Whose Job Is It, Anyway?

Alignment Series, Essay Two

I've been the coach who wished parents would stop coaching from the bleachers. I've also been the parent in those bleachers, watching something go wrong that I knew how to fix. Sometimes I was right about what I was seeing. That didn't mean I was right about what should happen next, which is an uncomfortable distinction for someone who's spent most of his working life being paid to see what other people miss.

The first essay in this series argued that a good meeting and a shared goal don't add up to alignment. The test comes afterward, when somebody loses, somebody gets frustrated, and the adults have to decide what to do with what they just saw. Underneath that sits a harder question. Even when everyone agrees something needs attention, who gets to decide what happens next?

I think we blur three things that aren't the same. Expertise means I might know what's going on. Responsibility means I've taken on some obligation to do something about it. Authority means I have the standing to decide what actually gets done. Around a young player, those can belong to three different people, and they often overlap.

Take a parent who played high-level tennis. He watches his daughter lose and notices her second-serve toss has drifted behind her head. He's probably right, and he may even know how to fix it. But her coach has spent three weeks on something else. Maybe the serve is already on the list. Maybe the coach has chosen to leave it alone for now because one more technical thought would crowd out something more important. The parent has expertise. The coach has responsibility for the technical progression. Who has the authority to change that progression shouldn't get settled in the parking lot after a loss.

The example runs just as well in reverse. I've known coaches who acted as if being hired to teach a child gave them sole rights to interpret everything in that child's tennis life. The parent might watch twenty tournament matches while the coach watched two, and somehow the coach's read still counted for more. The parent would describe something happening again and again in competition, and the coach would answer by describing what the player did in lessons. Both could be telling the truth. The title didn't make the coach's view complete.

This is why "everybody stay in your lane" has never satisfied me. It sounds sensible until you ask who drew the lanes, whether anybody agreed to them, and what happens when something important falls between them. A parent doesn't stop being a parent because a coach was hired. A coach doesn't stop being responsible for development because the parent pays the bill. And an older player doesn't lose his stake in decisions just because two adults have worked out an arrangement that suits them.

Then there's someone in a role like mine. After more than thirty years of building and running development programs, I can walk into a training environment and see things that aren't obvious to the people working inside it every day. That distance helps. I'm not feeding balls, juggling court assignments, or getting through the afternoon's lesson schedule, so I can pay attention to how the whole experience is built. But distance has its own blind spots. I can spot what looks like a problem without knowing why the program runs the way it does. There may be a good reason for something I'd have organized differently, or there may not. Until I ask, I don't know. And even when I'm right, being right doesn't make it my call.

I've sat on the other side of that, too. When I was running programs, I didn't much enjoy someone showing up with a fresh set of observations and explaining how we ought to change things. Sometimes I was being defensive. Sometimes the visitor didn't know what we'd already tried. Sometimes both were true. Expertise can make a person more useful and harder to work with at the same time.

Nobody should stop sharing what they know. The real question is what happens to it once it's shared. Say a coach has decided that for the next month a player is going to work on recognizing when to attack, instead of trying to finish points from positions that don't call for it. The player understands the assignment, and practice is starting to show it. Then he loses a tournament match with a terrible first-serve percentage. The parent saw the serve problem, the coach knows it exists, and the player probably knows it better than either of them. Does Monday become a serve lesson? Maybe, and there could be good reasons. The mere existence of another problem isn't one of them.

A real development roadmap helps here because it gives everyone a shared way to decide what can wait. If the serve is scheduled for later, nobody has to find it again every weekend. If something new truly deserves to jump the line, there's a plan to measure that decision against. Without one, every observation competes to become the next intervention, and the player ends up working on whatever most recently bothered the adult with the strongest opinion. Sometimes that adult is me.

Parents also carry responsibilities coaches don't see, and coaches sometimes act as if those responsibilities have nothing to do with development. The parent knows how much the kid slept, what's going on at school, whether the family can afford another tournament, and what the ride home was like. The coach knows how the player takes instruction, what happens when a new skill gets tested, and how he behaves in a training setting the parent never sees. Neither view is optional, and neither is complete.

The trouble starts when information about one responsibility turns into authority over another. A coach can reasonably tell a parent the player needs more consistent rest between training sessions. That doesn't put the coach in charge of the household. A parent can reasonably tell a coach the player is drowning in technical instructions. That doesn't put the parent in charge of the lesson plan. Those observations should shape decisions, but influence isn't control.

The lines move, too. With an eight-year-old, the adults make most of the calls about schedules, training, and priorities, while inviting the child to think along with them. By seventeen, I'd hope the player is doing much more of that work himself, talking through what he's trying to accomplish, describing what he felt in competition, and taking a growing part in how he prepares. Not every seventeen-year-old is equally ready, and playing at a high level doesn't make someone equally mature everywhere else. But the adults should be looking for chances to hand over ownership, not admiring how well the old arrangement still runs.

I wonder how often a parent-coach relationship stays exactly what it was the day the child joined the program. The parent still starts the conversations, the coach reports back to the parent, and the two adults decide what's next while the player hears about it afterward. That may have been an excellent setup at nine. At sixteen, it may be keeping everyone comfortable while denying the player practice at decisions he'll eventually have to make without them. Nobody has to be doing anything wrong for that to happen. They may just be continuing something that used to be right.

So who gets the authority? It shouldn't simply go to whoever has the most impressive résumé or writes the biggest check. Authority doesn't come from knowing the most. Much of it is handed to someone, the way a family hands a coach the technical plan, and what's been handed over can be questioned or taken back. The rest ought to move toward the player as he becomes able to carry it. Telling everyone to respect each other's roles isn't enough either. Roles have to be defined, examined, and sometimes changed. People need a way to raise a concern without taking over the solution, and everyone needs to know whether an observation is being offered for consideration or a decision is actually being requested. Hardest of all, they have to be willing to hear that a concern can be legitimate and still not be the current priority.

An experienced parent who can see the problem finds that hard to accept. So does a coach whose sound decision is being questioned, and so does a consultant whose value has usually come from finding problems and helping fix them. Most of us measure our usefulness by what we add. We rarely count the contribution of leaving something alone. And if I'm honest, some of what passes for helping is really about staying at the center of things.

So I've started to think one of the most important questions in an alignment meeting isn't what each person is going to do. It's what each person is going to stop doing, and what they're going to let somebody else own.

That includes the player.

If the goal is a young person who can eventually run his own development without us, the adults can't treat every responsibility as permanent property. The arrangement should change as the player becomes able to carry more of it. The test isn't whether the adults feel comfortable letting go. It's whether the player can carry the responsibility, and whether we've given him enough chances to learn how. A kid who's never been allowed to start the conversation hasn't shown he can't. He just hasn't had the chance.

I don't want parents to stop watching, coaches to stop using their judgment, or consultants to stop asking uncomfortable questions. I want what each of them offers to be more useful because everyone knows what happens after it's offered. Sometimes that means acting, and sometimes it means asking one more question. It can mean recognizing that the next step belongs to someone else, or letting the player take a step we're perfectly able to take for him.

Everyone around a kid can know something, care about it, and even be right about what they're seeing. That still leaves the question of whose job it is to do something about it. I'd rather we answer that before the next bad match answers it for us.