Who Decided We Had to Teach It First?

Essay Two in the series Fundamental to What?

Watch enough first lessons and you start to notice how much they have in common. The grip comes first. Then the ready position, then the turn, then the backswing, and somewhere after that the follow-through. If all goes well, the child eventually gets to do something that looks like tennis. Most parents watching from the fence would call that a sensible way to start, and plenty of coaches would agree.

What strikes me now isn't whether that order is right or wrong. It's that the order is almost always there before the child is. By the time a kid walks onto the court, somebody has already decided what comes first, what has to wait, and what counts as ready for the next step. Hardly anyone explains where that order came from. It's just there, like the furniture in the room.

About sixteen years ago, in partnership with the Dallas Police Athletic League, I started a program at the Samuell Grand Tennis Center that moved some of that furniture. On opening night I told the adults who'd come to help that this would be very different from any tennis program they'd been around. We weren't going to start with how to hold the racket or how to keep score. The kids would get rackets, balls, and a place to play. As I put it that night, "Here's a racket. Here's some balls. Here's your play space. Go out and create." I wanted the high school players helping us to work with the kids peer to peer, and I didn't want adults deciding what the kids would do on the court. The first challenge I gave the kids was to invent a game of their own with a racket and a ball. I told them I didn't want anyone bringing back regular tennis scoring as their invention, because that wasn't original.

Instruction didn't disappear. We set aside two courts where a coach would work on forehands and backhands with anyone who asked. A kid could stay five minutes or twenty, then head back out and challenge whoever he'd been playing. "Nobody is going to say you have to stay there and be taught," I told them. The night had rules, too. You swing only when you have your own space, and you bring back the racket you checked out. Since I'm old school, I also told them a kid who talks back to an adult is wrong even when he's right, so they'd need to find another way to make their point. The youngest kids, eight and under, played on smaller courts with lower nets. There was plenty of structure. What changed was who decided when to ask for teaching. Once they were playing, that was up to the kids.

I'm not offering that program as proof. It ran about a year before the funding ran out, and I don't know whether any of those kids went on to play competitively. That was never the plan. The plan was exposure to the game, in a place the kids could make their own. What the program did do was make me answer a question most programs never have to face. If the grip and the score don't come first, what does, and who gets to decide?

In the last essay I wrote about racket back and down, an instruction that may have outlived the conditions that gave it authority. That essay asked whether something deserves to be called fundamental. This one is about what usually happens right after. Once we've decided something is fundamental, we tend to decide it has to come first.

Those are two different claims. Something can matter a great deal to how a player eventually performs without being the first thing he learns, or the thing he has to prove before he's allowed to move on. Needing something eventually isn't the same as needing it first.

Coaching language slides from one claim to the other with almost no resistance, and I've watched it happen for years. A coach notices something good players do, maybe a grip, a stance, a contact point, or a way of preparing the racket. Before long it's called a fundamental, and soon after that somebody decides kids should learn it early. From there it's a short trip to the stronger claim that nothing else of real consequence can happen until it's in place. What started as an observation about performance has turned into a rule about order, which is a lot of authority to rest on a very small bridge.

Take the grip. A young player probably does need, at some point, a way of holding the racket that lets him solve bigger problems later. If a grip makes certain shots nearly impossible, that eventually matters. But does it prove the grip has to be settled before anything else happens? Can't a child start learning about distance, timing, height, and keeping a rally going while the grip is still a work in progress? I don't think the importance of the grip answers either question. The grip still matters. What's in question is the timing, and a timing claim needs its own evidence.

What would that evidence look like? We'd need some reason to believe that learning one thing before another produces better results than learning them in a different order, and we'd need to say what those better results are. I don't often hear that case made. More often the order is simply handed down, the same way racket back and down was. We don't just inherit instructions. We inherit sequences, a whole picture of how learning is supposed to unfold, and because the picture feels orderly, we take it for truth.

Order has a strong pull on adults. A clear progression tells the coach what to teach next and tells the parent what progress is supposed to look like. It cuts down uncertainty, which adults tend to like a good deal less than children do. It also gives everyone an explanation when a player struggles: he just hasn't reached the next stage yet. Sometimes that explanation is fair. Sometimes it covers for a sequence nobody has checked. A parent, a coach, and an entire program can be perfectly aligned around a developmental order that no one has ever tested.

It isn't enough for a coach to say a thing is important. He also has to say why it needs to come first, compared with whatever the child might have learned by doing something else. We usually skip that comparison. We treat our preferred order as if the alternative were chaos, when the real alternative is a different order. Opening night at Samuell Grand had a check-out desk, safety rules, and coaches waiting for anyone who wanted help. It wasn't chaos. It just put things in a different order.

So who decided it had to come first? Maybe somebody tried different orders and found this one produced the best long-term results. Maybe a generation of coaches saw that players who started here adapted better later, or the equipment and the game once made this order the practical one. It's also possible it was simply the easiest way to run a group lesson with a court full of kids, and over time the order took on the dignity of a principle. Those answers aren't equally trustworthy, yet they all sound the same when they're passed down as coaching wisdom. I'll come back to that last one later in this series.

I'm old enough to know that when you write a sentence like that, some people hear an argument against structure. It isn't one, and that program wasn't either. Young players need guidance and correction, and they need adults who know more than they do. My objection is to the way one particular structure can hide inside the language of common sense. Questioning when something gets taught isn't the same as questioning whether it's worth learning.

I don't get to ask these questions only of the sequences I inherited, either. I've built my share of progressions and written programs down in a set order because I believed the order mattered. Some of it probably did, and some of it probably still does.

Even the Samuell Grand program had an order. About the instruction courts, I told the kids, "I don't want anybody to start there." Play came first because I decided it should. Did I put play first because those kids needed it there, or because I believed in it strongly enough to build a program around it? If I'd let them start at the instruction courts, what would they actually have lost? Those are design questions, not accusations, and they're uncomfortable ones, because once you've built something around an order, asking whether another order might have worked better feels a lot like questioning your own judgment. Given what that program was for, starting with play may have been exactly right. That still doesn't make it the right starting point for every program or every child.

This doesn't stop at the baseline. Schools, businesses, and families all arrange development into steps, and over time the steps stop looking like choices and start looking inevitable. Once that happens, questioning the order can sound like questioning the whole enterprise. A progression can be sensible, humane, and useful. It can also be arbitrary, out of date, or built more for the adults than the learner. Being tidy doesn't make it true.

If we teach as though every important thing has to come first, we crowd the start of development with adult priorities. The child spends his early time proving he's ready for the game instead of meeting it. Some kids handle that fine, and some even thrive. Others go along without ever quite understanding what all those pieces were for.

So when someone tells me a thing is fundamental, I've come to want answers to two questions, not one. Does it matter? And who decided it had to come first? The first gets asked all the time. The second almost never does, and it leads straight to the next one: what happens when we teach every part, in exactly the order we chose, and the player still can't put them together?

Link to Samuell Grand video click here