Who Gets to Teach the Teachers?

The game diversified who could play. The road into coach education moved more slowly.

In 1992, when I was thirty years old, I got certified by PTR. The program taught what I remember as PTR's standard method, and there was something about the structure I liked. We got ten hours of instruction, then owed ten hours back. Learn something, then contribute something. Joe Carey and Dan Santorum led the program, and Joe was a man of color, so I'm not going to rewrite that room as if nobody who looked like me had made it inside. He had. What I remember, though, is that I didn't experience the program as though Joe's voice was the one defining the method. That's a memory rather than an organizational chart, but it stayed with me, because I was already circling a question I didn't yet know how to ask out loud. How does somebody go from being taught the method to becoming one of the people trusted to decide what the method ought to be?

I couldn't see the road. Get certified, sure. Teach lessons, build a clientele, become a better coach. But if what interested you was coach education itself, if you wanted a hand in how other coaches understood the game, what came next? Who picked the clinicians? How did a person become a tester? Who got invited to speak at conferences? What actually moved a coach from local credibility to sectional influence to national standing? Maybe the road existed and I just didn't know where to look for it. Maybe I didn't have the relationships to see it. What I know is I was impatient enough about the question that I didn't wait long for somebody to hand me a map.

Around that same stretch, Oscar Wegner and I started building the World Association of Tennis Teachers and Coaches. I pulled an old portfolio out of storage recently, and seeing those pages again reminded me how much more substantial the thing had become than I sometimes give it credit for. By 1994 the organization had a board of directors, a tennis academy, plans for a national team and a national headquarters, implementation phases, and future projects. It also had a stated vision: every young American, regardless of race, gender, mental, physical or sensory ability, or socioeconomic status, should have equal access to the knowledge and benefits of tennis. I was listed as president, executive director, and head coach of the Tucker Tennis Academy. Oscar was first vice president. Bernie Chavis was second vice president. The board included people tied to USTA sections, community programs, the Arthur Ashe Youth Tennis Center, and PTR testing.

I'm careful about calling that organization ahead of its time, because people reach for that phrase to excuse everything that didn't work. Some ideas really are early. Some just aren't ready. Some are underfunded, badly packaged, or built by somebody more interested in the idea than in the politics required to make an idea travel. I was thirty-something, confident, impatient, and fully capable of any of those mistakes. But the surviving pages settle one question for me. I wasn't standing outside coach education waiting for permission to become interested in it. I was already trying to build a coach-education institution, and that distinction matters for what happened next.

Bernie Chavis had been part of that board before he became president of the American Tennis Association. Around 2000 I relocated from Georgia to Charlotte to work briefly with Calvin Davis at his Tennis Advancement Program, and during that stretch Bernie asked me to serve as National Director of Player Development for the ATA. I said yes, and once again I started building. I put together a roadmap for player development and coach education that I thought could give the organization a more coherent way of preparing coaches and developing players.

It never became what I pictured. The ATA didn't have the resources to stand up a national architecture, and a title inside the ATA didn't give the work enough standing in the broader tennis world to make it travel. That's not a knock on Bernie. Bernie had watched me try to build coach education years before, and he later handed me real responsibility, which means the recognition was there. The harder lesson was that an institution can give somebody authority without having the money, the distribution, or the outside standing to make that authority travel. I had a title and a plan. What I didn't have was an institution with enough weight to make the broader coach-education world look up.

That's where this gets more complicated than a story about race and exclusion. Black voices have been present in tennis for a long time. Arthur Ashe was a prominent television commentator. More recently, James Blake, Vicky Duval, and Chris Eubanks have all had places in tennis broadcasting. Martin Blackman ran USTA player development for a decade. Mark Bey came up in roughly the same era I did, became a USPTA Elite Professional, presented at more than eighty conventions, and became part of the association's instructional library. Bey's example presses hardest on my own question, because coach education is precisely the room I'm talking about, and he found his way into it. There have been national coaches of color whose expertise was plainly recognized. The honest version of this story isn't that tennis never let Black people speak with authority about the game.

The slower question, at least from where I stood, was who got to teach the teachers.

Television commentary says we value your read on what we're watching. Coach education says something heavier. It says we value your ideas enough to let them shape how thousands of other coaches learn to see the game. That's not a microphone. That's the power to set language, define problems, decide what good teaching looks like, and shape frameworks that travel coach to coach until they reach players who'll never know where any of it started.

