Maybe We Need to Rethink the Question
For the first 18 years of my coaching career, I believed very strongly in the idea of tennis fundamentals. It was what I had been taught on coach education courses, what experienced coaches around me reinforced, and what I subsequently passed on to the players I coached.
The fundamentals were normally presented as technical building blocks. A beginner needed the correct grip. They needed to understand a unit turn. They needed to split step. They needed to learn open and closed stances. On the serve there were certain positions I wanted to see, and on the forehand there were particular shapes and swing paths I considered important. On the volley, I was taught things like stepping across with the opposite foot.
These movements were not simply described as useful solutions. They were presented as the foundations of the game.
The analogy was nearly always the same. You would not build a house without strong foundations, so you should not build a tennis player without strong technical foundations either. Once those foundations were established, the player could gradually add complexity, creativity and their own individual style on top.
It sounds completely logical. I certainly believed it for a long time.
However, over the past seven years, as I have spent more time studying skill acquisition, motor development, ecological psychology and ecological dynamics, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the assumption hidden inside that analogy.
The question is not whether grips matter. It is not whether technique matters. It is not whether movement quality matters.
The question is why those particular movements have to come first.
And perhaps an even better question is: fundamental to what?
What are the basic fundamentals of tennis?
If you search online for the basic fundamentals of tennis, you will normally find a fairly predictable answer. Forehand, backhand, serve, volley and footwork will usually sit near the top of the list. The assumption is that beginners should learn the techniques underpinning those strokes before progressing towards rallies, tactics and competitive play.
I would answer the question differently now.
For me, the first fundamentals of tennis are understanding the relationship with the game itself. A player needs to begin developing an understanding of how a point starts, how it ends and what they are actually trying to achieve against another person.
Tennis begins with a serve. The serve has to travel into the diagonally opposite service box. The point then continues until somebody cannot make a legal return. Somewhere within that relationship, the player begins to discover that they can make life more difficult for the person on the other side of the net.
They can stretch an opponent by sending the ball away from them. They can jam an opponent by taking away the space they need to move or swing comfortably. They can manipulate height, speed, spin, direction and depth to create different problems.
Those are the relationships I want a beginner experiencing from their first lesson.
Technique still matters enormously within that process. What I no longer automatically assume is that a particular technique has to be isolated, mastered and stored before the player is allowed to experience the problem that gives the technique its purpose.
That is a much stronger claim, and one I think we should examine far more carefully.
What is actually fundamental about a fundamental movement skill?
Karl Newell asked almost exactly this question in his 2020 paper, What are Fundamental Motor Skills and What is Fundamental About Them? [1]
Newell argued that the word fundamental is often used too loosely in motor development. He proposed that, for a movement to genuinely be considered fundamental, it should satisfy several criteria, including a degree of uniqueness, near universality of its functional outcome and the capacity to influence a broad range of later perceptual-motor skills.
On this basis, Newell proposed a much smaller set of truly fundamental movements emerging through early development around upright posture, locomotion and object interaction. He contrasted these with the much larger collection of activities that are often labelled fundamental movement skills throughout childhood. [1]
That distinction matters when we bring the conversation into tennis.
Running is important. Throwing can be useful. Catching, balancing, jumping and developing physical capacities can all contribute greatly to a child’s development. I do not think any serious coach, regardless of methodology, would argue otherwise.
But that does not automatically establish a particular tennis grip, stance, backswing or volley step as a universal prerequisite for playing tennis.
Nor does it establish that a child must master those movements before they are exposed to the game.
Those are separate arguments.
Becoming a parent changed how I saw movement development
The research changed my thinking, but watching my own son develop made some of these ideas much easier to understand.
When he was around two years old, I took him onto a tennis court. He had never had a tennis lesson. There was no demonstration, no grip correction and no explanation of the contact point. I gave him a racket and a ball.
He walked towards the net and gently tapped the ball over.
That obviously does not prove that children do not need coaching. It does not demonstrate that explicit instruction has no value. What it did show me, though, was how readily a child could perceive an opportunity in the environment and organise some kind of movement solution around it.
I saw the same thing in his general movement development.
The developmental story we often hear is presented quite neatly: crawl, walk, run. My son never really crawled in the conventional way. He shuffled on his backside and eventually moved into walking.
As he grew stronger, I also noticed new actions becoming available to him. He began climbing differently, jumping differently and experimenting with movements that he simply did not have the physical capacity to produce six months earlier.
Nobody needed to install those movements into him. His developing strength, balance and coordination interacted with the opportunities available in the environment.
Again, one child does not overturn developmental science. But watching that process helped me understand why I had become sceptical of viewing movement development as a perfectly linear staircase where one fixed skill must always be completed before the next can emerge.
Do fundamental movement skills still matter?
