SHORT VERSION Radina Lilova edited probably the most read article that I have ever written. Her version is shorter and no doubt better, but nonetheless, the long version has been published in three different magazines. The new version will soon be published in another magazine that requested it have less words. It first appeared on the web site, THE TENNIS MOM. Short and sweet. Well, not sweet. Brevity! Thanks for the advice. As I have always stated, The wit & wisdom of Steve Smith should be written on a piece of confetti. The article has been translated into several languages, and many of the coaches we are associated with have issued the article to their parents as a mandatory reading. I am honored if it has helped educate tennis parents. Thanks for sharing. Steve Smith PS: The long version has also been edited. I like the long version for the same reason I like full matches over pro-sets. I would recommend not to take any short cuts trying to persuade tennis parents to listen and learn for the long term success of their child. --------------------------------------------------- Why Do Juniors Change Coaches So Often? One short answer is because pros do. Juniors copy pros. A longer answer is the role of the “buyer,” the “seller,” and the “taker.” The “buyer” is the parent(s). The “seller” is the tennis coach. The “taker” is the junior tennis player. Yes, as always, there are exceptions to the rule, but this is how the typical scenario plays out. The buyers have no idea what they are buying. They are writing checks with little or no experience and little or no tennis knowledge. They are, quite simply, under-educated consumers. The seller knows what he is selling and it is not tennis development. He is selling credibility, and credibility is not product knowledge. To be credible means to be believable, not necessarily truthful. To be truthful as a tennis educator, one would need information, and teaching is simply information transfer. Unlike the buyers, the seller has experience, but the seller generally does not have an abundance of tennis knowledge. Actually, it a tragedy how little product knowledge the seller usually has. The seller is a street entrepreneur. In fact,if the seller were selling cars, he could convince the buyers that if they bought a car with no tires they would save money on air. The taker just takes. Private lessons, groups, clinics, camps, and one-on-one fitness sessions. The taker, like the buyers, has little or no experience and little or no tennis knowledge. Also like the buyers, the taker gains experience the longer he is in tennis, but seldom does he truly gain tennis knowledge because the seller does not have it. Note: If there were such a thing as product knowledge, the product, which in this case is tennis, would have to be produced. Players would have to have serves, volleys, specialty shots, the list goes on. Players would have complete games and be “finished players,” which used to mean being able to play the whole court and finish points at the net. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case. First to the buyers. The parents are going down a path for the first time with little or no directions, and siblings are usually close enough in age that their tennis path with coaching is the same as their brothers’ and/or sisters’, meaning they all go through both the bad and the good coaches. The parents can usually only rely on their opinions or the opinion of others on how to evaluate a coach, but the method in most cases has little or no merit because their judgments are not usually based on facts. Coaches are generally 98% people skills and 2% product knowledge, and the buyer loves personality, which is why the upbeat, cheerleading coach full of optimism also has pockets full of money. To the seller. The coach knows his customers are both the buyers and the taker. The coach knows the parents are their kid’s number one fan, and fan is short for fanatical. The parents may not be crazy, but emotions are definitely involved. Often, the parents want their kid to be happy, and this is one of many red flags as Bill Cosby’s statement, “I do not know the key to success but I know the key to failure, make everybody happy,” implies. Parents and players choose what they like and want, not what they need. Usually, the kid with competitive goals often changes coaches, but if he cannot find the right coach, he cannot be competitive at a high level. Unfortunately, however, close to a decade goes by before the parents figure out junior development. By this time their kid is neurologically hardwired with poor technique, and thus has limited tactical options. Through the process, the parents become frustrated because their kid is frustrated. Simply put, the kid is not getting better. If lucky, the buyers may have a coach who is a true teacher of the game, but unfortunately, oftentimes the parents become impatient. They do not understand that developing a fundamentally sound game is like watching grass grow; it takes huge amounts of time and dedication. So, the bopping and shopping on almost all fronts begins. Now to the taker. The junior player typically becomes empowered and entitled, formulating his own opinions on what he wants, the “fast food, instant gratification, I want it and I want it now”. A player wants to be successful, but success is ultimately a delayed gratification process. Becoming an accomplished player is a marathon, not a sprint, taking a decade of 10,000 plus hours just to become a respectful college player. But the player wants to find a shortcut, and even though no shortcut exists, the entrepreneurial coach presents a shortcut through his program and the parents happily write the