The Institution That Kept Meeting Me for the First Time

Every time I crossed a section line, my résumé seemed to reset.

By the time I moved to Texas, I had stopped expecting tennis to remember me. That sounds more wounded than I mean it. I don't think an organization owes anybody a role because he did good work somewhere else. New people turn up all the time carrying impressive résumés and oversized opinions of themselves, and I've never been short on confidence or opinions. I can imagine plenty of good reasons a new section would want to see what a man actually does before handing him anything that matters. What struck me wasn't that Texas was cautious. It was how completely the conversation seemed to start over.

By then I'd served on the USTA New England Board of Directors and chaired its Community Development Committee. I'd moved to Georgia and built programs there, including the World Association of Tennis Teachers and Coaches, which by 1994 had a board, a tennis academy, and plans for a national team and a headquarters. In 1998 a television station profiled my work with inner-city kids as a Hometown Hero segment. By then I was running on borrowed rackets and free summer programming, trying to put together an after-school program so children could keep playing a sport most of their families couldn't otherwise afford. What the segment didn't mention is where the money came from. My mother died in 1997, and I was funding the program out of what she left me.

The television piece caught something about what I thought tennis was for. I called the work my ministry. I talked about self-reliance and self-discipline. And when the reporter asked what success would look like, I said I'd rather go to a Nobel Prize ceremony than sit in the coach's box at Wimbledon. I meant it, and I still do. Wimbledon was the obvious symbol of tennis success. Develop the great player, sit in the box, get associated with the result. The Nobel Prize stood for something else entirely, the possibility that a kid holding a borrowed racket grows up to do something that matters far beyond this sport. Tennis was the vehicle. The person was the point.

Two years later I left Georgia for Charlotte to work briefly with Calvin Davis at his Tennis Advancement Program. During that stretch Bernie Chavis, who was president of the American Tennis Association by then and had known my work years earlier, asked me to serve as the ATA's National Director of Player Development. I built another roadmap, this one covering player development and coach education. The ATA didn't have the resources to turn it into what I pictured, but the role added another layer to what I was carrying around. North Carolina eventually added more. I became chairman of the USTA North Carolina Coaches Committee and stayed there for years, which was real responsibility in the part of tennis where most of my working life had been spent. North Carolina didn't see only a community-development person or only a Black volunteer. It saw a coach.

Then I moved again. When I got to Texas I contacted USTA Texas and offered to help. Cory Ann Avants was relocating to the Dallas area to help me with a program I was starting, so I put her name forward too.

Cory Ann was not another version of me. She's a white woman raised in Gastonia, North Carolina, coached growing up by her parents, with a tennis résumé that looked nothing like mine. She reached the quarterfinals of junior Wimbledon and the semifinals of the junior US Open, where she came through qualifying and beat Ana Ivanovic on the way. She played professionally and cracked the top 250 in the world. I knew her from those years. After she turned professional, while she was still a teenager, her father Hank called me about coaching her, and I did for a stretch. Later she moved into coaching herself. Between the two of us we represented about as much range as tennis experience comes in, one man who'd spent decades building programs and governance, one young woman who'd competed among the best juniors in the world and gone on tour.

The answer, as I remember it, was that there were no volunteer opportunities. That moment has stayed with me because it makes the easy explanation less satisfying.

Race is part of my tennis story. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise. When I left New England for Georgia, I arrived with sectional board service and committee-chair experience and was placed on a district Minority Participation Committee. I remember wondering whether the first thing the institution saw was what I'd done or what I looked like. I can't tell you the motive behind that decision, and I'm not interested in inventing one thirty years later. But Cory Ann complicates Texas. She was white, she was younger, and she had elite playing credentials I never had. If the organization had no obvious way to absorb either of us, then maybe the problem wasn't only how it saw me. Maybe the bigger problem was how it saw people at all.

We spend a great deal of time in player development talking about transfer. A player can do something beautifully in practice, but if the learning isn't available under tournament pressure, we don't call the job finished. Information has to survive the change in environment. Skill has to travel.

