Sometimes the Adults Are the Intervention

Alignment Series, Essay Three

I've spent a good part of my professional life watching coaches try to fix kids. A player can't concentrate, gets frustrated, or makes poor decisions, so we name the problem and build something to change it. Focus work, emotional control, decision training. I've done plenty of that myself. Some of it worked and some of it probably didn't. And some of it might have worked better if I'd spent less time examining the kid and more time examining what the adults around him were doing, which is a much harder conversation to have.

The first two essays in this series argued that agreeing on a destination doesn't mean we're aligned, and that seeing a problem doesn't give someone the authority to decide what happens next. There's another possibility we tend to skip. What if the thing that needs to change isn't mainly something the player is doing? What if it's something we're doing to the place where we're asking him to develop?

I've seen players described as lacking confidence while nearly every adult conversation around them was about what they needed to fix. I've watched coaches complain that kids couldn't think for themselves while handing over the answer before the kid had a chance to think. Parents worry that their child depends too much on outside approval, then grade every tournament on the ride home. None of these adults set out to create the problem they were worried about. Some of them were very good at what they did. But good intentions and real expertise don't exempt our behavior from examination.

We have a habit of treating the player's behavior as evidence and the adults' behavior as background. A player misses three returns and stops attacking second serves. We see hesitation, a poor decision, maybe a confidence problem, and we start asking what's going on in his head. But what if he's spent two weeks hearing three versions of what to do on second-serve returns? One adult has told him to be aggressive, another wants him to make more balls, and a third keeps reminding him how many chances he's wasting. I'm not saying that's the explanation. I'm saying his behavior alone doesn't tell us which explanation is right, and the adults' part shouldn't be left off the list just because we're the ones doing the evaluating.

One of the more uncomfortable lessons from my recent classroom work came when I started listening to recordings of sessions I'd designed to get young people doing more of the thinking. I'd told the coaches to ask questions, listen, and resist filling every silence. I'd written those principles myself. Then I heard how much of the talking I was doing. It wasn't flattering. I could explain almost everything I'd said. A kid needed clarification, somebody gave half an answer, I wanted to make a connection the group hadn't made yet. One at a time, most of those moments seemed perfectly reasonable. Added together, they built something different from what I said I wanted. I'd meant to build a room where the kids did most of the intellectual work, and I'd built one where the adults, me included, were still doing too much of it.

If I'd judged those sessions only by whether the kids answered correctly, I might have decided certain kids needed to be more engaged or more independent. The recordings pointed somewhere else first. And I didn't have to guess at anybody's motives to see it. I could count how often my turns after a good answer ran past a hundred words. That didn't prove what the kids were or weren't learning. It showed me what I was doing at the exact moment they'd produced something worth keeping.

I've come to think we should do more of that. Not count words in every tennis lesson, but look at what the adults actually did before assigning explanations to a child's performance. How many instructions did we give, and how many questions did we ask? How often did we answer our own questions? Did we shift the player's priorities without telling him? Did we let him describe what happened before telling him what we saw? Those questions are less comfortable than asking why the kid won't listen. They're also about behavior we can actually change.

Parents have their own version of this, and I know it because I've sat in that chair. Watching one of my daughters compete could make me feel remarkably helpless for someone who'd spent years teaching other people's kids how to compete. I couldn't hit the next ball or make the adjustment. I could see things happening and had to sit there while they happened, and when the match ended I sometimes had a great deal to say. I've wondered since how much of it was information she needed and how much was me trying to do something with the frustration I'd stored up in the stands. An observation can be accurate and still not be useful, especially in that moment.

Every adult around a player runs that risk. A parent trying to encourage can leave the kid feeling graded. A coach trying to build confidence can signal that the player's current game isn't good enough, and a consultant trying to bring clarity can just add one more voice to a crowded conversation. What we meant to say is only part of it. What the player heard and what happened next matter too, and we shouldn't assume we know either one without asking.

This is where adult alignment gets more demanding than communication. Suppose the parent, the coach, and the player all agree the player needs to become more independent. Everybody nods, because it's a worthy goal. The coach gives him more responsibility for evaluating practice, the parent lets him handle tournament preparation, and the player says he's ready.

Then he forgets something.

Does the parent jump back in? Does the coach take the mistake as proof the player wasn't ready, so the responsibility quietly returns to the adults? Or does somebody recognize that learning to carry responsibility probably includes dropping it now and then, when the consequences are manageable? I've watched adults ask players to take ownership and then take it back the first time ownership got inconvenient. I've probably done it myself. We say we want independence, but sometimes what we really want is independence performed correctly, on our schedule, without making us uncomfortable. That's a pretty narrow version of independence.

The player's age and maturity still matter. An eight-year-old shouldn't carry what a mature seventeen-year-old carries, and a seventeen-year-old shouldn't be handed every adult concern just because he can drive. But at any stage, the adults can ask whether their own behavior is opening room for the player to learn what he can handle next, or quietly closing it.

There's a reason this kind of intervention is difficult. It's much easier to tell a player what he needs to change than to tell an experienced adult his behavior may be getting in the way. Parents have put enormous time, money, and emotion into this. Coaches have reputations and years of experience behind them. Consultants, me included, have built careers on seeing problems and offering solutions. Nobody enjoys hearing that their next useful contribution might be doing less.

We also avoid these conversations because we assume they have to turn into accusations. If the player lacks confidence, someone must have damaged it, and if he's overwhelmed, someone must be piling it on. Maybe. But development is rarely that simple. A player's behavior usually has more than one cause, and we should be especially careful about turning our observations into confident stories about somebody else's motives. Asking an adult to look at his behavior isn't the same as blaming him for the child's problems.

The more useful question is usually narrower. Is there something we're doing that could be making this harder, and what happens if we change it? That gives us something we can actually test. If we think we're talking too much, we can talk less and watch what happens. If competing instructions seem to be swamping the player, the adults can agree on fewer priorities and see whether his picture gets clearer. A parent who tends to step in too fast can try a different way of handling tournament observations, and everyone can watch whether the player starts taking more ownership.

None of those experiments guarantees anything. The player may keep struggling after the adults change. That doesn't make the change pointless, and it doesn't prove our first explanation was wrong. It gives us another experience to examine, which is how development ought to work for everybody involved.

None of this lets the kids off the hook. They still have to practice, compete, make decisions, handle frustration, and own their preparation. Sometimes the player really does need to change something, no matter how thoughtfully the adults behave. But his obligations don't excuse us from examining ours.

What I've come to appreciate is that the adults can often change faster than the player can. Whether we interrupt, how many instructions we give, whether we send that message right after the match or wait until we know what we're actually asking for, whether we invite the player to think or hand him the answer first: all of that is in our control. At least it ought to be.

I've spent decades asking young players to notice patterns in their own behavior, try different responses, and learn from what happens. It's a strange arrangement if the adults responsible for that development consider themselves exempt from doing the same.

The next intervention might be another lesson, another drill, or an honest conversation with the player about his own choices. And sometimes the adults should meet without him, not to decide what's wrong with the kid, but to decide what they're prepared to change about themselves before asking him to change anything else. I'd like to see what happens when we stop treating that as an uncomfortable exception and start treating it as an ordinary part of development.

We've spent plenty of time measuring what the kids are doing. Maybe we ought to spend a little more measuring what we're doing to them.