Notes from the Field: The Expert Gets a Turn

Finding the balance between drawing knowledge out and putting knowledge in

Yesterday I wrote about what I found when I recorded my own tournament debriefs. I asked players good questions. Then, a few seconds after they answered, I'd step in and improve the answer before I knew how far they could have taken it themselves. The phrase I came away with was talk later. Not talk less. Talk later.

Today I got another chance.

The tournament was Little Mo Nationals, where every player is 12 or younger, with brackets running from 8 and under up to 12 and under. One of our players had just won a match that got much more complicated than it needed to be. He was up 5-2 in the second set, lost three straight games, let it get tight at 5-all, and then closed it out. He told me it was the biggest tournament of his whole life. He also isn't used to having a coach at his matches at all, let alone one who asks him to recall what happened instead of telling him what the coach saw. I knew what I wanted to work on before we sat down. His feet. The test for me was whether I could keep from starting there.

Better, and then the same

So I asked him what he experienced. He said he'd been winning by a lot and then lost three games in a row. When I asked what was going on during that stretch, he said he started to push a little bit. Then he added two words.

"It worked."

Yesterday I probably would have explained why it worked. Today I asked what his evidence was. He told me what changed on the other side of the net. His opponent started going for big shots.

That's a real answer. He wasn't just describing what he did. He was connecting an adjustment to something he saw.

Here's where the tape gets honest with me. My very next sentence was, "So you noticed when you went into keep-the-ball-in mode, his mode changed to a way that wasn't helping him a lot." His word was push. Keep-the-ball-in mode was mine. His reply was "Yeah."

The same three seconds. Better question, same habit.

The run of yeses

I asked whether the pushing was a purposeful test. He said yeah. I added that it wasn't just a nervous reaction. I asked what information the test gave him, and he said the opponent missed. Did that have him doing more of it? Yeah. Did it give him confidence? Yeah.

Four questions, and three of the answers were one word. Every one of those questions had its answer built in. He didn't have to think. He only had to agree.

Some of that was on purpose. If I had stuck to open questions and waited for him to fill the space, he wouldn't have said much, and I wouldn't have had enough to work with. So I tried to draw out what lived closest to the surface for him, and then shifted into a mode he knows, one where the coach leads and the player responds. For a kid meeting this kind of debrief for the first time, those yeses kept him in the conversation.

A few minutes later he agreed with something else. I asked whether he was playing to win or playing not to lose at the end. Not to lose, he said. Was that just because he was nervous? Yeah. So in one debrief the pushing was a purposeful test and not a nervous reaction, and the ending was nerves. Those can't both be the whole truth. Both were him agreeing with the way I asked.

But the tape still has something to say about them. A yes-or-no question feels like dialogue. The player is talking, the coach is asking, and from the outside it looks like the kid is doing the thinking. On tape, a lot of it is teaching with a question mark attached. "Did you peek at the finish line?" "Were you playing to win or playing not to lose?" Those questions contain my model. Sometimes that's exactly what I want. With a kid who's new to this, it may be most of what the first few debriefs can hold. I just can't count those answers as discovery.

Where he found it himself

The best moments came from questions he couldn't answer with yes.

When I asked how he got ahead 5-2, he said, "By going for the shots." That's his own diagnosis of the first set, and it quietly explains the second. When I asked when he started playing not to lose, he said 5-2, then corrected himself to 5-4. I would have guessed 5-3. I took his answer, because it was his match and he was the one inside it.

Then I asked what else he noticed. He said his serve was really big today. Could he place it? Yes. Did he place it? No, with a big smile on his face. Why not? He was trying to hit it as hard as he could. I didn't tell him any of that. The two questions just put his answers side by side where he could see them. He also volunteered, without any prompt, that at 5-all he started hitting second serves to make sure the ball went in. I still couldn't help tacking on my version, something about not putting himself under pressure. But the observation was his.

Expertise isn't the problem

This is where I need to be careful not to overcorrect.

Some things he wasn't going to find on his own. One was what I call peeking at the finish line. At 5-2 he started thinking about winning, and then about his next match. Players do this all the time. The match stops being the thing in front of them and becomes the thing standing between them and whatever comes next. The body is still on court, but the attention has already left. He didn't bring that up, and I don't think he was going to. He hasn't watched enough players walk up to that line. I've watched them for thirty-five years.

