The Rule Was Right. Was I?

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

At Samuell Grand, kids who showed up late to practice didn't walk in. They ran. I knew they had no control over the car, and whatever made them late usually wasn't on them. But from the moment a kid's feet hit the parking lot, those feet belonged to the kid, and I wanted them moving like practice had already started, because it had.

I didn't mean it as punishment or as conditioning. Running in was how a kid said, with his body instead of an excuse, that he knew the other players were working and a coach was teaching. He was joining something in progress. To me, that was respect.

One mother saw it differently, though I didn't know it at the time. She let us know her three daughters wouldn't be attending anymore, and that was all. The reason reached me later, through someone else. She was tired of me telling her how to raise her children.

I wasn't passing judgment on her. I was holding a standard for the program. I believed that then, and I still do. It took me much longer to see that I could be right about that and she could still have had a point, a point I'd never have heard at all if a third party hadn't passed it along.

Why the Rule Made Sense to Me

By the time Kim and I were running Samuell Grand, I'd been developing players for nearly two decades. Tennis looks like an individual sport once a match starts, but almost all of the learning happens in a shared space. Court time and a coach's attention are both limited, so every child in a group gets shaped by how the adults set things up and how the other kids behave inside it.

So I cared about standards, especially the small ones, like how fast kids picked up balls and whether they walked onto the court ready to work. How a kid arrived belonged on that list. A late arrival disrupted the group no matter whose fault the delay was, and the walk from the car was the one part of it the kid could own.

The running rule seemed like a good answer. It didn't need a lecture, and it didn't stop practice so a coach could vent in front of the group. A late kid could acknowledge the moment and get back in within a few seconds. I'd have told you it taught responsibility without drama, and I think there's still truth in that.

The Objection I Never Heard

She never said a word to me about the rule. As far as I knew, she hadn't pushed back on anything before. The girls just stopped coming.

That wasn't unusual. Most objections in a program like ours went unspoken. And I had a belief about families who left, one I still hold. By the time people tell you they're leaving, they've already made the choice. Chasing them takes attention away from the families who are choosing to be there, and those families deserve all of it. So I didn't chase.

I still think that's the right way to spend attention, but it comes with a cost I didn't think much about. When people leave without saying why, and you don't ask, the only reasons you ever hear are the ones that find their way back through somebody else. Losing three kids showed up on the roster right away. The reason behind it took a lot longer to show up.

When it did, it pointed at something I hadn't considered. She may not have been objecting to the standard so much as to my assumption that I got to decide how that standard was taught to her children. That's a question of jurisdiction, not of rules, and it's one I didn't spend much time on. Who gets to shape a child's experience, and which lessons belong to the coach rather than the parent? A coach enforcing a group standard usually has no idea what happened in that car before the child reached the gate.

Systems Don't Remove Judgment

I've known plenty of coaches who dodge standards because they want to be liked. That was never my problem. I leaned the other way. If a standard served a real purpose, enforcing it felt like an obligation, and backing off because a parent complained felt weak.

Kids notice when adults don't mean what they say, and staff notice too. If the leader won't defend the structure, everyone learns the structure isn't real. So there's a reason coaches like me hold the line.

But a principled person can start confusing conviction with clarity. I believed the rule expressed a good value, so I assumed my way of applying it was justified. When you're that sure, you don't go looking for objections, and the few that do surface sound like attacks on the value instead of information about how you're applying it.

I liked systems because they took the personal out of it. A child wasn't running because Coach Evans woke up in a bad mood. The child was running because that's what we did when practice had already started. And to be fair to my younger self, the rule had some careful thinking built into it. It separated what a kid couldn't control, the car, from what a kid could, their own feet.

But systems don't remove judgment. They relocate it. My rule had sorted out which part of the moment belonged to the child, and I'd drawn that line between child and parent carefully. The conflict happened on a different line, between the program and the family, and the rule had nothing to say about it. A system can make it easy to stop thinking, because it gives the comforting impression that the thinking has already been done.

Who Was the Rule For?

I'd have said the rule was for the child and the group, and I'd have meant it. But rules also serve the adults who make them. They cut down the case-by-case conversations we have to manage and help us feel the place is under control. People running institutions need tools like that.

The question I didn't ask often enough was whether this rule was still mostly for the kids, or whether part of its appeal was how much easier it made the place to run. That's a hard question to put to yourself about your own rule, especially one that works often enough to keep confirming your confidence.

A Bag in the Parking Lot

This past summer I watched a father walk in from the parking lot carrying his ten-year-old son's tennis bag. The boy was late because he'd needed a bathroom stop.

I told the boy I didn't want to see him let his father carry his bag again. As long as his dad was driving him around and paying for his tennis, the least he could do was carry his own bag. Afterward, I told his parents what I'd said. They didn't ask me to back off. They asked if I'd give the same message to his much younger sister.

It would make a neater story if I'd gotten better at delivering a standard, and that's why this family welcomed it when the other one walked away. I don't think I did. I told the boy first and his parents afterward, the same order I've always used, and I still tell kids what I expect without asking anyone first. I suspect it was just a different family.

The same kind of standard landed as a gift in one family and as an intrusion in another, and from where I stood, I couldn't tell them apart ahead of time. This family told me so. The other one just stopped coming.

What I'd Do Differently

I'm not arguing for dropping standards and letting every family negotiate a private deal with the program. I've seen where that goes. Groups need structure, and coaches have a legitimate role in shaping the habits that make training work.

But I'd think harder now about what belongs to the program and what belongs to the family, and I'd be more curious when an objection does surface, because so few of them do. I'd still explain the purpose of a standard. I'd also want to know whether the parent objected to accountability itself or only to the form it took, and whether she saw the rule as my authority crossing into her territory.

I might keep the rule. I might change it, or replace it with something that taught the same thing with less baggage. Either way, I'd be less likely to assume my confidence in the principle settled the question.

The Rule Was Right. Was I?

I still believe children should learn that their actions affect other people, and I still believe coaches are allowed to hold standards that make groups work. In that sense, the rule was right.

I'm less sure about how I held it. I assumed a sound principle gave me the authority to enforce it in exactly that form, on every family, without much thought about how each family heard it. And because most objections never reached me, nothing forced me to find out.

At thirty, I'd have asked only whether the rule made sense. I was well past thirty when I made it, and that was still mostly the question I asked. Experience eventually taught me that a leader's job doesn't end when the principle is sound. He still has to check whether the way he enforces it creates the experience he thinks it does, especially for the people who will never tell him.

The rule was right. I still had more to learn about holding it.