This is where I think we need to avoid moving from one extreme to another.
There is evidence suggesting that proficiency in some fundamental movement skills can be related to performance in more complex movement tasks.
Pacheco and colleagues investigated Seefeldt’s well-known proficiency barrier hypothesis in children aged seven to ten. They examined a series of fundamental movement skills, including running, hopping, leaping, kicking, catching and stationary bouncing, and looked at their relationship with a more complex dribbling task. Their findings provided some evidence consistent with a proficiency barrier and suggested that particular movement components may influence performance in more complex tasks. [2]
So I would not argue that fundamental movement skills are irrelevant.
The more interesting issue is what we infer from that relationship.
If being proficient at running and bouncing contributes to performance in a task that combines running and bouncing, that tells us something potentially important about dependency.
It does not necessarily tell us how to teach.
This is a distinction I think coaches often overlook. Evidence that one capability contributes to another does not automatically prove that the first capability must be isolated, perfected and assessed before the second can be practised.
In other words, dependency does not automatically establish pedagogical sequence.
A capability might influence another capability without requiring us to construct the coaching pathway as: learn this first, master it, then progress to that.
That is one of the most important distinctions in this whole discussion.
Capacity is not the same as tennis skill
I would make a similar argument when we talk about physical development.
Would I rather have a player who can move quickly than a player who cannot? Of course. Greater speed can make new opportunities available. Strength may increase the player’s potential to generate force. Mobility can change the positions they can access. Improved balance or coordination may increase the range of possible movement solutions available to them.
But greater capacity does not automatically equal greater tennis skill.
A player can become stronger in the gym without automatically serving faster. A child can become very proficient at throwing without that automatically producing a better tennis serve.
There may be useful relationships between those activities. There may be shared physical demands or coordination features. What we should be much more careful about is assuming transfer.
If my objective is to help somebody learn to serve, then serving exposes them directly to the informational and coordinative demands of serving. Throwing might support that process in some way, but it is much harder to justify the claim that throwing must come first because it will automatically transfer into serving.
That is where I think the language around fundamentals sometimes becomes too confident.
The evidence in sport is much less certain than the coaching claims
This becomes even more interesting when we look at the broader skill-acquisition evidence.
Choo and colleagues reviewed 130 randomised controlled studies across 29 sports. At first glance, that sounds like a huge evidence base. [3]
But the review also identified substantial limitations in what we currently know. The literature was heavily skewed towards inexperienced participants, controlled conditions and relatively closed sporting tasks, with golf particularly overrepresented. Transfer testing was also relatively uncommon compared with immediate performance measures. [3]
That does not make the research useless. Far from it.
What it should do is make us cautious when saying things like, “Science shows beginners have to learn this way.”
The evidence base for sport skill acquisition is still developing, and much of it does not perfectly reflect the type of open, opponent-dependent and highly variable environments players encounter in sports such as tennis.
The certainty of our coaching language is sometimes much stronger than the certainty of the evidence supporting it.
Why isolated practice can create an illusion of learning
This is where traditional fundamental practice can become incredibly convincing.
Imagine I am teaching a complete beginner a forehand. I stand beside them with a basket of balls and repeatedly feed the same type of ball into roughly the same area. The player knows what shot is coming. They know where to stand. They know which movement I am looking for.
Within ten minutes, they can look significantly better.
Within twenty minutes, the movement can become more consistent.
For the coach, this feels like very successful learning. The player feels improvement. The parent watching from the side can see improvement.
But the question is: what exactly has improved?
Motor-learning research has long distinguished between performance during practice and learning that persists, retains or transfers into another environment.
When uncertainty and variability are stripped away, performance can improve rapidly because the player is solving a much narrower problem. When we place them back into a more representative environment, however, the movement has to reorganise around different information.
The ball arrives higher. Then shorter. Then wider. The opponent changes direction. The player is moving. There is a score. The timing changes.
Suddenly the stroke that looked beautifully stable in the basket-fed drill does not always appear quite as stable.
That does not mean the isolated practice created no learning. It means practice performance alone is not sufficient evidence that we have created adaptable tennis skill.
That distinction matters enormously when we talk about fundamentals.
Does the evidence show that beginners need a linear approach first?
The short answer is no. But it also does not show that nonlinear pedagogy is always superior.
Bromilow and colleagues’ 2025 systematic review compared linear and nonlinear pedagogical approaches in team-invasion sports. Only nine studies met the inclusion criteria, so the evidence base remains relatively small and is not tennis-specific. [4]
For most technical outcomes, the review found no significant differences between the two approaches. Nonlinear pedagogy appeared more favourable in some technical outcomes and showed a stronger pattern across tactical outcomes, but the authors were appropriately cautious and called for further high-quality research. They also raised important questions about the representativeness of the assessment instruments used. [4]
I think that nuance is important.
