My Own Transmission Gap

I spent years writing about coaches who could not pass on what they knew. I described a coach who read a point better than almost anyone in the sport and never learned to explain the read to the players he trained. I described another who saw a gap in his own program, built a fix for it, and watched the fix sit unfinished the moment his calendar pulled him away. Both pieces made the same argument. The knowledge was real. The person holding it was real. What never existed was anything built to carry that knowledge past the person who had it.

I wrote those pieces before I let myself apply the same diagnosis to my own record.

What I Built and What I Didn't

In 2000, I founded the Carolina Youth Tennis Foundation in Charlotte. It took real effort to get there. A 501(c)(3), a lot of paperwork, a lot of hours spent convincing people the idea was worth funding. CYTF was the umbrella organization, and for a long time, the actual work happened under it at Midcourt Tennis Academy. The purpose was straightforward. Elite-level tennis development costs more than most families can pay on their own, and CYTF existed to close that gap, so kids with real potential weren't shut out by their parents' income.

That was the whole plan. A place. A way to fund it. Nothing beyond that.

I didn't build CYTF with any intention of it outlasting my own involvement. I didn't leave with a plan for what came after me. Nobody had been given a plan for succeeding me, because I had never built one. That's not a criticism of whoever inherited it. Within a year of my departure, the organization I had spent years building went quiet. It was never formally dissolved. It simply stopped operating and eventually lost its 501(c)(3) status, which might be the worse ending. Nobody made a decision to end it. It just stopped being anything.

The Diagnosis I Missed in My Own Case

I could tell you the CYTF story the easy way. Funding dried up. Leadership changed. Nonprofits are hard to sustain. All of that is true, and none of it is the real answer.

The real answer is the one I had already written about in other people's programs and somehow missed in my own. What I built at CYTF was a place and a funding mechanism. What I never built was a way for the judgment behind that place, the thousand small decisions about which kid needed what kind of push, which family needed a different conversation, which failure was actually progress in disguise, to exist anywhere except inside me. When I left, that judgment left with me, because I had never built anything for it to live in besides my own presence. For as long as I was there, my presence looked like a system. It wasn't one. It was just me, filling the gap a system should have filled.

This is the same problem underneath what I've called the Alcott Dilemma elsewhere. Individualized development is the most effective method there is, and it has never been the kind of thing that survives past the one person doing it, unless somebody builds the structure that lets it survive. CYTF didn't fail because I picked the wrong person to hand it to, or because nonprofits are inherently fragile. It failed because I never built the structure that would have let the judgment move, and no successor, whoever it had been, was going to reconstruct on their own what took me decades to develop.

Why This Matters Now, Beyond the History

I'm telling this story now because I'm in a position where the same failure is available to me a second time, and I would rather name it in advance than run into it again in five years.

The version of me that could physically demonstrate what I know on a tennis court is gone. That's not a complaint. It's a fact about where I am, and it's forcing a question CYTF let me avoid. If the judgment doesn't leave the court with me physically anymore, does it leave the sport entirely once I'm no longer available at all? Or is there a way to build the structure I skipped the first time, deliberately, before I need it, instead of assuming it will exist because I care enough to want it to?

I don't have the full answer worked out in public yet. I have something I'm testing quietly, and I'll walk through what it actually looks like in the next piece. What I do know is this: caring about whether something outlasts you is not the same as building something that can.