The Gap Nobody Named

After 35 Years, I Finally Saw What Was Missing

I've been a junior tennis coach since 1989. I've watched hundreds of families invest tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into player development. I've seen talented kids plateau. I've seen committed parents grow confused. I've seen capable coaches run out of language to explain what's actually happening.

For decades, I couldn't name what I was seeing. I just knew something essential was missing.

The problem isn't instruction. The problem isn't effort. The problem isn't talent. The problem is that junior tennis has no institutional space where understanding actually forms.

What Happens in a Typical Development Pathway

Here's the pattern I've watched repeat for 35 years. A parent enrolls their child in a development program. The coach delivers instruction. The child trains. Matches happen. Results occur. The parent watches. The cycle repeats.

Somewhere in that cycle, someone has to interpret what's happening. Someone has to make sense of contradictory signals. Someone has to weigh competing goods. Someone has to decide what matters and what doesn't.

But there's no structure for that. No ritual. No protected space. No institutionalized process.

So interpretation happens informally—in parking lot conversations after matches, in panicked texts when results disappoint, in coach meetings that feel like performance reviews, in parent WhatsApp groups trading rumors and anxieties, in late-night Google searches about "how to know if my child is improving."

The understanding that forms in those conditions is usually incomplete, reactive, distorted by emotion, shaped by whoever spoke last or loudest, focused on outcomes rather than development, and defensive rather than curious.

Families bleed money and clarity at the same time. Not because they're wrong. Not because coaches are incompetent. But because no one is responsible for the space where understanding actually forms.

The Pattern Across Domains

Once I could name the gap, I started seeing it everywhere. But I also started noticing that some fields had solved it.

Teaching hospitals do something junior tennis doesn't. Residents present cases. They defend their interpretations. They get questioned—publicly but safely. Bad assumptions get exposed early, before they harden into doctrine. The debrief isn't optional. It's institutionalized. It sits inside the work, not after it.

Architecture studios have the same structure. Critiques are not evaluations. They're collective sense-making rituals. The work goes on the table, not the person. Everyone learns by watching how judgment forms, not just what decision gets made. You calibrate faster by seeing how others reason.

Aviation learned it the hard way. Heroics don't prevent crashes. Systems do. Post-incident analysis focuses on decisions, signals missed, context—not blame. Psychological safety plus brutal clarity saves lives.

The best founder forums work the same way. They're not pitch sessions. They're pattern-recognition arenas. Founders test interpretations against people who've seen similar failure modes before. They don't need advice. They need better frames.

None of these domains invented this structure because it seemed like a good idea. They built it because experience alone does not produce judgment. Judgment emerges in protected, structured reflection spaces that sit inside real work.

Why Junior Tennis Is Different (and Harder)

Here's what makes this gap particularly brutal in youth development contexts like junior tennis.

The performers aren't making decisions for themselves. They're children. They're developing. The timelines are long. The metrics are ambiguous. Winning doesn't equal developing. Losing doesn't equal failing. You can't A/B test childhood.

The parents are emotionally invested, financially committed, and often confused. They're not professionals evaluating their own performance. They're watching someone they love struggle toward something they don't fully understand. Every decision feels high-stakes. Every signal feels critical. But they don't have frameworks for interpretation.

Junior tennis is a consumer marketplace pretending to be a profession. There's professional language without professional accountability. Quality is opaque. Incentives are misaligned. Families are navigating this complexity without institutional support.

The developmental timelines are measured in years, not days. Teaching hospitals deal with sick patients who get better or worse on timelines measured in days or weeks. Design studios critique projects with clear deliverables. Aviation investigates discrete incidents. Founder forums discuss businesses with quarterly metrics.

Junior tennis development unfolds across years. The causal chains are tangled. The feedback loops are slow. The counterfactual is unknowable. You can't run the experiment twice.

That combination—children, parents, ambiguity, fake professionalism, long timelines—doesn't exist in any of the domains that figured out how to institutionalize judgment formation.

