I became a tennis coach by coaching tennis.

That probably sounds obvious, but my route into the profession was very different from the pathway somebody entering coaching today is likely to follow.

In the summer of 1999, I was 16 years old and working on a multi-sport holiday camp at my local sports centre. I had no coaching qualifications and very little formal tennis experience. I’d played with friends, had the occasional lesson and entered a few competitions, but I certainly wasn’t an accomplished tennis player.

Nobody else on the coaching team really played tennis, so I was given the tennis sessions. And because I didn’t know much about coaching tennis, I mostly let the children play. I organised games, set up matches and hit balls with them. Looking back, there wasn’t much sophisticated coaching taking place, but the lead coaches thought I communicated well, organised the children effectively and seemed to have a genuine interest in working with young people.

They suggested I should become qualified and, fortunately for me, they funded the course.

That was the beginning of a coaching career that has now lasted more than 25 years. Since then I’ve completed advanced coaching qualifications, worked in player-development and performance environments, educated and assessed other coaches, studied skill acquisition, and eventually returned to university to research coaching and coach development.

And if someone asks me today, “How do I become a tennis coach?”, my answer is very different from the one I might have given twenty years ago.

Yes, you should become qualified.

But getting qualified and becoming a coach are not the same thing.

How do you become a tennis coach in the UK?

Let’s deal with the practical part first.

If you want to become a tennis coach in Britain today, the LTA has a recognised qualification pathway. The current pathway begins with the Level 1 LTA Assistant qualification, progresses through Level 2 Tennis Instructor and Level 3 Tennis Coach, with more advanced Level 4 and Level 5 pathways available later in a coach’s career.

What you are qualified to do depends on your level. A Level 1 Assistant is trained to support sessions under a lead coach rather than operate independently. As coaches progress, the scope of their role and responsibility increases.

There are also responsibilities that go well beyond whether you can hit a forehand or organise a drill. If you are coaching independently, particularly within recognised club and venue environments, requirements around safeguarding, first aid, criminal-record checks and professional standards are important.

Those requirements matter.

If you are going to work with children and adults and take responsibility for their sporting environment, there should be a minimum standard of competence and safety. Formal coach education therefore has an important place.

What I question is the assumption that qualification is where becoming a coach ends.

In my experience, that’s closer to where it begins.

My first tennis coaching qualification gave me something I desperately needed

Before starting what was then called the Development Coach Award, or DCA, I started volunteering at Wirral Tennis and Sports Centre. I’d go there around my college and sixth-form commitments and help the coaches with their evening sessions. I shadowed them, watched what they did and gradually gained some experience before starting the qualification.

I needed that experience because I was young, shy and considerably less experienced as a tennis player than most of the other coaches on my course.

I actually failed my DCA the first time.

I’m not ashamed of that at all. Given my age, lack of playing background and minimal coaching experience, it probably wasn’t particularly surprising.

My tutor and mentor, Jo Hagan, told me something that stayed with me throughout my career. Because I didn’t have the playing background to fall back on, I needed to make sure the coaching part of my coaching was extremely strong.

That started something in me. I became obsessed with becoming the best coach I could be.

And my qualification helped.

It gave me something I didn’t previously have: structure.

I learned how a coaching session could be organised. I was introduced to the classic hourglass model: assess the player, identify something to work on, isolate it, progress the practice and eventually put it back into the game. I learned feeding frameworks such as hand feeding, racket feeding and live-ball feeding. I learned how to organise players, communicate instructions and build a session with some deliberate progression.

For somebody who had previously largely put children on court and let them play, this was useful. The qualification showed me that coaching could be intentional rather than random.

But there is one word in that sentence that I think is important now.

It showed me how a session could be organised.

At the time, I interpreted it as how a session should be organised.

Those are very different things.

“It’s like a driving test”

I still remember Jo telling me something during my qualification. She said the assessment was a little like taking a driving test. You might not drive exactly like this once you’ve passed, but during the assessment you need to demonstrate certain things to the examiner.

That puzzled me.

I assumed the course was teaching me what coaching was. Why would I demonstrate one form of coaching to become qualified and then potentially coach differently afterwards?

That tension existed surprisingly early in my career.

There was another tension too. I had largely learned tennis by playing it. I’d gone onto court with friends, competed, experimented and gradually become competent enough to play the game.

