Nobody Told You

The question every tennis family eventually faces — and why most face it too late

By Duey Evans 35 years of elite junior tennis coaching

There is a conversation that happens in junior tennis. It happens in parking lots after tournaments. It happens in hotel lobbies at nationals. It happens in kitchens at 10pm after a flight home from a loss that felt like more than a loss.

The conversation sounds like this:

"We've given everything to this. How do we not know if it's working?"

I have had that conversation with dozens, possibly hundreds, of families over 35 years. It never gets easier to be in. Not because the question is hard to answer. Because it should never have taken this long to ask.

The Ceiling Nobody Mentions

Every junior tennis player has a competitive ceiling. That is not cynicism. That is development reality. The ceiling is not fixed — it moves with training, maturity, physical development, and competitive exposure. But at any given point in a player's development, there is a level where their current game stops winning and starts losing. Consistently.

The system does not tell you where that ceiling is.

It does not tell you when you are approaching it. It does not tell you when the tournament schedule you are running is repeatedly putting your child above it — burning confidence, burning money, and burning the developmental window you cannot get back.

You find out the ceiling the hard way. After years. After the college recruitment conversation that goes differently than you expected. After the ranking plateaus and the coach changes and the equipment upgrades don't move the needle. After the investment has already been made.

The average serious junior tennis family spends between $35,000 and $128,000 per year when you add up coaching, tournaments, travel, equipment, fitness, and recruiting services. Over the course of a junior career — ages 10 to 18 — that is $280,000 to over a million dollars.

Most families will discover their child's competitive ceiling inside that number. Very few will discover it early enough to do something useful with the information.

That is not bad luck. That is a structural failure. And it has been hiding in plain sight for decades.

What the System Was Built For

Junior tennis development in the United States was built for the sport's administrative needs, not for your family's investment decisions.

Rankings are managed by institutions that have organizational interests in how competitive information flows. Data that would help you make smarter decisions about tournament selection, coaching investment, and realistic trajectory planning exists — but it is not aggregated, analyzed, or delivered in a form that serves you. It serves the system.

Coaches — and I say this as someone who has been one for 35 years — are often excellent at developing players and genuinely terrible at communicating development in systematic, verifiable, documented terms. Not because they are hiding anything. Because no one ever built the tools that would make systematic communication possible. A coach's assessment of your child lives in their head. Their development plan for your child exists in conversation, not in writing. Their honest evaluation of your child's realistic ceiling is something they may think about privately but rarely say out loud because the social cost of that conversation is high and the structural support for having it doesn't exist.

So you operate on faith. You trust the coach. You book the tournaments. You buy the flights. You watch the matches. And somewhere around year four or five, you start to feel something you can't quite name.

The feeling is information asymmetry. You are on the outside of a system that holds data about your child's development and has no structural obligation to share it with you in a form you can actually use.

The Competitive Ceiling Problem Is Solvable — But Not the Way You Think

The instinct most families have when development stalls is to change something visible. New coach. More tournaments. Better racket. Different academy. Sometimes those changes help. Often they are expensive rearrangements of the same fundamental problem: nobody has built a systematic picture of where your child actually is, where their ceiling currently sits, and what the gap between those two things actually requires.

The gap analysis is the thing that's missing.

Elite junior development requires three perspectives to align: what the coach sees technically and tactically, what the family can realistically resource and sustain, and what the player understands about their own game and goals. In 35 years, I have almost never seen those three perspectives naturally align. The coach sees one player. The parent sees another. The child experiences a third.

Those gaps are not communication failures. They are structural ones. Nobody built the tool that surfaces them systematically and translates them into a development plan that all three parties can see, verify, and hold accountable.

Without that tool, the competitive ceiling stays invisible until it isn't. And by the time it isn't, the window has usually closed.

The Tournament Schedule Nobody Is Tracking

Here is something concrete.

