We Taught the Parts. Did They Learn the Whole?

Essay Three in the series Fundamental to What?

While I was at the Samuell Grand Tennis Center, my friend Kris Soutar of The Service Box and I built a program called Power Bands, and it went through several versions while we ran it. Kids earned colored wristbands for skills they could show on court. A white band meant a rally of ten with a coach, and an orange band meant three rallies of twenty. The fuller versions added partner bands, where two players worked through serve-and-return patterns and crosscourt rallies against down-the-line rallies, some with a standard that every ball stay deep enough to keep both players behind the baseline. One serve band asked a player to go wide enough to cross the doubles sideline, then send the third ball deep to the other side, nine times out of twelve. Every band had a clear standard, so a kid always knew what he'd earned and what came next.

There was a second set of bands for milestones. Those started with playing a first full practice match and a first sanctioned tournament, and they ran all the way up to winning a Slam. A slightly modified version of the program is in use now in the entry-level program at Austin Tennis Academy.

Read the bands with this series in mind and a gap shows up between the two sets. The skill bands asked for real tennis, with direction and depth against another player, but every one of them told the player the problem in advance. A player can earn every skill band without ever having to decide which shot a moment calls for. The milestone bands bring in the match, and a first tournament is worth recognizing, but those bands reward getting there and winning. Neither set asks whether the rally of twenty shows up once the score counts.

Each band may have measured exactly what it was built to measure. The risk is in what the adults conclude from a wrist full of them. When a kid wearing that many bands struggles in a match, we usually call it a transfer problem. The skills were learned and didn't carry over. I think the explanation sits earlier than that. The player didn't necessarily fail to transfer the lesson. I may never have established that he could.

The first essay in this series asked whether an inherited fundamental still deserves its authority, and the second asked why it has to come first. Suppose we got both of those right and the player performed every part we taught him. What did that prove?

So much of a lesson's success belongs to the person running it. I decide where the ball comes from and how fast. I can strip out the uncertainty and keep feeding the same problem until the right answer shows up, and with that much control I can make most players look better by the end of the hour. That may be good coaching. It may also tell me less about what the player learned than I'd like to believe.

Hitting a good forehand when you know a forehand is coming proves something. Hitting it when you don't know which side the next ball is headed for proves more, and choosing it at the right moment against someone trying to beat you is a different skill altogether. The mistake is treating the first as proof of the last. I've fed enough baskets to know what a basket is good for. Sometimes a player needs to feel one movement over and over with nothing else going on. The trouble starts when he gets good at that simplified version and I assume he'll be just as good once I put back everything I took out.

We break tennis into strokes, and strokes into smaller pieces with drills of their own, because parts are easier to teach and easier to check one at a time. The bands put that on a kid's wrist, but most curricula work the same way with or without the color. A coach can build a complete forehand progression without the player ever once having to decide whether a forehand is the right answer to the ball in front of him. Every step can be taught and checked and passed, and the progression never asks for the thing the forehand is for.

An opponent doesn't announce that the next ball is going wide and will need a repositioning step and a defensive crosscourt reply. The player has to read it and pick an answer in less time than it takes a coach to explain the first step. In most junior tournament matches, once the player walks on court, the coach isn't coming with him.

I've written before about a between-point routine we taught that disappeared once the player was in a match nobody was coaching. I asked then whether the teaching took. The harder question is whether the curriculum ever included the moment the routine was built for. A player can do the breathing and the cue perfectly in practice, but did he ever do them right after losing a point that mattered? In the classroom, a player who gives the right answer about handling a tough opponent has shown he can produce that answer in that room. Whether he'll recognize the situation when it happens to him is a separate question, and a lot of our teaching never gets around to asking it.

Look at what we actually count. The bands count rallies of ten and twenty, and serves that land nine times out of twelve. Most programs count something similar. Those numbers are easy to collect. Evidence of what a player can do on his own when the situation keeps changing is not, so we count the first and assume the second. A student can pass every unit test and still not be able to use the subject. A curriculum can be completed without its purpose being accomplished.

If a player finishes every step and still struggles to play the game it was all supposed to prepare him for, where does the failure belong? The usual answers are that he needs more practice or couldn't handle the pressure, and sometimes those are true. But if we never check whether the progression measured what we wanted, we're protecting the curriculum from evidence and asking the kid to answer for a system we never tested.

The checks don't have to be elaborate. I can come back to the skill a week later without warning, or ask him what he saw and why he chose what he did and hold that up against his next match. The scoreboard alone won't tell me much, because a player trying something harder will often lose more points before he starts winning them. What I'm looking for is whether he's seeing the problem sooner and handling it better.

I've coached long enough to know how easy it is to mistake my effectiveness in a lesson for the player's development. I know how to run a session that looks productive. But the player isn't being developed to perform well in my lesson. He's being developed to play tennis when I'm not there, and that ought to change what evidence I need before I decide he's learned something.

In the last essay I set aside one possibility: that some of our sequences exist because they're easier for adults to run. If so much of what we measure is also what's easiest for adults to see, it's fair to ask who the curriculum was really built to serve.