If You Don't Do This Exercise, Somebody Else Will

I recently spent several weeks working out how to win two markets I have no plans to enter.

I didn't rent courts, hire coaches or call a single family. I picked two places where serious junior tennis already thrives, the San Francisco Bay Area and Charlotte, North Carolina. Then I invented a rival with money, credible leadership and a few years to work, and named it Challenger. The question I gave it was simple. If you were starting from nothing, how would you become the organization families in this city trust most with their child's development?

The exercise started closer to home, with a question about protecting something I care about. It got more interesting once I had nothing to protect.

The Newcomer's Advantage

Established programs hold real advantages over anyone new. They have families, facilities, relationships, credibility and a history of surviving their own mistakes. All of that takes years and money to reproduce.

They also carry something a newcomer doesn't. Commitments.

The courts are already leased. The staff is already hired. Families expect a certain schedule, and revenue depends on that schedule continuing. Some choices made fifteen years ago have sunk so deep into daily operations that nobody remembers they were choices.

Challenger inherits none of that. It gets to ask whether the established programs are solving the right problem, and whether families are buying what those programs think they're selling. Newcomers aren't smarter. They just have fewer reasons to defend yesterday's answers.

I wanted to see what that freedom would show me. I also wanted the markets to be able to tell me I was wrong.

The Bay Area Killed My Favorite Idea

I went into the Bay Area with a theory. A network of smaller sites, spread across a region, should beat one big campus. Bring the program to families instead of making families drive to the program.

The Bay Area isn't one market. It's several smaller ones, separated by geography, traffic and access to courts, with San Francisco, the Peninsula, the South Bay, the East Bay and Marin each behaving like its own territory. Even the regional junior team tennis divisions break along those lines. In a place like that, convenience isn't a feature of the product. It's part of the product.

So far my theory looked good. Then I looked at one of the region's leading high-performance programs. It was founded in 2003, serves hundreds of serious players and already runs on multiple sites. The idea I'd walked in with was already the incumbent's business model.

Market evidence killed my favorite idea, which is exactly what market evidence is for.

Other things surfaced once I stopped defending the theory. Money isn't the gap. Household incomes in the core counties are among the highest in the country, and premium pricing for junior tennis is already normal, so Challenger can't win by being more expensive. Courts aren't simple either. A region can have plenty of courts and still very few a program can actually build a business on, which turns a municipal court agreement into a strategic asset.

What the Bay Area seemed to lack wasn't inputs. It had programs, coaches, clubs, tournaments and private lessons everywhere. What I couldn't find was anyone who clearly owned the whole picture of a single child, across all the places that child trains. The market was organized around places, programs and coaches. Challenger could organize around the player.

That changes the pitch completely. Challenger doesn't need a family to leave its academy or its private coach. It can say, keep your coaches, and we'll help make everything around your child work together.

Charlotte Had the Pieces

Charlotte looked nothing like the Bay Area.

It has a lot of tennis. Large public facilities, a dense network of country clubs, strong junior team tennis participation, several academies and plenty of capable coaches. What I couldn't find, at least from the outside, was one organization that clearly owned serious player development across the whole metro area.

Charlotte is also about to change. In September, the WTA announced it will move its corporate headquarters to Charlotte and hold its season-ending WTA Finals there every November from 2027 through 2029. The state and local governments put close to $20 million in public money behind the deal. It's fair to wonder whether a city that hosts the best women's players in the world every fall will start asking where its own players come from.

In Charlotte, Challenger probably shouldn't replace anyone. The clubs are where families already live their tennis lives, and asking them to leave would be expensive and slow. A better move would be to sit above the clubs as a development layer. Assess the player, build the plan, watch the matches, debrief with the kid, educate the parents and keep the record. Pull the strongest players from different clubs together for periodic training days without asking anyone to switch.

If that worked, a family might end up saying the club is where their daughter trains on Tuesday, and Challenger is who's developing her. Nobody changed programs. The developmental relationship moved anyway.