Then I entered formal coach education and was introduced to an approach where skills were frequently broken down, isolated and repeated before being returned to the game. I was introduced to models such as Fitts and Posner’s stages of learning and to the idea that players needed considerable repetition to establish technical skills.

It felt quite alien compared with how I had actually learned to play tennis.

But I was a novice coach. The people teaching me were the experts.

So I trusted the framework.

After qualifying, I followed the framework religiously

I qualified as a DCA coach in 2002 and became extremely structured in how I worked. My lesson plans were detailed. I knew exactly what I wanted to work on, which practices I was going to use and how I planned to progress them.

But something else was happening alongside my formal education that probably influenced my development even more.

I watched coaches. A lot.

At Wirral Tennis and Sports Centre, there were two banks of courts separated by a balcony. Like most new coaches, I didn’t have a completely full diary, and sometimes I had significant gaps between lessons.

So I’d sit on that balcony and watch.

I watched coaches such as Nick Lawrence, Phil Leighton, Andy Wilkinson and Jo Hagan. I wasn’t just looking at the drills. I was watching how they coached.

I noticed the humour and enjoyment in Phil’s sessions. I noticed the intensity and determination Nick brought. I noticed Jo’s questioning, empathy and compassion. Then I’d go onto court and try some of those things myself.

I effectively assembled my early coaching identity from pieces of other coaches. I would observe something, imitate it, test it on court and gradually blend elements into my own personality.

Looking back, I think I learned more during those hours sitting on the balcony than I did during the formal days of my qualification.

Research into coach learning gives some support to that experience. Work by Nelson, Cushion and Potrac, for example, distinguished between formal, non-formal and informal coach learning and highlighted how much coaches often value learning that happens through experience, observation and self-directed development.

That doesn’t mean observing another coach automatically makes you better.

There’s a trap there too.

I know because I fell straight into it.

I copied.

Success can make coaches believe their methods are right

After qualifying, I became ambitious very quickly.

Like many inexperienced coaches, I was initially given younger beginner players. I’ve always found that slightly strange. We often give our least experienced coaches some of our least experienced players, even though those formative experiences can be enormously important.

A few of the players I worked with progressed quickly and achieved good competitive results. One became a county champion at Orange.

I need to be careful here. I wouldn’t now say, “I produced a county champion,” as though the coach is solely responsible for an athlete’s development.

Players develop within complex systems involving parents, other coaches, competition, maturation, resources, motivation and many other influences.

But at the time, those results mattered to my career.

People started taking me more seriously, and I got a taste for performance coaching. I wanted the next qualification. I wanted to work for the LTA. I wanted performance roles.

So I pursued what was then the Club Coach Award performance route and eventually became a Level 4 performance coach.

There was one problem: my own playing level wasn’t strong enough.

So I went away and worked on it.

I spent huge amounts of time playing people better than me and getting beaten. A lot. But that experience probably improved my understanding of tennis enormously because I wasn’t merely studying shots anymore. I was experiencing how the game actually worked against stronger opponents.

At the same time, I was constantly knocking on Jo’s and Nick’s office doors with questions. I must have driven them mad. I’d arrive with an idea, a problem from a session or something I couldn’t understand and ask what they thought.

Without necessarily calling it this at the time, I was receiving almost daily informal mentoring.

That mattered enormously.

I thought the next qualification would unlock the next level of coaching

I believed becoming a Level 4 performance coach would fundamentally change my understanding of player development.

It did broaden my knowledge. There was more performance planning, annual plans, match charting, momentum and using data to become more specific about what players needed.

But I was surprised by how much of the underlying coaching logic remained familiar.

Observe a problem. Break it down. Develop the component. Repeat it. Put it back into the game.

And some of the sophisticated-looking tools didn’t work as neatly in reality as they did on paper. I would write annual plans, then reality would happen and the plan might need changing within weeks. I’d chart matches, but eventually began recognising that match-charting data weren’t completely neutral. What I recorded depended on what I had already decided was worth looking for.

Then I passed Level 4 and had the qualification I had desperately wanted.

What changed?

Not that much.

I had another certificate and, in some environments, a slightly higher rate of pay. But I didn’t suddenly become a radically different coach.

I remember Phil Leighton saying to me:

“It’s just a piece of paper. You’ll get better at coaching by coaching.”

Twenty years later, I understand that sentence much better.

My coaching started changing before my theory did

Around 2004, I became increasingly interested in game-based coaching and encountered the work of Louis Cayer.

