The Test I Never Ran

A few weeks ago I wrote about the difference between seeing something and testing it. I used a moment from one of our classroom sessions at Austin Tennis Academy. I had asked the players what you actually know when an opponent misses two high balls to the backhand, and one of them gave the best answer of the day. He said you know they missed two high backhands. Nothing more. I held it up in the essay as exactly what I wanted from that room.

Some weeks later I had five of those sessions transcribed, for a reason having nothing to do with the essay. He was right, and I did tell him he nailed it.

Then I talked for another three hundred words.

I want to back up, because the three hundred words are not the interesting part. Before the school year started, I sent a note to our coaching staff explaining how the classroom would run. Players should do most of the talking. Coaches should ask questions, listen, follow up, and resist the urge to fill every silence. Adults should neither dominate the room nor disengage from it. Some of the coaches pushed back. A few told our director they weren't sure what their job in the room was anymore, and one thought his input wasn't wanted. I read it as a coaching problem. We're all trained to hold the answer and hand it over, so asking instead of telling feels like doing nothing, and doing nothing feels like not coaching. I figured we'd work through it.

Then I had the transcripts. And because I'd spent a week thinking about how you would ever prove a room is working, I did something I had never once done in thirty-five years. I counted the words.

In one session, adults spoke seventy-six percent of the words in the room. In another, seventy-five. I was the largest share of both. Sixty-seven percent in one, seventy-two in the other. Twenty-some kids split what remained. Averaged across the room, about one percent each. I wrote the rule. I sent the email. And I was breaking it by a wide margin, in a room I built specifically to prevent it.

It gets more specific, and worse. In one of those sessions I said out loud, to the players, I talk more than our other coach does, and they talk more when she runs the room than when I do. I asked them to help me fix it. Five minutes later she gave the clearest statement of the method anyone offered all day, telling them the coaches were not going to hand out answers or say who was right, and this was for them to work out with each other. About a minute after that I asked the high-backhand question, and a player produced the perfect answer in front of everyone, which is the whole reason the room exists. Then I gave him the three hundred words.

Here's what I didn't expect. I wasn't lecturing. Two thirds of my turns in that session contained a question, so I was asking constantly. Asking and then answering. Asking and then explaining. Asking and then connecting it to something else I'd noticed. My average turn ran sixty-seven words. Whatever else that is, it isn't a question. I hadn't stopped being Socratic. I had never actually been Socratic. I was performing the shape of it at a volume leaving no room for anyone else.

The same stack of transcripts told me the room can run differently. Another of our coaches leads the same session with the same players, and when she runs it alone the players hold forty-five percent of the words, nearly double my best session. Her average turn is half the length of mine. When a kid gives a good answer she says something like "good, that goes with awareness," and moves on. I have a theory about why she does that and I don't, but it came later, and it isn't what I expected. What mattered in the moment was narrower. The number I had been treating as a fact about group instruction turned out to be a fact about me.

I should be honest about the instrument, because it's crude. A recorder, a transcript, and a word count, run across a handful of sessions never designed as an experiment. It can't tell me whether a room at forty-five percent develops players better than a room at twenty-four, and nobody has established that. I'm going to keep counting until I have more than a handful. But crude was enough to break the belief, and the belief was the thing in the way.

Four essays now, all circling the same handoff. Transfer. Awareness. Judgment. Seeing and testing. Every one of them about moving ownership from the coach to the player. And the first honest measurement I ever took of my own room was about how much space is left for anyone to own anything.

I'd seen this for years. I'd noticed rooms go better when I say less, I told people so, and I wrote it in a staff email before writing an essay about the value of testing what you think you know. I had never tested it. Testing meant counting, and counting meant finding out. It took an hour and a word count on transcripts I already had.

I'm not going to tell you the right number, because I don't know it, and anyone handing you a target will produce a coach who hits the target and a room gone silent. The number doesn't teach anything. It only tells you where in the tape to go listen. But if you run a room, whether it's a practice, a team, a classroom or a dinner table, you already hold a belief about how much of it you occupy. Most of us are certain we ask more than we tell.

Did you see it, or did you test it?