Two Markets, One Answer

Two markets gave me two different Challengers. The Bay Area version was a network built around convenience and coordination. The Charlotte version was a layer that connected institutions already there, with a flagship facility maybe someday, built for families it already had instead of families it hoped to attract.

Underneath both sat the same opportunity. Own the developmental relationship with the child, not just the hours the child spends on your courts.

That changed what I thought I was building. The valuable skill wasn't designing the best competitor. It was knowing how to figure out what kind of competitor a particular market needs. If headquarters already knows what a new market should look like before studying it, Challenger is doing it wrong.

I'd Already Built It

Charlotte did one more thing to the exercise. It reminded me I'd already run a version of Challenger there.

Years before I came to Austin, my program, Midcourt Tennis Academy, operated Park Road Park under a contract with Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation, with satellites at different times at Colonel Beatty Park and Hornets Nest. We didn't own a facility. Most of the coaching staff were Nigerian former Davis Cup players. In my judgment, it was easily the strongest developmental program in Charlotte.

Ree Ree Li hit her first tennis ball with me when she was seven, and I was her only primary coach for seven years. She went on to captain her team at Yale. I started working with Thai Kwiatkowski when he was nine. He and Ree Ree are three weeks apart in age. Thai went on to win the NCAA men's singles championship.

So the model I'd just sketched for Charlotte wasn't new. Public courts under a county contract, a credible staff, no destination facility, and a program built around developing individual kids instead of filling court time. I'd done it more than twenty years ago, a few miles from the courts I was now studying from a laptop.

If you'd asked me back then what set Midcourt apart, I'd have told you the truth. I worked harder than everyone else, and I understood how to develop a player better than anyone else around.

That was the advantage. It was also the ceiling.

Midcourt knew how to develop players because I knew how to develop players. Nobody could copy the part that made it work, because it lived in one person. We could add coaches and sites, but looking back, I think the further the work got from me, the thinner it likely would have run.

That problem is older than Midcourt. In the 1830s, Bronson Alcott ran a small Boston classroom, the Temple School, built on close attention to each child and constant conversation about what the child was thinking. His methods depended on the kind of attention one teacher can only give so many children. The best ways to develop a person depend on close observation, real dialogue and constant adjustment to the individual. All of it runs on someone paying attention, and attention doesn't multiply just because demand does.

The answer isn't a manual that turns out thirty copies of the founder. Good coaches see different things, and a system should make those differences more valuable instead of sanding them flat. The goal is to keep valuable coaching judgment from disappearing every evening when the coach drives home. An organization full of knowledgeable coaches isn't the same thing as a knowledgeable organization. Midcourt was the first kind. Challenger would have to be the second.

Somebody Else Will

None of this means the programs I studied in the Bay Area or Charlotte are in danger. I don't have evidence for that, and it wasn't the point.

What the exercise showed is how much an outsider can work out with public information, market research, experience and disciplined questions. I came away with credible hypotheses about an opening in each market without talking to a single family in either. Whether those openings are real would take the next round of work, and that round starts with the families. The people running those programs know far more than I do. They have the families, the staff, the numbers and the history.

Those advantages only count if someone asks the questions. Most organizations spend money on problems they can already see. They're less eager to look for problems that haven't happened yet, and the better things are going, the easier it is to decide the exercise can wait. I've run enough organizations to understand that instinct. Something always needs fixing today.

Competitors don't have to wait until you're ready.

I did this with no stake in either market and no interest in hurting anyone. Picture someone running the same exercise with the capital, the ambition and the patience to act on what they find.

Every organization should try to put itself out of business every so often, at least on paper. Not out of pessimism, and not because what it's built is obsolete. The people who understand an organization best are the ones best positioned to see what could replace it.

They also have the most reasons not to look.

If you don't do this exercise, somebody else will. And they may not be doing it to help you.