The review does not allow us to say nonlinear pedagogy has been proven superior.
What it does make harder to justify is the claim that technical skill must necessarily be developed through a linear, technique-first pathway before players can benefit from more representative problems.
Chow and colleagues provide another useful example. In their 10-week intervention with 224 students learning football, the nonlinear-pedagogy condition showed improvements across several game-performance measures, while fewer improvements were observed in the linear condition. However, the transfer effects were not as strong as the researchers expected, and the authors themselves concluded that both approaches may have a role depending on the context. [5]
Again, the evidence is more nuanced than the slogans.
It does not tell us to abandon technique.
It does not tell us that anything goes.
It does suggest that the assumption “technique first, game later” should not simply be treated as established fact.
Simplifying the game rather than removing the game
This is probably the biggest practical change I have made in my work with beginners.
Traditionally, I would often decompose the task. I would remove the forehand from tennis, remove the opponent, remove most of the variability and practise the movement separately. The intention was to stabilise the technique before gradually putting it back into the game.
Now I am much more likely to simplify the task while trying to preserve the relationship that makes it tennis.
The court can become smaller. The ball can become slower. The net height can change. Starting positions can move. The scoring system can be manipulated. The number of possible actions can sometimes be reduced.
But I still want the player to perceive something meaningful and act in relation to it.
That is the distinction I make between task decomposition and task simplification.
Task decomposition simplifies the movement by removing significant parts of the performance environment. Task simplification reduces the difficulty of the game while trying to preserve important information–movement relationships.
These are not simply different drills.
They reflect different assumptions about what skill is and how it develops.
Parry and colleagues make a similar conceptual argument in their 2025 paper on opposed and unopposed practice. Their article is a theoretical ecological-dynamics rationale rather than an intervention trial, so it should not be treated as empirical proof. Their central challenge, however, is directly relevant here: the traditional assumption that technical skills have to be acquired through repeated, unopposed practice before they can be applied to dynamic sport environments should not be accepted unquestioningly. [6]
That was exactly the assumption I held for nearly two decades.
What would I actually do with a beginner?
I want them experiencing tennis from the beginning.
That does not mean placing a four-year-old on an adult court with a yellow ball and telling them to get on with it. That would be a poor interpretation of representative practice.
It means scaling the game until the relationship becomes manageable.
I might use a small court, a slower ball and very short distances between players. I might allow an underarm serve initially. I might change the scoring or simplify how a point begins.
But the player is still experiencing something recognisably tennis-like. Someone starts the point, the ball crosses the net, another person reacts, and eventually the point ends.
From there, I can begin to shape intention.
Can you make the other player move?
Can you send the ball away from them?
Can you jam them by sending the ball towards their body?
Can you make the ball travel higher?
Can you make it travel deeper?
Once those problems exist, technique begins to have a reason.
Technique still matters
This is one of the areas where ecological approaches are sometimes badly misrepresented.
Saying that technique can emerge and adapt within representative problems is not the same as saying technique does not matter.
Of course it matters.
If a player is standing deep behind the baseline and repeatedly driving every ball extremely flat with a horizontal swing path, that may limit what they can achieve in certain situations.
If their intention is to create greater height, spin and depth from a defensive position, a different movement organisation may be more effective.
The coaching question then becomes how we help the player discover and calibrate that solution.
Explicit instruction might sometimes help. A demonstration might help. A question might help. But so might changing the task.
I could increase the height the ball has to travel over. I could increase the required court depth. I could change the scoring so that short balls become less valuable. I could ask the player to explore different trajectories and compare what happens.
I am still coaching technique.
The difference is that I am coaching technique in relation to the function it serves.
Repetition is still essential
Another misconception is that ecological coaching rejects repetition.
It does not.
Players need enormous amounts of experience. They need touches. They need errors. They need successes. They need repeated opportunities to calibrate what they are doing.
The difference is that I am less interested in asking them to reproduce one identical movement again and again.
Bernstein’s idea of repetition without repetition is useful here. The player repeatedly solves the same type of problem, but the exact movement solution is not identical every time.
Take the serve.
Rather than requiring a beginner to reproduce one model serve from one fixed position, I might let them explore serving from slightly closer or farther away. They might serve wider, narrower, higher, slower or faster. They might push one ball and strike another.
The purpose remains recognisable: start the point by sending the ball into the service box.
The movement solutions can vary.
Over time, the player begins discovering which solutions are more effective and efficient under different conditions.
That is calibration.
The player is not simply learning what my preferred serve looks like. They are learning what different actions do.
What about bad habits and injury?
This is one of the most common objections I hear.
If we do not teach the correct technique early, won’t players develop bad habits? Could they even become injured?
I think we need to separate several issues.