check. This “shortcut” typically sounds like, “Your kid has upside potential. Your kid is great. We need to advance him. He needs more intense drills, especially footwork, and (of course) more match play.” The coach can easily deliver this action method by pumping out balls and delivering a “busy, happy, good” program because that is what the junior wants. The junior wants to be treated like he is advanced. He wants to accelerate through the “run and gun” approach, and I can tell you from experience that juniors typically do not want to do the basic boring routines of repetitive drills to hone their skills. At training sessions I conduct for parents and players, I always tease that I have been fired by hundreds of kids under the age of twelve. The seller-coach kills the kid with kindness. The only good lesson is a repeat lesson and the motto is “bring them back.” The taker-player does not end up burned out; he is frustrated, which is misdiagnosed as burn-out. The kid is bummed out. He spends four hours a day practicing but starts to plateau. He has hit a wall because the proper foundation for development was not put in place by the coach. Parents should know that with most coaches, coaching is about money and not coaching, but once again, the buyer-parents usually figure it out when it is too late. The tennis teaching industry is now entrenched in a concept called “game-based” approach. There is some positive merit to creating situational, match simulated drills as one would not want to only have “form-based” training (A combination of both is called “principle training.”) The problem is that the buyer-parents and the taker-player want games and not form, which suits the seller-coach who cannot teach proper form anyway. So long periods of time go by, and by the time parents and player stumble on a coach that will skill test, film, chart, and be honest with the kid it is too late. Now the kid must be let go with what he has because it is so, so, so difficult to de-program and then re-program the brain to be more efficient. It is no secret that each year there is a long list of veteran junior players with impressive national junior backgrounds at top universities that have to play at the bottom of their line-ups and only play singles because they were never trained to go to the net. Most juniors do not even get beyond the junior and high school level despite their parents, to make a modest estimate, having spent over six figures on coaching. The buyer-parents should figure out the seller-coach is on a commission. Granted, salary based coaches can cross the line and be too tough and rough, yet the tennis culture is just the opposite when compared with most team cultures. Can you imagine the basketball kid telling the coach that he just wants to scrimmage and, if not, he will not sign up for the next practice? Parents need to do their homework and not fall for the oldest trick in the book. Just because the program has great players does not mean it has great instruction. Even at the grass-roots level, kids are being recruited and given a “back room deal” by the coach. Parents and players think that one improves merely by playing against better players, which is totally not the case. Parents and players need to take a lesson from the great, late John Wooden. The legendary basketball coach had so many thought-provoking quips, one being, “Don’t mistake activity for learning.” Parents and players will often call a drill session a great lesson, but for it to be a lesson, learning has to take place. Before hopping onboard a new program, parents should ask a coach how he learned to coach and who his mentors were. They should ask how long he has coached, who he has coached, and how long he has coached the players he is currently working with. As the great tennis coach Vic Braden always said, “Look for the kid with the least amount of ability, the one who buys the ice-cream cone and puts it on his forehead. If that kid has respectable ball-striking skills, then the coach can coach.” Parents should not fall for the trap of the smooth talking recruiter. They should look long and hard for a developer. Parents should ask about filming sessions, but unfortunately most are far too often worried about the student-teacher ratios and who’s in their kid’s group. Instead of worrying about things like that, parents should seek a system, an organized plan to make sure that improvement is taking place. Accountability and competency are key. Improvement can be measured in many ways, but it is sad when the parents, player, and coach are just looking at the win-loss record and/or the ranking. Tennis is about the acquisition of skill, so find a true coach who can tech skills and stay the course. Now a coach should not be possessive. He should be open to work with other coaches and have the inner circle of their player be open to outside input. Parents should be up-front with the coach and periodically have a meeting to assess the overall growth and development of the player’s game and character. When parents and players become upset with a coach, there is a good chance the coach is right, but they are usually too quick to jump ship. The parents should at least give the problem 24 hours to settle before they address it. Most parents will find other parents that are singing the same song of criticism. Coach swapping becomes like musical chairs, a merry-go-round. The buyer-parents, based on various day-to-day circumstances, can only go so far down the road to find a new coach. It is unlikely the parents go on a national search for another coach when the next seller is right around the corner. But the grass is usually not any greener on the other side. Parents and