The Part That Was Always Theirs

A ten-year-old boy walked in from the parking lot last week beside his father, who was carrying the kid's tennis bag. There was a reason. The boy had needed a bathroom stop, they were running a few minutes behind, and his dad grabbed the bag off the back seat so they could move faster. Reasonable enough, in the moment. I told the boy I didn't want to see it again. His father was already driving him to every lesson, paying for every hour of instruction, and arranging his entire week around getting him there. Carrying his own bag from the car to the court was about the smallest thing he could contribute to the arrangement, and no version of "we were running late" excused him from it. When I passed the message to his parents afterward, they didn't push back. They asked if I'd tell his younger sister the same thing.

Years earlier, running a different program, I had a rule that a lot of parents didn't love. If a family arrived late, the kid still had to run from the parking lot to the court instead of walking in. I gave the same answer whenever someone asked about it. The traffic wasn't the kid's fault. Getting out the door on time usually wasn't either, since most ten-year-olds don't control the household schedule. But the distance between the car and the gate belonged entirely to them, every single time, regardless of what had happened before it. One mother didn't see it that way. She told me she was tired of me telling her how to raise her children and pulled her three daughters out of the program. She wasn't wrong that I'd drawn a line. She was wrong about what the line was measuring. I wasn't grading her parenting. I was holding a standard that had to apply to every kid the same way or it wasn't a standard at all.

Two different decades, two very different reactions, and the same exact logic underneath both. Almost nothing that goes wrong on the way to a lesson belongs to the kid. The car is slow. The line at school ran long. Somebody forgot to fill a water bottle. A sibling needed something first. By the time a kid is standing in a parking lot, most of the morning has already been decided by adults, traffic, and circumstance, and none of that is fair to hold against an eight or ten or fourteen-year-old. But there is always a sliver left over, and it genuinely is theirs. The walk from the car. The bag on their own shoulder. The choice to jog instead of stroll once their feet hit the pavement. That sliver is small on purpose. It has to be small enough for a kid to own it completely, with no excuses left available, because the whole point is giving them one clean piece of a messy situation where the outcome is entirely up to them.

This is where a lot of coaching goes wrong in both directions. Some coaches try to hold kids accountable for the whole morning, traffic and late start included, and that isn't accountability. It's misplaced frustration landing on the one person with the least control over any of it. Other coaches, trying to avoid that mistake, swing to the opposite extreme and stop holding a line anywhere, on the theory that a kid who's already had a rough morning shouldn't be asked for anything more. Both approaches skip the actual work, which is finding exactly where the kid's control starts and holding the boundary precisely, no further and no less.

Parents respond to this in genuinely different ways, and it's worth being honest you don't get to pick which response you'll get. Sometimes holding the line costs you a family, the way it did with those three sisters. Sometimes it earns you a request to hold it for a second kid too, the way it did last week. Both reactions are real, and neither one tells you whether the standard itself was right. What tells you is whether the boundary you drew actually matched what the kid controlled. Draw it in the wrong place and you're just being harsh. Draw it in the right place and hold it consistently, and you're doing the only part of coaching that reliably builds something a kid can carry into every other hard morning they'll ever have, on a tennis court or nowhere near one.

Most of what happens to a young person on any given day was decided by someone else. Finding the small, specific part that wasn't, and refusing to let them off the hook for it, might be the most useful thing a coach ever does. It's rarely dramatic. It looks like a bag on a shoulder instead of a father's hand. It looks like feet moving instead of feet walking. But it's the one piece of the day that was always theirs, and teaching a kid to recognize it, claim it, and carry it is worth more than anything said during the actual lesson that follows.