The System That Forgot How to Learn

Part I of IV: Rebuilding the System: What Coaching Education Forgot

Note to Parents: This series is about coach education, but it's written for tennis parents. For 35 years, I've watched families invest tens of thousands of hours and dollars into systems that were never designed to develop independent thinkers. Understanding why coach education works the way it does is the first step in protecting your investment. This isn't about blaming coaches—it's about recognizing the architecture they inherited, and why that architecture is failing your kid.

Walk into most tennis academies and you'll see it. Lines at the ball machine. Players rotating through stations on a timer. Everyone doing the same drill sequence. Same footwork patterns. Same grip adjustments. It looks organized. Feels productive.

That's the factory floor.

We copied the architecture. Changed the product. Called it player development. The system works—if your goal is compliance. If you're after creativity, agency, or independent thinking, you built the wrong building.

The Template We Never Questioned

The Prussian education model from the 1800s wasn't designed to create thinkers. It was designed to create soldiers and factory workers. Bells told you when to move. Chairs faced one direction. Success meant following instructions without asking why. The system rewarded sameness because industry needed standardization.

We imported that logic wholesale. Sports coaching became school with balls.

In some cases you can watch a junior tournament and identify which academy a player trains at based purely on conformity. The footwork patterns match. The shot selections mirror each other. Even the way they problem-solve looks identical. That's not coaching. That's stamping.

Here's what no one mentions: it worked. For a while.

You needed citizens who showed up on time, stood in line, and did what they were told. The Industrial Revolution ran on human predictability. Education delivered the product. So did sports programs. We got very good at making people who followed rules.

Then the world changed. We didn't.

When I Learned to Stop Thinking

My first coaching certification taught me how to run drills exactly as written. Demonstrate. Correct. Repeat. I followed the manual because everyone else did. The kids looked busy. Parents saw structure. Success was visible compliance.

Dan Santorum ran the ACE program at Carter Playground in Boston. At the end, he let me be the only one who tested because he felt I was the only one who could deliver a USPTR Standard Method lesson by rote. He meant it as a compliment. I took it as one.

Only later did I understand what he'd actually recognized: I was excellent at mechanical replication.

The kids I worked with could execute the drill without understanding what it taught or why it mattered. They were excellent mimics. They couldn't problem-solve worth a damn.

We'd built performers, not learners.

The Alcott Problem

I grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. Home of the transcendentalists. Emerson. Thoreau. The Alcotts. My mother's buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery on Author's Ridge where they all rest. I'll be there one day too.

Bronson Alcott ran a school in the 1830s that worked differently. No rows of desks. No memorization. Just conversation. Socratic dialogue. Individual attention. He watched how each kid's mind worked and met them there. It required brilliance from the teacher.

Horace Mann's Prussian system required competence.

Alcott's approach was better. Mann's scaled.

That's the dilemma we're still living with 180 years later. The best teaching methods demand too much from individual humans. So we built a system that works with mediocre instructors and produces mediocre results. We chose scale over excellence and told ourselves it was pragmatic.

Maybe it was. For making factory workers.

The Cost of Certainty

When compliance becomes the standard, curiosity dies. Coaches stop experimenting because experiment feels like failure. Players learn to wait for instructions. The whole ecosystem becomes risk-averse and self-referential.

You can spot it everywhere:

• Coaches insisting on "correct" technique that biomechanics research contradicted five years ago
• Certification programs that reward memorization over application
• Programs advertising "structure" as if structure itself were the point

The language changed from discovery to delivery. We stopped asking "how does this kid learn?" and started asking "what does the curriculum say?"

Meanwhile the game evolved. Players got faster. Smarter. More data-literate. They study video. Train with sensors. Think probabilistically.

Coach education stayed in 1834. Mann's factory, not Alcott's laboratory.

What My Grandson Taught Me About Stairs

My daughter visited last week with my 18-month-old grandson. He doesn't have stairs at home. My house does.

He spent two days going up and down. Slowly at first. Then faster. He tried different methods. Holding the spindle. Scooting on his belly. Crawling. Standing. Each attempt taught him something. He was experimenting. Building understanding through iteration.

I could have stopped him. "No, that's not safe. Do it this way."

Instead I watched. Let him figure it out. Moved the expensive stuff out of reach and let curiosity do the teaching.

That's how humans learn naturally. Through exploration. Through failure. Through the friction between what we think should work and what actually does.

Coach education tries to eliminate that friction. Smooths it out. Makes it predictable. We call it structure. We market it as safety. What we're really selling is control.

What We Forgot

Learning isn't compliance. It's adaptation.

Great coaching isn't delivering information. It's designing environments where understanding has to happen because there's no other way forward.

The tragedy is we forgot how to recognize learning itself. We measure visible order instead of invisible growth. We count attendance instead of attention. We track completion instead of comprehension.

The factory model gave us predictability. It also gave us amnesia. We forgot that sport is an experiment, not an assembly line.

The Inflection Point

We're where education was a century ago when progressive schools started asking different questions. Not "what do students know?" but "how do they think?"

Coaching is overdue for that shift.

The next generation of coach education can't just teach better drills. It has to teach coaches to see learning—to recognize how feedback lands differently on different wiring, how communication patterns either open or close curiosity, how agency develops through small decisions that compound.

We're moving from the Industrial era into something else. The entrepreneurial era maybe. The technical era. Whatever you call it, it values different things. Creativity over conformity. Adaptation over obedience. Independent thinking over institutional loyalty.

Our education system—coaching included—was built for the world that needed factory workers. That world is gone.

Before We Rebuild

You can't renovate a building while you're standing inside it. First you step back. Look at what the architecture was meant to produce.

The factory model worked. For its purpose. At its time.

That time ended. We just haven't admitted it yet.

The timers still beep. The lines still form. The rotations still happen on schedule. But somewhere in the back of our minds, we know something's wrong. The system produces order. It doesn't produce learners.

Bronson Alcott was right 180 years ago. His approach worked. It didn't scale because human brilliance doesn't scale through human labor alone.

But we're not limited to human labor anymore. Technology changes what's possible. AI changes what scales. The constraint Alcott faced—that individual attention requires individual teachers—might not be a constraint much longer. The tools that now exist allow us to scale attention itself—if we remember what it's for.

If you're a tennis parent reading this, you're probably asking: what does this mean for my kid? Here's what: every time a coach says "this is how we do it" without explaining why, that's Mann talking. Every time your kid can execute a drill perfectly but can't adjust when the pattern breaks, that's factory training. Every time you watch a tournament and see players from the same academy making identical mistakes, you're seeing the cost of conformity. The next three parts of this series will show you what to look for, what to ask, and how to recognize whether your investment is building a performer or a learner.

Before we get to solutions, we need to see the problem clearly. Coach education inherited industrial architecture. It rewarded compliance over curiosity. It chose scale over excellence. It worked well enough to persist, but not well enough to prepare anyone for what's coming.

The system forgot how to learn.

Now we have to remember.

Next: Blow It Up (And Bring a Blueprint) — Why iteration isn't reform and how controlled demolition makes space for something alive.