If a movement is causing pain, creating a genuine functional limitation or repeatedly preventing the player from achieving their intentions, then of course I am interested in changing it.
Ecological coaching does not mean preserving every movement a player happens to produce.
But unconventional is not the same as dysfunctional.
Players have different bodies, different strength levels, different mobility, different histories and different action capabilities. A movement that looks unusual compared with a coaching model is not automatically evidence that the player is unsafe or technically deficient.
Biomechanics can help us enormously here. It can help us understand forces, loading patterns, joint positions and plausible mechanisms of performance or injury. What it cannot generally do is take a single unconventional-looking stroke and tell us with certainty that the player will become injured because they do not match a preferred model.
So the question becomes functional rather than aesthetic.
Does this solution work for this player, in this situation, under these constraints?
So what are the fundamentals of tennis?
This is where my thinking has changed most.
I do not think we necessarily need to throw the word fundamentals away.
I think we need to redefine it.
For me, the most fundamental thing is that a player understands the game they are playing. They should know how the point starts, how it continues and what causes it to end.
They should begin to understand that tennis is an interaction with another player. Winning a point means creating a problem that the opponent cannot solve successfully.
Sometimes that means stretching them away from the middle of the court. Sometimes it means jamming them and removing their space. Sometimes it means manipulating speed, height, spin, direction or depth.
Technique sits inside that process.
The player needs lots of experiences hitting balls. They need volume. They need variability. They need opportunities to succeed and fail. They need to calibrate movement to changing problems.
That, to me, is a much more useful way of thinking about the fundamentals of tennis.
Maybe the house-foundation analogy is the wrong metaphor
The more I think about it, the more problematic the house analogy becomes.
A house does not adapt while you are building it.
A tennis player does.
A house does not perceive an opponent.
A tennis player does.
A concrete foundation is valuable precisely because it stays fixed.
Skilled movement has to change constantly.
A forehand a child produces on a red court is not exactly the same coordination problem they will experience several years later on a full court against a much faster opponent. The player is different. The environment is different. The task is different.
Experience matters. Physical development matters. Previous learning matters.
But I no longer think skill development is best understood as laying a static technical foundation and stacking more complicated tennis on top.
The metaphor sounds intuitive.
I am just not convinced it accurately describes how skill develops.
What should coaches change tomorrow?
If I were working with a beginner tomorrow, the first question I would ask myself would not be, “Which technique must I teach first?”
I would ask, “What relationship with tennis do I want this player to experience first?”
Then I would simplify the environment until that relationship became achievable.
I might shorten the court. I might slow the ball down. I might alter the equipment. I might change the starting position or the objective.
But wherever possible, I would preserve the reason the movement exists.
I would still give the player plenty of repetitions, but I would not confuse repetition with manufacturing the same movement again and again.
I would let them explore. I would let them experience different ball flights, different positions, different opponents and different movement solutions. I would help them understand what the ball can do and how their actions change what becomes available next.
Technique matters throughout that process.
The difference is that technique becomes a solution to the problem of playing tennis, rather than a prerequisite for being allowed to experience tennis in the first place.
And the next time somebody tells me:
“You have to teach the fundamentals first.”
The question I would still ask is:
Fundamental to what?
References
[1] Newell, K. M. (2020). What are fundamental motor skills and what is fundamental about them? Journal of Motor Learning and Development. DOI: 10.1123/jmld.2020-0013.
[2] Pacheco, M. M., Dos Santos, F. G., Marques, M. T. S. P., Maia, J. A. R., & Tani, G. (2021). Transitional movement skill dependence on fundamental movement skills: Testing Seefeldt’s proficiency barrier. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 93, 718–727. DOI: 10.1080/02701367.2021.1912691.
[3] Choo, L., Novak, A., Impellizzeri, F. M., Porter, C., & Fransen, J. (2024). Skill acquisition interventions for the learning of sports-related skills: A scoping review of randomised controlled trials. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 102615. DOI: 10.1016/j.psychsport.2024.102615.
[4] Bromilow, L., Milne, N., Woods, C. T., Dowsett, C., & Keogh, J. W. L. (2025). The effectiveness of linear and nonlinear pedagogical approaches in team-invasion ball sports: A systematic review. Sports Medicine – Open, 11. DOI: 10.1186/s40798-025-00893-y.
[5] Chow, J. Y., Meerhoff, L. A., Choo, C. Z. Y., Button, C., & Tan, B. (2023). The effect of nonlinear pedagogy on the acquisition of game skills in a territorial game. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1077065. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1077065.
[6] Parry, T. E., Myszka, S., Yearby, T., O’Sullivan, M., & Otte, F. (2025). The value of opposed and unopposed practice: An ecological dynamics rationale for skill development. Quest, 77, 80–100. DOI: 10.1080/00336297.2024.2420759.