The other was his feet. He told me his opponent didn't play any differently. From where I sat, the opponent gave away a lot of free points hitting wide early and stopped doing it later, so my player had to work harder just as his movement got lazy and nonchalant. At the very end his feet got sparkier, and I think that's what closed the match. If they'd split sets, I'd already planned to tell him the third set was going to be all about his feet.

So I told him. And I don't think that was a failure of the process. The problem I saw yesterday was never expertise. It was expertise arriving before I knew whether it was needed.

There's a version of player-centered coaching that turns into a performance by the coach. Keep asking. Never tell. Make the athlete discover everything. I don't believe in it. If a player has the pieces, I want to give him room to put them together. If his explanation doesn't hold, I want to challenge it. If he's hit the edge of what his experience lets him see, I should teach. Pretending I don't know something useful wouldn't make me a better educator. It would just make me less useful.

One moment made that especially clear. I asked if he does the same thing when he gets way ahead in a game. He said no. I said, "Yes, you do." Up 40-15, he lets up, the opponent gets a point or two back, sometimes all the way to deuce, and then he snaps out of it and fights. That's a case where the player's self-report isn't enough. But I didn't just tell him what it cost. I asked him to estimate how many extra points he played because of it and how many shots were in an average point, then turned his own numbers into the extra running he'd signed up for without meaning to. He did the arithmetic on his own habit.

A sequence for the coach

Yesterday I landed on a sequence for the player: recall, notice, interpret, test, choose. Today showed me the coach needs one too. Elicit what the player already sees. Test what he thinks it means. Supply what experience lets me see and he can't yet. Then return it, so he has to do something with it.

The return is the piece I keep skipping. With his feet, I got it right. After I laid out what I saw, I asked him how he was going to keep his feet sparky for an entire match. Right about then his dad pulled the car around, but at least the question landed in his lap and not mine. With peeking at the finish line, I named the idea, he said "present" when I asked where he needed to stay, and I asked how he does that. Then, before he could answer, I moved on to playing to win versus playing not to lose. I supplied. I never returned.

Naming a concept doesn't teach it. The player has to find it in his own match. When did it happen? What changed? What would staying present have looked like at 5-3? Until he answers questions like those, I've given him a label, not a tool.

Why this happens in the field

This isn't only about making me a better coach. If elicit, test, supply, return holds up, it's something other coaches can learn, and eventually something a system can help carry.

Software companies have a job called the forward deployed engineer. Instead of building the product back at headquarters, this engineer works on site with the customer, on the customer's real problems. The job is to find out what the product can't handle yet and bring it back.

That's my job in this work. The larger goal is guidance that observes, asks and adapts the way a good coach does, without depending on one coach being in one conversation. AI will be part of how that scales. But nobody can design it from a desk. Somebody has to run the process on real kids under real pressure, record it, and report what broke. Some of what breaks isn't the method. It's the conditions. Most junior players have never been asked to reconstruct their own match. As more of our coaches run the same kind of debrief, players will get used to it and better at it. The system has to train its users too.

The last two days read like a requirements list written in tennis. A system has to know where the player's thinking stops before it adds anything, and it can't trade the player's words for its own. It can't treat a yes as understanding. When it names an idea, it has to hand the idea back. A system built without those lessons would make my mistakes faster, and at scale.

There's one difference from the software version. A forward deployed engineer usually tests someone else's product. I'm testing my own, which is exactly why the recorder matters. My memory would go easy on me. The tape doesn't.

A different standard

I think today's debrief was better. Not because I held back more, but because I was more deliberate about when I came in, and for a few stretches he did real work. He connected an adjustment to evidence, caught the gap between how hard he served and where it went, and named his own conservative serving at 5-all.

The tape also shows I'm not there yet. I translated his words within seconds, again, and I introduced an idea and walked away from it. The closed questions are a different matter. They were a choice, and for now I'd make it again. This is a process, and it won't happen in one match. Nobody in this draw is older than twelve.

The goal isn't independence from coaching tomorrow. It's gradual independence over a season. The player should take on more of the process, and my part should get more precise. Less filling. More extending.

Yesterday I was watching the three seconds after the answer. Today the tape pointed me at the question before it. A question the player can answer with "yeah" is still me doing most of the talking. With a kid like this one, I'll need some of them for a while. The job is to need fewer of them each time.