A Poor Decision Executed Well

A child gets pulled wide, runs the ball down, and from a stretched but balanced position rips a screaming winner up the line. The parents on the bench come alive, the kid pumps his fist, and everyone in earshot treats it as the highlight of the day, because the ball caught the line and the point was won, and in tennis the point that is won is the point we celebrate. I want to suggest that the winner you just applauded might have been the wrong decision, and that the applause is the real problem.

From that position, on balance and with a moment to choose, the higher-percentage play was probably to add a little shape to the ball, buy himself time to recover, and roll it back crosscourt, into the longer diagonal where the net is lower and the margin is wider. The line was the smaller target, the riskier choice, and the shot that leaves him most exposed if the ball comes back. He made it this time, cleanly and beautifully, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous, because nothing teaches a child to repeat a choice like watching it work.

A decision and its execution are two different things, and the scoreboard blends them into a single number that hides the difference. When a point ends, most people see only the result, won or lost, and they reason backward from there. If it worked, it must have been right. If it failed, it must have been wrong. That reasoning feels like plain common sense, and it is wrong often enough to do real damage, because the result of any single point is a noisy, contaminated signal. A great decision can lose. A terrible decision can win. A child who learns from the result instead of the choice is learning from the least reliable teacher on the court.

This is the line I keep coming back to with players: a poor decision executed well is still a poor decision. The winner that catches the line does not become a good idea just because it found the corner this time. It was a lower-percentage choice taken over a higher-percentage one that was sitting right there, and if your child files it away as a success, he will reach for it again at four-all in the third set, which is exactly when it will betray him. What we want to train, before anything else, is the quality of the decision. Execution can be cleaned up later. A child who makes good decisions and misses is a child you can coach. A child who makes bad decisions and wins is a child quietly building a habit that will fail him the moment it matters.

Because that distinction is almost impossible to see in the heat of a match, I built a simple chart that pulls the two apart. Five letters run across the top of a page: C, D, I, E, and W. The first two hold the decision. C is for could, as in whether your child could reasonably have played that shot at all, and D is for did, whether he actually played it. The last three hold the execution, and they ask whether the ball landed in, whether the shot was effective and truly troubled the opponent, and whether the point was won. You move through the match one shot at a time and mark where things break down. If your child comes forward behind a ball he never should have approached, the breakdown shows up early, on the decision side, even when he somehow steals the point. If he picks the right ball every time but keeps missing it, the breakdown shows up late, on the execution side. The pattern across a whole match tells you where the work actually lives.

Here is the part I did not fully expect when I started using it. The chart does not require a coach. A parent who has never held a racket can fill it out, because it asks plain questions with plain answers. That turns out to matter for a reason that has almost nothing to do with tennis. Most tennis parents I have known do not struggle because they lack knowledge. They struggle because they are sitting courtside with nothing to do but feel every point in their stomach, and that nervous energy leaks onto the court and onto the child. The chart gives them a job. Instead of riding the wave of won and lost, they are quietly tracking decisions and execution, which keeps them calm, keeps them off the result, and hands the coaching team something genuinely useful at the end of the day.

The chart also teaches a lesson that is hard to teach any other way, which is that you can do everything right and still lose. Sometimes your child makes the correct decision, executes it cleanly, and hits a shot that truly troubles the opponent, and then the net cord knocks it back, or the opponent shanks a ball that dribbles over for a winner. He could have played it, he did play it, it landed in, it was effective, and he still lost the point. When a child can see that laid out on paper, a lost point stops feeling like a personal verdict. It becomes what it always was, one outcome among a hundred, some of which were never his to control.

And sometimes the chart finds the one thing that is broken by showing you everything that is not. I once watched a player whose approach shots were so good that the opponent was forced to throw up a lob on nearly every point. His decisions were right, his approach was executed well, and his shots were effective, yet he kept losing those points, because his overhead was weak, and every good thing he did was only setting up the one shot he could not yet hit. Without the chart, you might tell that boy to stop coming forward, which would be exactly the wrong correction. With the chart, you can see that the approach was never the problem, and that the work is the overhead. The chart does more than judge the point; it tells you what to go practice.

None of this stays on a tennis court. Outcome is the most seductive teacher any of us ever meets, and it is also the most dishonest, because it rewards us for things that happened to work and punishes us for things that happened to fail, with no regard for whether the decision underneath was sound. We do it with the gamble that paid off on luck and call ourselves wise. We do it with the careful plan that blew up and swear off careful plans for good. A child who learns early to separate the choice from the result, to ask whether the decision was good before asking whether the score went his way, is learning something that will outlast every forehand he ever hits.

So the next time your child rips a screaming winner up the line and the bench comes alive, enjoy it, because those moments are part of why we love watching. Then, once the match is over and the noise has faded, ask him the only question that actually helps him get better, which is not whether the ball found the line, but whether the line was where he should have aimed at all.