Elite player development research is consistent on one thing: optimal competitive development requires roughly a 2:1 success-to-failure ratio. Two tournaments where your child is competing at or slightly below their current ceiling — building confidence, executing development work, winning enough to sustain motivation — for every one tournament where they are stretched above it, failing authentically, and learning things that only genuine competitive pressure can teach.

Most families are not tracking this ratio. Most coaches are not either. Tournament selection happens based on what is available, what other families are entering, what is geographically convenient, and what feels ambitious.

Ambition is not a tournament strategy. A 2:1 ratio is.

A child consistently entered above their ceiling does not develop faster. They develop anxiety, avoidance, and a complicated relationship with competition that takes years to unwind. A child consistently entered below their ceiling does not develop either. They develop complacency and a false sense of their own level that the first serious stretch tournament will shatter.

The right ratio, tracked systematically, adjusted quarterly based on actual competitive data — that is a development tool. Nobody is selling it to you because nobody has built the system that makes it possible to track it.

Data That Should Be Yours

There is no shortage of competitive data in junior tennis. Rankings, tournament results, UTR trajectories, peer comparisons across age groups and regions — it exists. It flows through the USTA, through UTR, through ITF platforms, through state associations.

It does not flow to you in a form that is useful for decision-making.

You can look up your child's ranking. You cannot easily benchmark it against the realistic competitive landscape they are navigating. You cannot run a tournament ROI analysis that tells you which events are producing development return and which are producing expensive losses. You cannot access predictive college recruitment modeling based on your child's current trajectory. You cannot compare your child's development pace against a peer group that resembles them developmentally rather than just chronologically.

All of that analysis is possible. None of it has been built for parents operating independently of institutional data systems.

That is not a technology problem. Technology is not the barrier. The barrier is incentive. The same institutional ecosystem that controls rankings also collects entry fees — which means volume participation is structurally rewarded regardless of whether that volume serves your child's development. Independent parents asking hard questions are inconvenient. Dependent parents writing checks are sustainable.

What Systematic Development Actually Looks Like

I want to be direct about something.

What I am describing — cross-perspective gap analysis, systematic development planning, independent competitive data, tournament selection based on tracked developmental ratios — does not exist as a finished product you can purchase today. Some of these tools are in development. Some are conceptual. None of them are fully built.

What I am describing is a framework. A blueprint for what junior tennis development infrastructure should look like if it were designed to serve your family rather than the system.

I am publishing this because families deserve to know the infrastructure is missing. Not because it has already been built.

But here is what I know after 35 years.

The families who get the best outcomes are not always the ones with the most talented players. They are the ones who figured out — usually through expensive trial and error — how to build informal versions of this infrastructure themselves. They found coaches who communicated systematically. They tracked their own tournament data in spreadsheets. They built their own benchmarking from watching other players and asking hard questions at the right moments. They discovered their child's competitive ceiling early enough to make rational decisions about the investment.

They did it without tools because the tools didn't exist.

The families who didn't figure it out — and there are far more of them — spent the same money, loved their children just as much, and found the ceiling the hard way.

The difference was not talent. It was architecture.

The Question Worth Asking Now

If your child is in serious junior tennis development, one question is worth sitting with tonight.

Not "is my child good enough." That question is the wrong question and it will eat you alive.

The question is: Do I have systematic, documented, independently verifiable information about where my child's development currently stands, where their competitive ceiling currently sits, and whether the investment I am making is closing that gap or preserving it?

If the answer is no — and for the overwhelming majority of tennis families, the answer is no — then you are not operating with less information than the system has. You are operating with less information than you deserve.

That is the problem worth solving.

And it starts by naming it.

Duey Evans has spent 35 years developing elite junior tennis players. He is the founder of Communiplasticity Solutions, which is building systematic development infrastructure for tennis families. This piece is part of an ongoing series on the structural gaps in junior tennis development.

If this describes something you've felt but couldn't name, pass it to another tennis family. They are probably having the same conversation in a parking lot somewhere.

If you want to be part of what comes next: [email protected] 469.955.DUEY (3839)