Institutions have a transfer problem too.

Every time I crossed a sectional boundary, I felt as though the organization was meeting me for the first time. New England knew one version of me. Georgia knew another. North Carolina eventually knew a third. Texas appeared to know none of them. The experience existed, the work had happened, the titles were real, the programs had been built, and almost none of it seemed to arrive ahead of me. That's different from saying somebody should have automatically believed I was useful. An institution ought to be skeptical. Past success doesn't guarantee future usefulness, and a committee title in Boston doesn't make a man the right fit for a committee in Atlanta or Austin. Local context matters, relationships matter, sections have different needs, and sometimes the person walking in with the longest résumé is exactly the one a smart organization should pass on. The question isn't whether Texas should have said yes. It's whether anybody there had a way to ask the question at all.

That's what I mean about the résumé resetting. I don't mean every new section should have handed me a comparable title. I mean there seemed to be nothing durable saying: this person has already served here, built this, chaired that, tried something, succeeded in one place, failed in another, and might be worth a conversation about where any of it could be useful next. What traveled was whatever I could personally carry into the room.

That's not institutional memory. That's social memory, and the two are easy to confuse. Social memory lives in people. Somebody remembers you, somebody makes a call, somebody says you ought to talk to Duey. It can be powerful, and tennis has always run on a lot of it. But it's fragile. People retire, staff turns over, sections operate differently, and geography interrupts relationships. A man who's well known on one side of a state line can be invisible on the other. Institutional memory is a different thing. It holds on to what the organization has already learned, and it doesn't evaporate when a particular person leaves the building.

That distinction reaches well past my own story. If every coach, volunteer, administrator, and program builder has to reintroduce an entire career each time the environment changes, the individual isn't the only one starting over. The institution is starting over too, paying again to learn something it already knew.

I think about that now because so much of my current work is built around keeping learning from disappearing. The Training Cards and Match Cards aren't valuable because paper is magic. They're valuable because they leave a record. IEDE isn't useful because the acronym is clever. It's useful because intention, experience, debrief, and evolution ought to connect to each other instead of evaporating between one session and the next. Tournament observation matters because what happens on Saturday should be able to change what happens in training on Tuesday. The architecture is always chasing the same problem, which is how to keep useful information from vanishing at a boundary. A player's experience shouldn't disappear when practice turns into competition, and a coach's observation shouldn't disappear when another coach takes over. An institution shouldn't forget what it already learned about the people inside it just because somebody crossed a line on a map.

I'm not sure tennis could have solved that in 1992, or in 2000, or even by the time I got to Texas. Records lived in filing cabinets. Committee history lived in meeting minutes. Reputation lived in phone calls and somebody's memory. Sections had autonomy, and decentralization has real advantages, so I understand why one office didn't automatically inherit what another office knew. But the cost of that architecture is easier to see now, and it isn't only my cost. How many capable people kept having to become strangers to the same organization? How much knowledge never traveled because nobody local knew it existed, and how much disappeared at a sectional boundary because there was no mechanism for carrying context across it? I'd add the quieter version too, which is the volunteer who stops raising a hand because the institution never seemed to remember it had been raised before.

I can't answer any of that with my own résumé. One person's history isn't a dataset. I can only tell you what it felt like from inside. New England gave me a seat at the table. Georgia put me in a different room. North Carolina eventually trusted me with coach leadership. Texas told me there were no volunteer opportunities, even when I offered a second person whose tennis credentials looked almost nothing like mine. Same national organization, different local institutions, very little continuity between them.

For years I thought the frustrating part was having to prove myself again.

I see it differently now. The bigger loss was that the institution had to learn the same person over and over, and every time it started from zero, whatever I'd learned about tennis wasn't the only thing at risk of disappearing. So was whatever tennis had already learned about me.

*Written with Reggie, Claude, Gemini, Otter, and 64+ trips around the sun.*