The Cost of Being There

I know the cost of asking coaches to be at tournaments because I paid some of it myself.

In 2001, my family was living in Charlotte. My wife was pregnant with our middle daughter. I was in Macon, Georgia, at a junior tournament, when the phone rang at one o'clock in the morning. She was going into labor. I don't need to describe what that call felt like, or what it means to be in another state when it comes in. That's the trade, in one sentence.

For a long time, I treated being at junior tournaments as part of the responsibility I'd accepted. Looking back, I can also see that responsibility competing with others I'd accepted at the same time, ones that didn't come with a schedule I could plan a season around.

I wrote in the last piece about junior development sitting near the masthead of who I was for more than 30 years, and about the trade coaches make when they choose that path. I want to go a layer deeper here, because "there's a cost" is easy to say and easy to nod at without actually pricing it out. The cost is specific. It has a shape.

What the Weekend Actually Costs

Tournament weekends land on exactly the hours most people use to hold a life together. Saturday and Sunday are when marriages get tended to, when kids get raised, when family shows up for each other, when friendships survive because somebody made the time. A coach who is seriously committed to junior development spends a lot of those hours somewhere else: in a car, in a hotel, courtside through a rain delay, in conversation with somebody else's child about somebody else's forehand. That's not a complaint. It's an accounting.

There's an economic cost sitting right next to the personal one. I wrote about Charlotte in the last piece, about the different market I found there compared to Atlanta, and the logic underneath it. A coach can spend Saturday and Sunday teaching private lessons and get paid for every hour of it, or spend those same hours driving to a tournament and watching kids compete for nothing. Both choices are rational. They just optimize for different things. If the business model rewards court hours, tournament observation looks like a bad use of a weekend even when it produces real developmental value. Nobody has to be lazy or uncaring for that math to win.

Choosing Differently Doesn't Mean Caring Less

None of this means a coach who stays home on Saturday is making the wrong call. It might be the healthier one. Kids grow up fast. Marriages need attention on a schedule nobody controls. A coach who protects that time is not failing the profession.

But the developmental trade is still real, whether or not the choice to skip it was the right one. If the people responsible for a player rarely see that player compete, something goes missing from the picture, the same something I wrote about in the first piece: what a player chooses under pressure, not just what they're capable of in a lesson. Acknowledging the cost of being there and acknowledging the value of being there aren't in conflict. They're both true at once, and pretending otherwise doesn't make either one go away.

From "I Need to Be There" to "The System Needs to Be There"

For most of my career, my answer to this problem was simple: I need to be there. That model works, right up until it doesn't. It works until the phone rings at one in the morning and you're in another state. It works until a coach burns out, or a marriage frays, or a program loses a good coach because the job quietly demanded every weekend for a decade.

A better answer isn't asking coaches to carry more. It's building a system where somebody responsible for the developmental process is there, and where whatever gets learned actually makes its way back into the plan. That's a different model entirely, and it's the one I think programs need to build toward.

In practice, that looks like a handful of concrete choices. Tournament coverage can rotate across a staff instead of resting on one primary coach's back every single weekend. A program can decide in advance which tournaments, which players, or which developmental transitions actually warrant somebody courtside, instead of treating every event as equally worth the trip. An observer, a tournament coach, or an advisor can stand in for the primary coach with clear boundaries around what they're there to do. What gets seen needs to be captured in some structured way, not left to whatever gets remembered in a hallway conversation or relayed secondhand through a parent. The debrief with the player needs to preserve the player's own voice instead of burying them in match-day correction. And the observations need an actual path back to the primary coach, so what happened Saturday shows up in the plan by Monday instead of evaporating somewhere between the parking lot and the next lesson.

Courtyard, Again

The same weekend, at Courtyard, I was there to support Rhiannon Evans on her first assignment as an ATA tournament coach, and I was also watching a player I'll call John Joseph, or JoJo for short, since he's a currently competing junior. His primary coach wasn't at that tournament. He didn't need to be, because the system was.

Before the weekend, Rhiannon had been given an IEDE Sideline Card I'd built for coaches working L5 and L6 events (download it here). Its first instruction was simple: keep the player inside the loop. It gave her a structure for checking a player's intention before the match, watching without over-coaching once it started, asking short questions instead of giving speeches at the changeover, and debriefing afterward around what the player was trying to do and where it held up or fell apart.

That's mostly what I watched happen. Rhiannon asked players about their intentions before matches, reconnected them to work they'd already done in training, supported the reset routines they'd practiced, and sat with them afterward to talk through what happened. I watched JoJo, sent his primary coach what I saw, and made clear that they were observations, not prescriptions. What to do with them was his call. None of that required the primary coach to give up his Saturday. It required a program that had already decided somebody would be there to catch the most coachable moments the match produced, and that whatever got learned would find its way back to him.

Not Martyrdom, Architecture

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a story about sacrifice, about the coach who never misses a weekend and pays for it in the parts of life that don't show up on a résumé. That's not the standard I'm arguing for. Glorifying the coach who's never home isn't a solution. It's just the old problem wearing a hero's costume.

The standard isn't "the primary coach must always be there." It's "the developmental system needs a way to be there." Those sound similar. They aren't. One asks a single person to keep absorbing a cost that eventually breaks something, whether it's a marriage, a friendship, or the coach's own capacity to keep doing the job well. The other asks a program to build something sturdy enough that the value doesn't disappear just because one person, for good reasons, chose to stay home.

This is exactly what I want Beyond the Card to provide: a way for the developmental process to have a presence at competition through three functions, observe, debrief, transfer, without requiring the primary coach to be the one who pays for it every time.

If the product a program sells is court time, tournament observation looks inefficient. Nobody's getting billed for a Saturday spent watching somebody else's lesson play out on a match court. But if the product is actually player development, the calculation changes completely, because the information sitting inside that match is part of the developmental product, whether the program has built a way to collect it or not.

I made it back to plenty of matches over the years, and I missed plenty of moments that mattered more. I did make it back to Charlotte that day. My daughter was born shortly after I got there.

I didn't know it yet when the phone rang in Macon at one in the morning, but it was Rhiannon being born back in Charlotte, the same Rhiannon who spent that Courtyard weekend on her first assignment as an ATA tournament coach, doing part of the work I once believed I had to do myself for every player I was responsible for. I'm not claiming I planned any of it. It doesn't settle the account, either. Twenty-five years doesn't work that way. But it's taken me most of that time to see that the value of being there doesn't require the same person to keep paying for it every time. We can build it differently.