched wide?
Can it function when jammed?
Can it create height?
Can it take time away?
Can it absorb pace?
Can the player organise something completely different when the situation demands it?
That is a very different definition of consistency. Rather than asking whether the player can reproduce an identical movement, I become interested in whether they can consistently achieve functional outcomes across changing conditions.
What does an ecological tennis session actually look like?
From the outside, potentially not very exciting.
It may look like people playing tennis.
That is partly where the criticism comes from. Because ecological coaches try to retain key information such as opponents, rackets, ball trajectories, decisions and consequences, many activities superficially resemble normal points.
The difference is often hidden in the design.
Perhaps one player’s court is wider because I want to afford more opportunities to stretch the opponent. Perhaps the score rewards winning before the ball bounces because I want players searching for opportunities to move forward. Perhaps one player can steal their opponent’s points if the ball bounces twice because I want both players becoming more sensitive to attacking and protecting space.
The players are playing tennis, but they are playing within a carefully manipulated problem.
The ecological coach is therefore not inactive. They are often hands-off but eyes-on. They are watching how players interact with the practice, whether the intended behaviour is emerging and whether the constraint is doing what they thought it would do.
And sometimes it will not.
That is coaching.
Ecological coaches need information from their players
Another major change is communication.
If every performer perceives their environment relative to their own capabilities and experiences, the coach cannot assume they have perfect access to what the player is perceiving.
The coach sees the practice through the coach’s history, knowledge and biases. The player experiences it differently.
That makes collaboration important.
However, this is where coaches moving towards ecological approaches often make another mistake. They stop giving instructions and instead ask 400 questions.
Even worse, the questions are often instructions disguised as questions.
“Did you notice your opponent was standing over there?”
“Do you think you should have moved forwards?”
“Could you have hit cross-court?”
We already know the answer we want. We are simply waiting for the player to say it.
I find questions such as “What did you notice?”, “What made you choose that shot?” or “What seemed most important to you there?” far more informative.
Now I might discover something I did not know.
Perhaps the player did not perceive the space I thought was obvious. Perhaps they saw it but did not believe they could exploit it. Perhaps a completely different source of information was dominating their attention.
The player’s answer helps me design what happens next.
That is very different from using questioning as another way to deliver my solution.
You cannot copy and paste ecological coaching
This is why downloading an “ecological tennis drill” from Instagram misses the point.
A practice is not ecological because an ecological coach designed it.
The practice only makes sense relative to the people interacting with it, the problem being addressed and the information it creates.
A constraint that works brilliantly with one player may do virtually nothing with another. A scoring system that highlights an affordance for an experienced player may overwhelm a beginner. The behaviour you expected might not emerge at all.
There is no ecological recipe book that removes that uncertainty.
In fact, uncertainty is part of what makes coaching interesting.
I have been coaching increasingly through an ecological lens for around seven years and I still design practices that completely fail to produce what I expected. Players do things I never anticipated. Constraints create behaviours I had not considered.
That is not necessarily evidence that ecological dynamics has failed.
Sometimes it is evidence that my prediction was wrong.
That distinction requires the coach to lose some ego.
Where should a coach start with ecological dynamics?
I would not recommend finishing this article, throwing every basket away, cancelling all technical coaching and announcing that Monday’s session will now be completely ecological.
Start considerably slower.
The first step is probably nothing to do with drills. Write down what you genuinely believe about learning.
Where do you think skill exists?
What do you believe your role is?
Do players primarily learn because you give them the correct information?
Do you believe demonstrating an ideal model gives them something they can reproduce?
When a player performs well, what do you think has changed?
When the performance disappears in competition, how do you explain that?
There is no point writing what you think an ecological academic wants you to write. Be honest. Your actual coaching behaviour will expose those beliefs eventually anyway.
At the philosophical level this touches both ontology, assumptions about the nature of skilled behaviour and performer-environment relations, and epistemology, assumptions about knowledge and knowing. You do not need to become a philosopher to coach tennis, but you do need to recognise that changing your drills without examining those underlying assumptions will usually produce traditional coaching wearing ecological clothing.
Change one practice, not your entire programme
Once you have started questioning your assumptions, take one practice you already use.
Do not throw it away.
Look at the information available.
Perhaps it is a serve practice with no returner. Could you introduce one?
Perhaps it is a basket-fed forehand practice. Could an opponent now produce the ball?
Perhaps there is no consequence attached to the action. Could you introduce a score or some value?
Make one change.
I developed my Representative Practice Assessment Scorecard for exactly this reason. It takes ideas from Representative Learning Design and the tennis work of Krause and colleagues and turns them into ten practical questions coaches can use to look at their own practice design. If you score an area red, you do not need to rebuild the entire session. Change one red and observe what happens.
That is already a significant step.
Then reflect on yourself, not just the player
The third thing I would recommend is filming your coaching.
Not to analyse the player’s forehand.
Film you.
Watch how quickly you intervene. Listen to the questions you ask. Notice how often you provide solutions. Look at whether the environment is doing the heavy lifting or whether you are still relying on continuous explanations and demonstrations to create the behaviour you want.
Ask yourself whether you are genuinely constraining to afford opportunities or simply using ecological terminology while constraining players towards your preferred answer.
That reflection can be uncomfortable.
It should be.
I still have sessions where I realise I talked too much, manipulated the wrong variable or became impatient and gave the player the solution because it was easier.
Seven years into this rabbit hole, I am still learning.
That is partly the attraction.
Two places I would start reading
If you want to understand ecological dynamics properly, eventually you have to move beyond Instagram clips and coaching slogans.
A very accessible starting point for coaches is Rob Gray’s How We Learn to Move: A Revolution in the Way We Coach & Practice Sports Skills. It was published in 2021 and provides an approachable bridge between skill-acquisition research and applied coaching.
For coaches wanting to go deeper into ecological psychology itself, Julia J. C. Blau and Jeffrey B. Wagman’s Introduction to Ecological Psychology: A Lawful Approach to Perceiving, Acting, and Cognizing provides a contemporary introduction to ideas including affordances, perception-action, self-organisation and dynamical systems.
Neither book will give you a neat list of tennis drills to copy on Monday morning.
That is probably a good thing.
What coaches should really know about ecological dynamics
If there are three things I would want a coach to remember, the first is that ecological dynamics begins with beliefs about learning, not practice design. If you still fundamentally believe your job is to possess the correct solution and transfer it into the player, adding opponents and constraints will not suddenly make the coaching ecological.
The second is to start small. Take one existing practice and make it slightly more representative. Retain one piece of useful information that you currently remove. Introduce an opponent. Add a meaningful consequence. Allow a genuine decision. Then watch what changes.
The third is to reflect constantly. Ecological coaching is not about becoming the coach who now has the correct theory. That would simply replace one form of certainty with another. Humans are complex, practice is messy and we should expect players to surprise us.
For me, that is probably the biggest change ecological dynamics has made to my coaching.
I used to feel that being a good coach meant having the answer.
Now I am much more interested in whether I can design a useful problem, observe carefully and help the player discover what the environment affords them.
That does not make the coach less important.
It changes what coaching expertise looks like.
And perhaps the best place to begin is not by asking, “How do I become an ecological coach?”
Start by asking:
“What do I actually believe about how people learn?”
Your answer to that question will probably tell you far more about your coaching than the drills you currently use.
If you want a practical place to begin, you can also download my free Representative Practice Assessment Scorecard. Take one practice you currently use, put it through the ten questions and identify one area where important match information may be missing. Do not change everything at once. Change one thing, watch what happens and reflect.
Listen to me discuss the misconceptions about Ecological Dyanmics with Rob Gray below
