Today Is Yesterday’s Tomorrow

I remember 1992 vividly because I was teaching something that much of the tennis establishment still believed was wrong. I was teaching the open stance, and some of the established pros in Massachusetts were telling parents they couldn't work with players who were also working with me. Their objection wasn't simply that they disagreed with the technique. They treated the disagreement as disqualifying. A player could follow the accepted standard, or that player could work with me, but apparently not both.

At the time, the open stance was still viewed by many coaches as a technical compromise rather than a legitimate foundation for high-level play. The conventional model was built around stepping into the ball, closing the stance, and organizing the stroke in a way that matched the prevailing understanding of sound mechanics. Anything outside that model looked like a departure from proper instruction, so the safest response for many coaches was to reject it entirely.

The interesting part is that the game didn't wait for the establishment to become comfortable. Players were already being asked to manage greater speed, wider court positions, shorter preparation windows, and more demanding repositioning patterns. The open stance wasn't an act of rebellion against good technique. It was a response to the realities of the game in front of the player. The environment had changed, and the movement solution had to change with it.

Eventually, reality won. Today, no serious coach questions whether players need to be able to hit effectively from an open stance. What was once treated as a violation of technical orthodoxy became part of the basic vocabulary of the modern game. The controversy disappeared so completely that younger coaches may not even realize there was ever a controversy to begin with.

That is how standards usually change. The new idea is first dismissed, then resisted, then adopted, and finally treated as though it had always been obvious. By the time the establishment embraces it, the people who challenged the old model have often already moved on to the next problem.

This is why I'm suspicious whenever someone defends a practice primarily by saying, "That's how it has always been done." Every standard is simply someone's successful past. It may have been exactly right for the conditions that produced it, but that doesn't mean it remains right for the conditions we face now.

Here is the part that's easy to miss, and it's the reason I keep circling back to this. The reflex doesn't only show up in the people guarding the gate. Not long ago I sat in a conversation about building something genuinely new, with people who were on my side and wanted it to work, and within a few minutes someone reached for the established, brand-name program as the model to follow. Do it the way the proven place does it. It wasn't resistance. It was the opposite, an honest attempt to help. But it pointed straight back at the existing standard, because the existing standard is where our instincts go when we're trying to be taken seriously. Even the people helping you build the future will hand you the past, because the past is the thing everyone already respects.

Conforming to a past standard can make you competent. It can make you respectable. It can even make you successful for a while. What it cannot do is make you the new standard. To become the new standard, you have to be willing to question much of what you already believe. That doesn't mean rejecting the past for the sake of being different. It means refusing to confuse familiarity with truth. Some beliefs deserve to be preserved. Others deserve to be examined, tested, revised, or abandoned entirely.

The hardest part is that the people protecting the old standard rarely experience themselves as being behind. They believe they are defending quality. In many cases, they are defending the model that once made them successful, which makes the resistance understandable. It also makes it dangerous, because the stronger your attachment to yesterday's success, the harder it becomes to see what tomorrow requires.

That lesson extends far beyond tennis. It applies to coaching, leadership, education, business, technology, and every system that mistakes its current form for its final one. The future almost never arrives looking respectable. It arrives looking inconvenient, unnecessary, or wrong.