players seek out someone who will tell them what they want to hear and give them what they want, and when the new coach does not work out, the parents can easily find another coach if the parent lives in an urban area. And so the process repeats itself. I lived in the small town of Tyler, Texas, for ten years, and our small program, in its second five years, produced more state champions than Dallas and Houston combined. I have been in the city of Tampa, Florida, for more than ten years now, and to make an understatement, it is next to impossible to develop players in Tampa because the consumers are so confused with so many coaches to choose from. In a small town, the players and parents have little options, allowing the coach more time to develop a player properly. Go to TennisRecruiting.Net. They provide a great service. Pick a town, small or large, and see where the blue chip players are from. Then find a way to interview, ask the parents of top players a battery of questions. Parents do not talk to other parents with children that have what TennisRecruiting.Net labels a low standard of play. Last year I conducted a coaches’ clinic in Austin, Texas. Among the attendees were approximately a dozen coaches that I trained and have continued to work with for more than twenty years. I asked each of them to make a list of players they worked with from the beginning to the end. It was shocking how short the lists were. My list is short, too. I have a business where my former students, who are coaches, send me players. So I do a great deal of project work with players and coaches on a short-term basis. The local players in Tampa, though, for the most part, do not stay the course I offer. Keep in mind, Tampa is the land of the car-trunk pro. The sparring partner in boxing wears a helmet and a mouth guard. He does not have a speaking part. But the sparring partner in tennis charges so much that he feels compelled to say something, even when he has nothing worth saying. The buyer-parents look at the player right out of college as a shortcut to success. So, overnight, the ex-college player is hired and the coach is fired. The parent is not loyal to the old coach and looks for a quick fix through the young so-called “overnight coach.” What the parents do not understand, however, is that there is no shortcut. On another note, I am a supporter of Quick Start Tennis, but the name is a problem. The turtle wins the race, so I am not a fan of the word “quick” when it comes to player development. Quick to the ball but not so quick to develop life-long tennis skills. Each year I attend junior international tournaments and I see, particularly on the boys’ side, a large percentage of players who have put education on the back-burner to focus on tennis. When the dream of playing the pro tour falls through for these young players, however, it is okay because they have a built-in job. They hit the ball well and the buyer-parents will pay them to pretend they are coaching their kid. I have a kid, who, as a milestone, finished junior tennis ranked #1 in Florida and #2 nationally in the 18’s. Although he is a good player, his national ranking is misleading because of kids who do not play USTA events but play ITF and ATP events instead. Nonetheless, he has an impressive credential to put in his bio. It will get the buyers’ attention and the taker will enjoy hitting with him. So, he has a built-in job as a seller. But the question is if he were to start to coach, would his interest be passion or paycheck? Parents look hard and long for a coach who truly cares about their kid, other kids, and the welfare of the game, but far too many coaches are just parasites living off the game. They had no plan to be coaches but, based on personal circumstances, ended up coaching because the work was easy and the pay was a lot better than minimum wage. In tennis, coaching is easier than teaching. Feeding and hitting balls is a much simpler task than teaching beginners, brats, and boastful ball bangers. One has to be trained to teach. The consumers should know that in the US it takes a day and around one hundred dollars to be certified, but approximately half the people teaching tennis are not certified. Most clubs and camps do not even have an orientation program for staff members. To equate the tennis scenario with baseball terms, the kid has to cross home plate to score, passing through the first base coach and the third base coach. In tennis, we have an abundance of so-called “coaches” who want to be third base coaches because they want to coach the kid who is about to score. This third base “coach” can often be found at local tournaments working as a “merchant of flesh,” passing out business cards to kids who already play at a decent level. In city after city throughout America, coaches fight over a small group of players at the tournament level instead of growing the game by teaching beginners. The consumers should also realize that tennis is not an impulse item like candy bars. If it were, it would be placed by the cash register at the grocery store. Unlike popcorn, tennis cannot be microwaved. To become a really confused tennis consumer, move to Miami, where tennis academies are opening up on every street corner, spreading at a faster rate than 7-11’s. But sadly, this tragic saga will continue. The buyers will buy, the sellers will sell, and the takers will take. I do not foresee the scenario of changing coaches slowing, down only speeding up. The coaching carousel should have seat belts because with each passing year, it spins faster and faster.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 00:27:31 +0000
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