They Saw What Was Coming Before I Did

Most people think they understood their toughest mentors while they were living through their influence. I thought I knew what was happening too.

I was wrong about all of them.

The people who truly shaped my approach to developing elite tennis players weren't tennis coaches at all. My mother was my first great influencer. My high school football coach influenced me as a player. And a mentor I met after I became a tennis coach showed me how to carry proven methods beyond the communities where they were confined.

But I walked through their influence in complete darkness, often confused and sometimes resentful, not understanding why I was being treated differently than others around me.

My mother's lessons felt restrictive at the time. She valued precise communication above everything else: "When you start yelling, people stop listening. Learn to express yourself with your words and everyone will know exactly what you mean without needing to raise your voice." She practiced what she preached - I can't remember her ever raising her voice. I mimicked her technique without understanding it, learning to lower the volume of my voice when I wanted people to lean in and pay attention. My voice is naturally loud, so modulation down worked better than trying to raise it.

But her most confusing lesson went deeper. When she told me I couldn't defend myself even when physically provoked - that I had to "turn the other cheek" literally - I felt frustrated and limited. Why was I different? Why couldn't I react like other kids? I carried this resentment for years until that moment in my high school parking lot when a police officer cornered me, put his hand on his weapon, and told me "little niggers like me disappear all the time." Suddenly, everything crystallized. She hadn't been restricting me. She had been keeping me alive.

Coach Bill Tighe confused me even more. When my high school football coach called me out in front of the entire team during Monday film review, I thought he had it out for me. "Evans, look at you. You look like a traffic cop out there standing straight up." I was 6'4" and skinny - looked like the ideal candidate to retrieve balls from the gutter. Why was he always on me? The criticism came with his characteristic speech patterns: "Are you kibbin me?" and his famous demand for "intestinal forbitude" - which he pronounced with a "b" instead of "d."

I spent that season wondering why he seemed harder on me than other players. Was I that bad? Did he not want me on the team?

Then came my epiphany moment. A year later, doing a post-graduate year at Bridgton Academy in Maine, I received a knock on my door. Someone told me I had a call on the pay phone. It was a recruiter from West Point. Coach Tighe had told him I was "the sleeper of the east," explaining I had skipped 3rd grade and was younger than many in the class behind me. Here I was, a year removed from his program, and he was still advocating for me without me asking.

Everything I thought I knew about that season shattered. He hadn't been picking on me. He had been preparing me.

Thirteen years later, when circumstances allowed me to do whatever I wanted with my time, I chose to volunteer as an assistant coach on Bill Tighe's staff at my alma mater. Finally understanding what my mother and Coach Tighe had been doing changed how I wanted to spend my time.

When I moved to Atlanta in 1993, the only person I knew was Coach Ernie Peterson at Burdette Tennis Center in College Park. Coach Peterson was my height and twice as thick, missing parts of several fingers from picking cotton as a youth in Florida. He had a deep booming voice and ran a junior development program that looked nothing like conventional tennis coaching.

At first, his methods seemed almost harsh. Coach Peterson had never been a tennis player himself. He taught his kids to play with two hands on both sides - two backhands. In the summer, kids in his program had to create businesses. When I would talk to kids about dreaming of playing professional tennis, he would quickly shut me down: "Get that pro talk outta here. What we do here is get kids college scholarships."

He became my mentor and surrogate father, but I didn't understand his intensity initially. The phone would ring before 6:00 AM, and his voice would boom: "Get up boy, you can't make money in the bed." He was concerned about my financial future, asking to see my finances and showing me his as comparison. Why was he so demanding about everything?

Then I started seeing his results: multiple top 5 US juniors, including his daughter Jewel who became a multi-time All-American at USC, and Jamea Jackson who played Fed Cup for the United States.

Coach Peterson operated in a deeply Black community, and almost all players in his program looked like the community. He often told me I understood his training philosophies better than anyone except possibly his daughter. He acknowledged his influence was largely limited to the Black community - he was the elder coach who earned respect from younger Black coaches in greater Atlanta and legends like Zina Garrison, Rodney Harmon, and Lori McNeil.

Then came his revelation: He said my gift was bringing his proven philosophies to the greater junior development world. Suddenly I understood why he had pushed me differently, why the standards seemed higher, why he invested so much time in my development beyond tennis.

Walking through their influence, I had no idea what they were actually doing. I thought my mother was being overprotective. I thought Coach Tighe didn't like me. I thought Coach Peterson was just intense by nature.

I was wrong about all of them.

They saw environments I would navigate - country clubs where I might be the only Black face, tournaments where every reaction would be scrutinized, coaching situations where my credibility would be questioned before I opened my mouth. They weren't being tough for toughness' sake. They were preparing me for battles they could see coming.

My mother knew what happened to Black boys who fit aggressive stereotypes. Coach Tighe understood what it took to succeed when you couldn't rely on natural advantages alone. Coach Peterson had figured out how to develop elite players using methods the tennis establishment ignored, and he saw me as the bridge to carry those methods where they needed to go.

None of them explained their intentions while I was living through their influence. They just did what they knew needed to be done, while I walked through it confused, sometimes frustrated, not understanding why I was being treated differently than others around me.

But I wasn't being treated differently. That was another misconception.

Years later, walking through the President George W. Bush museum at SMU, I heard him speak about "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and instinctively understood what he meant. Another epiphany moment.

On the occasion of Coach Tighe's 95th birthday, a year before he died from Covid, I attended a gathering in his honor. I was there both as a former player and with video camera in hand to help capture and tell his story. I was amazed by the number of people whose experience with him mirrored my own. He hadn't singled me out - he had refused to accept low expectations for any of his players.

My mother cared about me the way parents should care about their children - like I mattered most. Coach Tighe and Coach Peterson made everyone feel the way I did. They weren't playing favorites or identifying kids with special potential. They were refusing to practice the soft bigotry of low expectations with anyone.

This changed how I think about coaching entirely. I don't pick winners and losers based on who I think has greater potential, because I learned from the best that excellence isn't about potential - it's about refusing to accept anything less than someone's best effort toward meaningful goals.

Even when I was confused by their methods, I could sense something different about Coaches Tighe and Peterson compared to other demanding coaches I encountered. There's a crucial distinction between coaches who refuse low expectations because they genuinely care about development versus coaches who are just hard ass assholes. The difference isn't always obvious in the moment, but the underlying motivation matters everything.

Coaches Tighe and Peterson served as my north stars because their intensity came from authentic investment in building people, not from ego or enjoying being difficult. That's why they're still advocating for players years later, still earning respect from people whose lives they touched decades ago. Hard ass assholes don't get invited to 95th birthday celebrations where dozens of former players want to honor them.

Today, when I work with tennis families investing serious money in their child's development, I remember what it felt like to be in that darkness. I tell them what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. I prepare their kids for the reality of elite tennis competition, knowing they might not understand my methods in real time.

Because the people who shaped me taught me this: The most important preparation happens while you're walking through it blind. The understanding comes later, in those powerful moments when everything suddenly makes sense.

The tennis world needs more coaches who see what's coming before their players do, even if those players won't understand until much later what was actually being built.