Partly, this happened because game-based coaching made intuitive sense to me. Partly, if I’m completely candid, it probably suited me.

I wasn’t the world’s greatest feeder, and I enjoyed playing tennis. So creating environments where players interacted with each other, or where I played with them, felt more natural than standing with a basket feeding technically perfect balls.

That’s worth acknowledging because coaches don’t select methods purely through objective analysis. Our history, capabilities, mentors, ambitions and environments influence what feels right to us.

I started putting more emphasis on tactics and playing the game, but I still held many of the same underlying assumptions about learning.

Technique came first. Consistency mattered enormously. We developed the skill and then tried to apply it.

For perhaps the first 15 to 18 years of my career, those beliefs were also reinforced by the professional world I desperately wanted to join. I watched LTA coaches whenever I could. I attended performance workshops. I watched people such as Chris Peat, Nick Lawrence and Andy Wilkinson work.

There was considerable emphasis at the time on strong technical fundamentals, movement, athletic development, talent identification and long-term player development.

I wanted to become a performance coach. I wanted county roles. I wanted to work for the LTA. So naturally, the coaches already occupying those environments became models of what I thought good coaching looked like.

That’s something I think coach education needs to understand better.

Coaches aren’t educated only by courses.

We are educated by cultures.

We notice which behaviours are rewarded, which coaches are promoted and which language respected coaches use. We observe what successful programmes appear to do.

Then we absorb those norms, often without ever asking where the underlying assumptions came from.

The question that bothered me for nearly twenty years

There was always one problem.

My players often looked better in practice than they did in matches.

I could spend hours developing technically strong players. We could rehearse movement patterns, produce beautiful strokes and achieve high levels of consistency during practice.

Then competition arrived and everything changed.

Why?

For years I didn’t really have a satisfactory answer.

Then in 2019, one player’s serve forced me to confront the problem properly.

We spent around six weeks preparing for a tournament. I used everything I thought I knew: my coach education, my qualifications, my biomechanical knowledge and my coaching experience.

We worked on the serve in what, at the time, I considered a very thorough and technically informed way.

Then we arrived at the tournament.

The serve disappeared.

Not literally, obviously. But the version of the serve I’d been seeing in practice wasn’t available in the same way when the informational, emotional and competitive conditions changed.

I remember thinking:

What happened?

Why was there such a disconnect between what I saw during practice and what appeared on the match court?

That question changed my career.

Discovering that I didn’t understand learning as well as I thought

I initially enrolled on an online sports psychology course looking for answers.

I’m not going to pretend I immediately understood it. I hadn’t been to university, and academic terminology felt completely foreign. I’d hear a word I didn’t understand, pause the course, type it into YouTube and try to find somebody who could explain it to me.

Then, almost by accident, YouTube’s autoplay served me a presentation by Richard Shuttleworth discussing the Constraints-Led Approach.

I started making notes.

He talked about transfer. He talked about the disconnect between practice environments and performance environments. He questioned whether isolated practice necessarily provided the information athletes needed to develop functional skills for competition.

He discussed constraints.

It felt like somebody was answering the question I’d been asking for years.

And this created a very uncomfortable realisation.

By 2019, I had coached for approximately twenty years. I’d worked with county, regional and national-level players, run successful programmes, completed advanced qualifications and become an LTA coach-education tutor myself.

Yet I had never seriously engaged with the Constraints-Led Approach as a theoretical framework.

More importantly, I had never properly examined transfer as a central skill-acquisition problem.

My education had almost entirely existed inside tennis.

My qualifications were tennis qualifications. My workshops were tennis workshops. The people I observed were tennis coaches. Many of my colleagues were themselves coach tutors operating within the same system.

I knew one world extremely well.

I hadn’t realised how large the world outside it was.

Coach education and coach development are not the same thing

Over the past six or seven years, I’ve come to make an important distinction.

Coach education and coach development are not the same thing.

Coach education matters.

My early qualifications gave me frameworks when I didn’t have any. They helped me organise sessions, made me think about communication, introduced me to theories of learning and provided opportunities to demonstrate a minimum level of coaching competence.

They helped ensure I wasn’t simply walking onto court and behaving randomly.

Modern coach education also has an essential role in ensuring coaches understand safeguarding, first aid, professional responsibility and safe practice.

We should not dismiss that.

There is also evidence that well-designed coach education can positively affect coaches and athletes. Recent systematic review and meta-analytic work suggests coach-education interventions can improve outcomes relating to knowledge, attitudes, behaviours and athlete development, although the size and durability of those effects varies considerably.