The Real Cost

I've watched this gap extract enormous costs. Not just financial, though that's real—in my experience, serious junior player families commonly spend $15,000-$30,000 annually on development. But the larger cost is wasted potential and accumulated confusion.

A player plateaus. The parents don't know if this is normal consolidation or a signal to change something. The coach sees technical progress the ranking doesn't reflect. The player feels confused about what to focus on. Everyone has partial information. Nobody has the complete picture. And there's no structure to put the pieces together.

So they make decisions. Change coaches. Increase training volume. Pull back on tournaments. Add mental skills training. Each decision made with incomplete understanding. Each carrying opportunity cost.

The families that succeed aren't necessarily the ones making better decisions. They're often just the ones whose resources let them survive enough bad decisions to eventually stumble onto good ones.

That shouldn't be how development works. But without an institutional layer where understanding forms, it's how it does work.

What I Couldn't Name Until Recently

I watched this pattern for decades without being able to articulate what was missing. I could see the symptoms. I could feel the gap. But I couldn't name it clearly enough to design a solution.

Then something shifted. I started studying a 19th-century educator named Bronson Alcott. He'd built a school in Boston in 1834 that produced remarkable results—his students developed genuine intellectual independence, moral imagination, and capacity for self-observation. Parents described transformations in their children that went far beyond academic achievement.

But the school lasted only five years. It couldn't scale. When Alcott tried to expand, the quality collapsed. When he tried to systematize, the soul of the thing died.

That tension—between depth that doesn't scale and scale that loses depth—killed the Temple School and has haunted education ever since.

What I realized during my study was that I'd been watching the exact same pattern in junior tennis. Elite coaching works when it's individualized, attentive, responsive to each player's unique developmental needs. But that level of attention doesn't scale. So the industry solved the scaling problem the same way Horace Mann did in the 1840s—by building factory models. Group instruction. Standardized curriculum. Measurable outcomes. Efficiency over depth.

It scales. But it sacrifices the very thing that makes development actually happen: the interpretive attention that helps individuals understand what they're experiencing.

And that's when I could finally name the gap clearly: Junior tennis has no institutional space where understanding forms.

Not coaching. Coaching delivers technical instruction.
Not education. Education transmits knowledge.
Not therapy. Therapy processes emotions.
Not analytics. Analytics measures performance.

The missing piece is an interpretive layer—the structure where judgment forms through structured reflection about what's actually happening.

The Question That Changes Everything

Once the gap became visible, the question became clear: What kind of institution fills this gap?

The answer couldn't come from just one domain. Teaching hospitals solved part of it. Design studios solved another part. Aviation solved a third. Founder forums solved a fourth. But none of them had to deal with children, parents, ambiguity, fake professionalism, and decade-long timelines all at once.

So the solution had to be a convergent invention—borrowing constraints and failure lessons from multiple domains, then recombining them around a problem junior tennis never named.

But to build the missing institution, I had to understand why the last great attempt at scalable dialogue collapsed. I had to understand why a brilliant educator in 1834 couldn't solve the same problem. And what changed between then and now that makes it solvable.

That's the story of the Alcott Dilemma. And it's where we go next.

Next in this series: "The Alcott Dilemma: Why Good Teaching Doesn't Scale (And What a 19th-Century Failure Teaches Us About Modern Solutions)"

About the author: Duey Evans has been coaching elite junior tennis players for 35 years. He has been studying the problem of scaling individualized guidance without sacrificing depth since 2020. This is the first in a 10-part series on building the institution junior tennis is missing.

A note on how to read this series:

These essays are not meant to be consumed as advice or conclusions. They’re meant to be read as invitations to notice what you may already be experiencing but haven’t had language for yet.

I’m also exploring a companion project built around conversation rather than exposition. Not a podcast about opinions, but a place where questions are examined slowly and publicly.

If this essay sharpened your perception rather than answered your questions, you’re reading it with the right lens.