I wanted that kind of standing, though I wouldn't have put it in those words in 1992. I never wanted tennis to listen to me because I was Black. I wanted tennis to be capable of listening to me without first deciding what kind of Black man I was supposed to be. What happened after I left New England made that distinction hard to ignore. I arrived in Georgia having served on the USTA New England board and having chaired a sectional committee, and I was placed on the Georgia District Minority Participation Committee. Later, North Carolina looked at the same person and made me chairman of its Coaches Committee, where I stayed for years. Then USTA Texas told me there were no volunteer opportunities for me. Same person, an increasingly substantial record, different institutional lens each time.

I can't tell you the motive behind any of those decisions. Not every missed opportunity is racism. Institutions are messy, relationships matter, politics matter, and personality matters, which is worth admitting since I've never been short on personality. I can be impatient with convention and very sure an idea deserves a hearing before anybody else has decided it does. Some of my ideas were probably wrong. Some were probably early. Some may have been decent ideas carried into the wrong room by the wrong messenger at the wrong moment. I can grant every bit of that and still ask the question I care about now: where was the place those ideas were supposed to get examined?

I never became one of the names people associate with national coach education. Yet when I look backward, I'm not sure I ever stopped doing it. I built programs and developed players. I chaired a coaches committee. I designed Power Bands and other ways of making progress visible to a kid without a coach having to explain it. I spent years working on what transfers from practice into competition and what evaporates on the way. I studied how players, parents, and coaches manage to talk past one another. More recently I built IEDE, the training and match cards, tournament observation processes, parent education, and coach briefs. At Austin Tennis Academy those ideas have moved off the page and into an actual training environment, where coaches and players can use them, argue with them, and show me where they're wrong.

Maybe the irony is that I spent so long looking for a road into coach education that I didn't notice how much of the road I'd been building.

That doesn't mean the formal institutions were unnecessary. They matter, and they can do things an individual can't. A strong coach-education system sets standards, distributes ideas, tests them across different contexts, keeps what works, throws out what doesn't, and hands young coaches knowledge they'd otherwise spend twenty years figuring out alone. My frustration was never that institutions exist. It's that institutions can get so used to their own pathways that they stop noticing the knowledge forming right beside them.

I wonder about the coaches of my generation who never could find the entrance. Not only Black coaches, though race is part of my own story. I'm thinking about coaches without the right playing résumé, coaches who weren't connected to the right people, coaches whose work happened at public facilities instead of famous academies, and coaches whose ideas sounded strange until similar ideas later arrived in better-credentialed language. How much knowledge disappeared because the person carrying it never got the credential, the relationship, the platform, or the sponsor required to make anybody else curious?

I don't know how much of my own work belongs in that lost category. I'm too close to it to judge. Maybe some of what I pushed thirty years ago deserved to disappear. Maybe other pieces would have gotten better if they'd met serious scrutiny earlier. That's the point. Scrutiny isn't the same thing as recognition. I never needed tennis to tell me every idea was good. I needed a system capable of deciding which ones were worth testing.

The pages from that old portfolio are sitting in front of me right now. The paper has aged and the typography looks like the nineties. The ideas are full of the optimism of a younger man who figured that if he made the architecture clear enough, somebody would surely help him build it. I smile at some of it. I still believe some of it. And I notice something I didn't see at the time. The vision was never really about me finding a place in tennis. It was about making more places for other people to learn the game.

Thirty-two years later, I'm still doing some version of that work.

The tools are different now. I can publish without waiting on a federation newsletter, put a system inside a real academy and document what happens, and work with coaches, parents, and players directly. I can also use AI to interrogate my own ideas, compare observations across time, hold institutional memory, and build learning environments that didn't exist when I was carrying that portfolio around Atlanta. No national organization has to tell me I'm allowed to think about how coaches learn.

But I still care about the institutional question, because the next thirty-year-old shouldn't have to spend decades wondering where the road is. It's one thing to certify a Black coach, and another to ask that coach what the certification ought to teach. It's one thing to hand somebody a title, and another to give the work enough resources and standing to travel. Inviting more people into tennis is not the same as building a system capable of recognizing when one of them has something to teach the teachers.

Maybe I never stopped trying to teach the teachers. I just stopped waiting for somebody to tell me I was allowed to.

*Written with Reggie, Claude, Gemini, Otter, and 64+ trips around the sun.*