So the argument is not that formal coach education is pointless.

The problem arises when we confuse completing education with completing development.

I think qualifications should show coaches how a session could be run, not persuade them there is only one way it should be run.

What does the research say about formal coach education?

Interestingly, many of the tensions I experienced are not unique to me.

Research examining coaches’ experiences of formal National Governing Body education has found that coaches often value programmes more when learning is interactive, when coach educators have strong interpersonal skills, when there are practical opportunities to apply ideas and when reflection is supported.

Some research has also identified concerns about programmes becoming overly focused on technical content, with coaches wanting greater support around how to coach, rather than simply what to coach.

That is an important distinction.

I can reflect critically on my own experience of tennis coach education. I can also say that, even when I delivered my final LTA Level 3 courses in 2025, I personally perceived substantial continuity with some of the frameworks I had encountered much earlier in my career.

But I cannot jump from that observation to claiming that coach education everywhere has failed to evolve.

Indeed, tennis coach development is evolving. Recent work involving ITF coach developers has identified themes around barriers to learning, adaptive expertise and attempts to move towards less traditional forms of coach development.

That is encouraging.

The better question isn’t:

Does coach education work?

It is:

What kinds of coach education help which coaches develop, in which environments, and how does that learning eventually change coaching behaviour?

That is a much more interesting problem.

Becoming a better coach means understanding your own beliefs

Perhaps the biggest change in my thinking has been recognising that coaching isn’t principally about choosing the correct coaching method.

Isolated practice, game-based practice, Constraints-Led practice, conditioned points, basket feeding and live ball are all methods.

None of those labels, by themselves, tell us whether good learning is taking place.

Underneath our methods are our beliefs.

What do you believe skill is? What do you believe learning is? Where do you think information for movement comes from? What do you think the coach’s role should be?

Do you think the coach needs to prescribe the correct movement? Do you believe players learn through accumulating internal representations of techniques? Do you believe movement needs to be stabilised before variability is introduced?

Or do you see skilled action as something that emerges through continuous interaction between the performer, task and environment?

Those assumptions matter because they influence everything else. They influence what you observe, what you correct, what you praise, what you demonstrate, how you organise practice and what you interpret as successful performance.

Research into coaches’ epistemic beliefs — their beliefs about knowledge and knowing — is still developing, but there is evidence that these beliefs form an important part of coaching philosophy and practice.

That’s why collecting another drill is not necessarily coach development.

Sometimes development means changing the lens through which you interpret what you’re seeing.

What does good coach development look like?

Today, I see coach development as something much broader than attending courses.

It happens on court.

You try something and it doesn’t work. You adapt it. A player responds in a way you didn’t expect. You reflect. You change your mind. You speak to another coach and they challenge your interpretation.

Then you go back onto court and explore again.

There is research supporting the importance coaches place on informal and social learning. Communities of practice, professional networks and peer interaction can all provide useful environments for coach development, although simply putting coaches in a group obviously doesn’t guarantee meaningful learning.

Personally, I am currently involved in around half a dozen communities of practice. Some are tennis-specific and many are multi-sport.

Sometimes we’re discussing research. Sometimes we’re sharing practice ideas. Sometimes we’re trying to solve coaching problems.

And occasionally we’re simply there because someone has had a terrible session and needs to speak to people who understand.

Those conversations matter.

Look outside your sport

One of the biggest recommendations I’d give coaches now is to deliberately leave the intellectual bubble of their own sport.

Over the past six years, some of the most influential ideas I’ve encountered have come from people working in football, jiu-jitsu, boxing, swimming and other sports.

Why?

Because underneath the sport-specific details, we’re often dealing with similar questions.

How do humans learn? How does perception guide action? How much information should a coach provide? What does representative practice look like? How do we manipulate difficulty? How do athletes adapt? How do we help without making performers dependent on us?

If every person you listen to learned from the same qualification system, attends the same workshops, uses the same vocabulary and holds broadly similar assumptions, it becomes very difficult to notice the assumptions you’re all sharing.

Sometimes you need someone outside the room.

Watch other coaches, but don’t copy and paste

I would still recommend that every developing coach spends serious time watching other coaches work.

I did it for hundreds of hours.

But I would do it differently now.

Don’t watch somebody successful and conclude:

“That’s what good coaching looks like, so I’ll do that.”

