The Players Who Made Me Look Smart

What I Couldn't Have Known at Thirty | Essay Two

For several years I carried one of the Kwiatkowski family's credit cards in my wallet. It handled tournament expenses while I drove the family Volvo from one event to the next and a very young Thai sat in the back seat watching Star Wars. That's the picture that comes to mind when someone asks what it took to develop a player who would later win an NCAA singles title. It took long drives, long weekends and years of attention.

So when Thai Kwiatkowski won the 2017 NCAA men's singles championship at Virginia, and when ReeRee Li captained the women's team at Yale, I didn't feel like a bystander. Their results have been part of my professional story for a long time, and I've never been shy about that. I did the work. I still believe I earned some of the credit.

What I couldn't have known at thirty is how hard it would become to say how much.

## Two Children in Charlotte

In the early 2000s I was running Midcourt Tennis Academy in Charlotte. We had programs at Park Road Park, Colonel Beatty Park and Hornets Nest, and our staff included coaches who had played Davis Cup for Nigeria. It was a serious environment, and I believed it was a good one for young players.

Thai started with me when he was nine. ReeRee hit her very first ball with me at seven, and I stayed her primary coach for roughly seven years. The two of them were born about three weeks apart, played many of the same tournaments and often warmed up together.

Their results are real. ReeRee won a Gold Ball, reached the final of the Girls' 12 Clay Court Championships, where she lost to Madison Keys, and came out of high school as a five-star recruit ranked 16th in the country and first in North Carolina. Thai left high school as the top recruit in the nation and was part of three NCAA team championships at Virginia. Less than a week after the third, he won the singles title, which earned him a main-draw wildcard into the U.S. Open.

So here's the question I didn't ask at thirty. Did my coaching make them exceptional, or did their exceptional qualities make my coaching look good?

The honest answer is some of both, and the part that bothers me is that I can't tell you the ratio.

Thai offers a simple example. Some nights at eleven, he left our practice and went straight to a baseball game. His father had a rule. Thai would keep playing baseball until he hit a home run over the fence, not one that rolled around inside the park. I didn't make that rule, and I didn't coach those at-bats. I can't tell you exactly what those nights on a baseball field added to the player who showed up on my court the next afternoon. I can tell you I wasn't the only adult shaping him.

ReeRee's parents usually traveled with her to tournaments because they wanted to be there. Whatever she took from those trips with her family was part of her development too, and none of it was mine.

At the time, I understood the differences between these two as things a good coach needed to recognize and manage. I still do. What I'm less sure of today is how well I separated the qualities I was building from the qualities that made them so able to use what I was building.

## The Player Nobody Was Lining Up For

Before Charlotte there was Atlanta, and before Thai and ReeRee there was John Paul Bougon.

Up to that point in my career I'd been fortunate. Most of the players I worked with arrived already established. John didn't. He was about eleven, ranked outside the top 100 in Georgia, and his mother was looking for someone willing to make a serious investment in him. She had asked other coaches first. On a call with John recently, I put it this way: I was, to a degree, the coach of last resort.

I'd love to tell you I saw something the other coaches missed. On that call I told John I don't know why I said yes. My own notes from those years offer a less flattering answer. Most of my coaching at the time was unpaid, and I needed the money.

That detail matters to this essay. If I'm going to take credit for spotting potential in a player others passed over, I should admit I wasn't scanning for potential. I was trying to keep the lights on.

John did the work. His ranking climbed, he reached the quarterfinals of the Southern Closed, and he went on to play college tennis. Measured by distance traveled, his progress may be some of the best work I did in that decade. Measured by the trophy case, it barely registers.

The coaching I gave him was demanding. My philosophy back then was blunt. If you weren't trying to be the best you could possibly be, I didn't want to spend my time with you. When I asked John recently what he disliked about how I coached him, he said, "I liked it all."

I'm grateful for that answer, but I don't trust it to settle anything. My approach worked with John because John had something inside him that answered it, and a family that backed the process from two directions. His mother held the line on expectations. Around his father, tennis never felt like pressure. John described himself to me as a kid who knew how to work hard, listen and trust the process long before his speed and athleticism showed up. The same demands, aimed at a different child, could feel like pressure that slowly drained the game of any joy. I know, because I coached plenty of those children too. Even the part of John's story that looks most like my method belongs partly to John and the people at home.

There's one more piece, and I'll save most of it for a later essay. On that call I told John something I'm not sure I'd ever said to him directly. What I learned working with him went with me to Charlotte and into the years I spent with ReeRee. If that's true, then part of the coach who helped develop a Yale captain was developed by an eleven-year-old nobody was lining up to coach, and by the mother who kept asking.

Try assigning credit for that.

## The Other Column

If I take real credit for Thai and ReeRee, what do I owe the children who trained in the same programs, with the same coaches, under the same principles, and never came close to those results? There were plenty of them.

It's easy to explain their outcomes with ability, motivation, money or family support, and those explanations have merit. But if those factors help explain why one player didn't become exceptional, they have to shape how much credit I take when another one did. I can't count the champions as proof of my method and file everyone else under circumstances beyond my control. Not without looking hard at what I actually contributed in each case.

The scoreboard makes this harder, not easier. A player who never cracks a national ranking may have made extraordinary progress from where she started. A player who wins a national title may have been unusually capable before the coach ever showed up. Results tell you where someone stood on a given day. They don't tell you how far that person traveled, and they certainly don't tell you whose effort moved them.

## Who Deserves to Be Remembered?

I've been working on the idea of a U.S. Junior Tennis Hall of Fame, a place to recognize exceptional junior players along with the coaches, parents, educators and organizations who shaped young people through the game. The longer I work on it, the more this essay's question sits right in the middle of it.

Our sport is good at honoring results. We know who won the national titles, who earned the scholarships and who turned pro. We can usually name the coaches who stood near those results too. But producing an exceptional player isn't the same thing as making an exceptional contribution to a young person's development. Sometimes the two overlap. Often they don't. Honoring the players is the simpler job, because their results are on the record. Honoring the adults around them means looking at contributions those results can't show.

A Hall of Fame built only on proximity to champions would honor me for Thai and ReeRee and miss a father's baseball rule entirely. It would miss the mother who kept knocking on doors in Atlanta, and the coach whose best work went into a child whose name never showed up in a national draw.

None of that means every devoted parent or patient coach belongs in a Hall of Fame. Most don't, any more than every coach of a champion does. It means any honest system of recognition has to ask what someone contributed, not just who they stood next to.

## What I Know Now

At thirty, I believed my players' success was strong evidence of my ability as a coach. I still think results matter. It would be absurd to spend a career developing competitors and pretend their achievements say nothing about the quality of the work.

But I no longer think results tell the whole story. Thai and ReeRee brought qualities into our work that I didn't create, along with families who built parts of them I never saw. John came first, with less obvious ability and a problem I hadn't solved yet, and what I learned working on it went with me to the players who came after him. All three helped build my reputation. All three also helped build me.

I've spent much of my career explaining what I did to help young people become better players. I can describe the training, the travel, the decisions and the principles behind them. What I find harder every year is drawing a clean line between what I gave those players and what they, their families and their circumstances gave me.

Maybe I shouldn't be so eager to draw it. Development isn't something one person does to another. It happens inside relationships where both people get the chance to change, and the scoreboard only records one of them.

At thirty I took pride in what my players became because of me. At sixty-four, I'm just as curious about what I became because of them.