Who I'm Looking For

This piece has one purpose. I'm looking for one person, maybe two, to apprentice with me for six to twelve months starting later this year. If you've read the four pieces before this one, you already know what the work is. This one is about whether it's you, and what to do if it is.

What This Actually Requires

Before anything else, a bar that isn't negotiable. You need a 12+ UTR, and you need to have either played collegiate tennis at a ranked NCAA program or held an ATP or WTA ranking. That's not a preference. It's the standard I held for every coach I ever hired going back to Charlotte, when the rule was that you had to be able to beat me 6-0 and 6-0 to work for me. I can't hit at that level myself anymore. Whoever does this with me has to be able to, because the players we'll be working with deserve someone who can legitimately outplay them, not just direct them.

Playing ability gets you in the door. It isn't the job. The job is learning to see what I see, say it back to me in your own words until it's actually yours, and eventually run situations I never specifically walked you through, the way I described in the last two pieces.

What It Asks of You

This is unpaid. I can cover room and board at a basic level, and that means staying at my house for the length of the apprenticeship, not separate housing. If you need this to be a paying job right now, it isn't the right fit, and I'd rather say that plainly than waste your time.

It's also not just time on one court with me. Part of the apprenticeship means going out to watch and learn from programs outside my own, Dobsha Tennis in Tampa Bay is already confirmed as one of them, with more to come. It also means coach education seminars and symposiums, sometimes on your own and sometimes alongside me. You'll go into those already knowing you have to teach what you learn to other coaches afterward, not just take notes for yourself. That's on purpose. Understanding something well enough to teach it to someone else is a different level of understanding than learning it just to know it, the same reason I make you explain every call back to me instead of just letting you agree with it. You're not just absorbing how I do this. You're building a wider view of how good coaches solve the same problems differently, and putting some of it back into circulation while you're there.

And it's demanding in a way that has nothing to do with hours. Every session, I'll tell you what I'm working on and why before you execute it. Every session, you'll have to explain back to me why I made the call I made, not just that you agreed with it. Around month four or five, I'll send you to watch a player compete with no script from me, and you'll have to tell me what the next month of training should look like based only on what you saw. That's not a formality at the end. It's the actual test of whether any of this worked.

What You Get

If it works, you don't leave with a certificate. You leave with a place to go, either into an existing program that needs exactly this kind of coaching, or as the person who starts a new one. That placement is the actual intended endpoint, not an afterthought.

You also leave with something harder to quantify but probably worth more: a documented record of how you learned to see the game the way I do, built session by session, with the reasoning attached to the footage that produced it, not reconstructed from memory afterward.

If This Is You

Message me directly. Tell me about your playing background first, since that's the non-negotiable filter. Then tell me why this, specifically, and not a paying assistant coaching job somewhere else. I'd rather hear that reasoning from you than assume it.