Watch more carefully.

What does the coach appear to be trying to achieve? How do the players respond? Who is doing most of the talking? What happens after a question? Does the practice change behaviour? How representative is the task of the problems players actually experience?

When does the coach intervene? When do they leave the player alone?

What might work because of this particular coach’s personality that would look ridiculous if you copied it?

Observe.

Don’t clone.

I spent years copy-and-pasting elements of coaches I admired. Some imitation is probably inevitable in the early stages of development.

But eventually, you need to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Let other coaches watch you

Observation should work in both directions.

Invite somebody onto court and let them watch you coach. Ask what they noticed, but remember that their feedback is still an interpretation. It isn’t objective truth simply because another coach said it.

I also video a lot of my coaching.

Watching yourself back can be uncomfortable, but it can also be incredibly useful. When I’m coaching live, my attention is inevitably directed towards certain things, which means I miss others.

On video I can watch the interaction again.

How long did I talk? What happened after I gave feedback? Did the player actually respond to my question? Did my intervention improve the task or interrupt it? Did I give the player enough time to solve the problem before stepping in?

Research on video-supported reflection suggests it can deepen coaches’ self-awareness and stimulate changes in practice, although video and behavioural measures can never capture every aspect of the coaching context.

The video isn’t the answer.

It’s another source of information.

Reflection doesn’t have to be academic

My Tennis Coaching itself started as reflection.

When I discovered the Constraints-Led Approach in 2019, I wanted somewhere to document what I was learning and what happened when I tried different ideas on court.

So I started sharing.

An Instagram account followed, then a website, then courses, communities, mentoring and eventually a coach-education business.

None of that was the original plan.

Initially, I was simply trying to understand my own coaching.

That’s still something I recommend.

Write things down.

What happened today? What surprised you? What didn’t work? What assumptions did the session challenge? What might you change next time?

Research into reflective practice suggests structured reflection can help coaches develop deeper awareness of their own practice, although reflection itself is a skill and simply writing a diary doesn’t automatically make someone a better coach.

Again, the important part is not performing the activity.

It’s what that activity changes.

Do tennis coaches need to read academic research?

No, I don’t think every tennis coach needs to become an academic.

But if you’re going to spend your career helping human beings learn, I think it’s reasonable to become curious about human learning.

For most of my early career, I had never read an academic paper.

In 1999, accessing research was considerably more difficult for the average grassroots coach. Journals were often accessed physically through universities and libraries, and academic research felt distant from everyday coaching.

In 2026, that gap has narrowed dramatically.

I can access research from my phone. Researchers discuss their work publicly. There are podcasts, lectures, open-access papers and academics engaging directly with practitioners online.

When I started exploring research seriously in 2019, I could barely make sense of many papers.

That’s okay.

You learn.

If a term doesn’t make sense, look it up. If a paper is difficult, read something introductory first. I frequently recommend Rob Gray’s How We Learn to Move as an accessible route into contemporary thinking about movement and skill acquisition.

But don’t replace one authority with another.

Don’t stop blindly copying tennis coaches and start blindly copying academics.

Question the research too.

Look at what was actually studied. Who participated? What was measured? What alternative explanations exist? What can the study reasonably tell you about your coaching context?

Being evidence-informed is not the same as collecting references to prove that you’re right.

So what should I do after I qualify as a tennis coach?

Get on court and coach.

Make mistakes. Watch other coaches. Let other coaches watch you. Video yourself. Reflect. Find good mentors. Join communities where people can disagree with you constructively. Work with different ages, levels and types of players. Play the game yourself. Listen to people outside tennis. Read.

Learn enough about human learning to recognise that coaching theories exist beneath coaching methods.

And perhaps most importantly, keep questioning why you coach the way you coach.

Formal qualifications remain important. They establish a minimum level of competence, provide structure, create professional and safeguarding standards, and give new coaches somewhere to begin.

But don’t mistake the starting point for the destination.

More than twenty years ago, Jo Hagan told a shy young coach without much of a tennis-playing background that if he wanted to succeed, his coaching needed to be the strongest part of what he did.

Phil Leighton later reminded me that the qualification itself was only a piece of paper and that I would become better by coaching.

It has taken me most of my career to properly understand what both of them were telling me.

You don’t have to have been a great tennis player.

But if you want to become a great tennis coach, getting qualified is only the beginning.

The real development starts when you step onto court and become curious enough to keep questioning what you think you know.