The Vow of Poverty

For thirty years, I confused suffering with commitment. The kind of suffering I mean did not build anything. It arrived as chronic financial stress, utilities at risk, and the persistent belief that if you were doing the work correctly, instability was inevitable. I treated that instability as proof I was serious.

I was not alone in this. Junior tennis has a code, unwritten but visible. Devotion is admired. Struggle is praised. Prosperity raises questions. The harder you work, the less you should earn. Sacrifice becomes the measure. Over time, that code hardens into something closer to religion.

I lived inside it. There were stretches when I drove home wondering whether the power would still be on. On more than one occasion it wasn't. I bought a tool to turn the water on at the street level to avoid having to go to bed without showering. I normalized that feeling. I told myself this was what the work cost. Anything easier would mean I had sold out. I also believed something else. Coaches who worked at country clubs, who left at five, who earned well and still had evenings with their families, those coaches were less serious. Less invested. Less real. I was wrong.

What I failed to see was that I was confusing instability with virtue. I was operating in a system that required emotional heroics just to function at all.

Junior tennis does require emotional investment. You cannot develop young players without trust. Without it, instruction becomes either control or cheerleading. Trust is the delivery mechanism. This part is not optional. The problem was that the business model made that trust load-bearing. When the structure depends on the coach absorbing all the risk, stress becomes permanent. There is no margin for reflection. There is no room for redesign. There is only endurance.

I did not question this for a long time because everyone around me seemed to be living the same way. Financial precarity was normal. Burnout was expected. Family strain was treated as collateral damage. My children paid that price. My three girls never got to go to summer camp, Disney World, or a trip to most anywhere other than the zoo. I was present, but not in the way that matters. My attention was always divided. My nervous system was always on the court, even when I was home. I justified that absence as necessity. I told myself I was building something worth the cost. What I was actually doing was tolerating a structure that asked too much and gave too little in return.

The shift came when I took over Samuell Grand Tennis Center. What changed was not on the court. It was behind it. Kim Kurth handled operations. She was not a tennis person, and that turned out to matter more than I expected. Her job was not to coach better. Her job was to build systems around the work. Billing. Scheduling. Staffing. Consistency. All the invisible load that usually sits on the coach. What happened next was measurable. Revenue increased year over year for fifty-six out of fifty-seven months. That did not happen because we cared more. It happened because the system stopped feeding on personal sacrifice and started operating like an institution.

The lesson took longer to land than it should have. My earlier suffering was not proof of excellence. It was evidence of bad design. Junior tennis does not need less commitment. It needs better architecture. When coaches are forced to function like priests, everyone loses. Coaches burn out. Families churn. Players absorb anxiety that has nothing to do with development. The model survives because good people are inside it. Passion keeps it alive longer than it deserves. Commitment masks the fragility underneath. But passion cannot replace structure forever.

The most damaging part of the vow of poverty is not financial. It is cognitive. Coaches stop imagining alternatives. They stop questioning the container. They internalize the idea that instability is the price of doing meaningful work. It is not. A well-designed system protects care rather than consuming it. It separates craft from operations so neither collapses under the weight of the other. I know this because I have lived both versions.