You Can't Be Accountable for What You Can't See

We use the word accountability a lot with young athletes.

Hold yourself accountable. Stay focused. Do what your coach asked you to do. Show up ready. Compete harder. Use your routine. Take responsibility for your development.

None of those are bad expectations. I use them myself. But during one of our classroom sessions at Austin Tennis Academy this week, Coach Rhiannon asked the players a question that made me think we may sometimes be starting one step too late.

Can you have accountability without awareness?

The first answer came quickly.

No.

Then she asked why. That's where it got more interesting.

The players started working their way through it. You have to know what you're supposed to be accountable for, recognize what you're doing, and notice when you're not doing it. One of the older players talked about mindfulness, about learning to recognize when his attention has wandered, when he's no longer in the zone, when his focus has drifted somewhere else. Another talked about knowing your tendencies as a person and as a player, including knowing what solutions work when one of those tendencies starts working against you.

They were getting to something we don't talk about nearly enough.

Accountability requires information.

Before I can change what I'm doing, I have to know what I'm doing. That sounds almost too obvious to be useful until you watch how often we coach as though the noticing has already happened.

A player starts drifting during practice. The coach sees it; the player doesn't. The coach says, "Stay focused," and the player snaps back for a while, until his attention wanders again. The coach sees it. The player still hasn't.

Eventually the coach gets frustrated because the player isn't holding himself accountable. But the player may not yet have developed the ability to recognize the moment when his attention begins to leave.

We are asking for accountability from information the coach possesses and the player does not, which is a different problem entirely.

One of the examples Rhiannon used with the younger players was a training station where a player knows he tends to drift. Maybe serves and returns isn't as fast-moving as another court. Maybe there's more space to talk with friends. Maybe attention gets loose there.

If the player knows that about himself, he can walk onto the court with an intention: I'm going to notice when I start drifting here. Now accountability has something to attach itself to. He might even tell the coach on that court, "This is where I tend to lose focus. Help me notice it." That isn't a player giving responsibility back to the coach. I think it's almost the opposite. The player has identified his own tendency, named it, and recruited the environment to help him work on it. That's development.

The same conversation became more interesting with the older players. Rhiannon asked them what it means to be aware of yourself physically and mentally. Are you noticing that your attention is slipping? Are you noticing what your body is telling you? Do you know whether something hurts a little or has been getting progressively worse, whether you're pushing because the work is productive or because you don't want to disappoint a coach?

Those aren't easy questions, especially for a young athlete. Adults aren't always particularly good at answering them either.

But if we're going to ask players to take more ownership of their development, eventually they have to become better observers of themselves.

Maybe that's one of the earliest things we have to hand over.

In the last essay, I wrote about a player who had spent the summer training between-point skills. We knew he could perform the routine. We had seen him do it in practice and in competition. Then one weekend, with no coach standing there and no academy structure surrounding the match, the routine disappeared.

The obvious response would be to remind him again: use your routine. But there's another question underneath that one.

Did he know he wasn't using it? Not the same question.

If he recognized that he had abandoned the routine and chose not to return to it, we're dealing with one kind of problem. If fifteen minutes went by and it never occurred to him that the routine was gone, we're dealing with another. One is about choice. The other is about awareness. Both matter, but I don't know that we help players by treating them as the same thing.

Rhiannon gave another example that I think coaches ought to sit with. Imagine telling a player, "Hold yourself accountable to what we worked on in your private lesson."

Sounds reasonable. But what exactly does that mean?

Maybe we worked on five things in the lesson. Now the player has come through a school day, walked into a two-hour practice in 100-degree heat, rotated through several courts and heard additional information from several coaches.

Which thing is he supposed to hold himself accountable for? If the answer is all of it, we've probably made accountability impossible before practice even started.

The instruction sounds like we're giving the player ownership, but we may actually be giving him a pile of information with no hierarchy.

Awareness isn't simply noticing everything. It is learning what matters enough to notice. That distinction is important.

The best players I've worked with over the years weren't processing every possible piece of information at once. Nobody can. They became increasingly good at identifying what mattered right now: what was happening with an opponent, with the ball, with their own body and attention, what kept repeating, what had just changed, what needed action and what could wait. That's a skill. Maybe several.

We often talk about awareness as if it's a personality characteristic. Some kids are aware. Others aren't. I'm becoming less comfortable with that.

If awareness is required for ownership, then awareness itself has to become part of what we develop. That means giving players opportunities to notice before we tell them what they should have noticed, asking questions before supplying answers, and letting them describe what happened in their own words, even when their first description isn't the one we would have given. Then we compare what they saw with what we saw and help them close the gap.

The classroom conversations have become interesting to me for that reason. Rhiannon isn't simply teaching definitions of awareness and accountability. She is asking players to examine the relationship between them. They hear another player's answer, agree with part of it, challenge another part, offer an example, then try to make the idea fit something they've experienced on court.

They are practicing noticing while talking about noticing.

That matters because the coach will often see things the player doesn't see yet. We have years of pattern recognition the player doesn't have. We recognize frustration in the shoulders before the player knows he's frustrated, watch the feet stop moving, see shot tolerance shrink, notice a between-point routine disappear, hear the quality of decision-making change.

Our advantage can create a trap. Because we see it, we assume the player sees it. Then we hold him accountable for acting on information he never actually possessed.

The developmental goal can't be for the coach to remain the player's permanent warning system. See that. Fix that. You're drifting. You're rushing. You're getting negative. Your toss is moving. You're abandoning the pattern. Reset.

There will always be moments when a coach needs to do that. The issue isn't whether we should provide information. Of course we should. The question is whether the player is becoming more capable of generating that information himself.

A coach can notice for a player for a while. Eventually the player has to learn to notice. A coach can interpret for a player for a while. Eventually the player has to begin interpreting. A coach can sound the alarm. Eventually the player needs some alarms of his own.

That's where accountability becomes something more than compliance. If I do something because my coach caught me, that's external regulation. Sometimes young players need plenty of it.

If I catch myself, understand why it matters, and make the adjustment before anyone says a word, something different has happened.

The behavior has started moving inside.

That doesn't mean the coach disappears. It means the coach's job changes.

Instead of always saying, "Here's what happened," maybe we ask, "What did you notice?" Instead of, "You lost focus in that game," maybe, "When did your attention start to move?" Instead of, "You stopped using your routine," maybe, "How consistent was your routine today?"

Sometimes the player won't know, and that information is useful too, because before we can hold a player accountable for changing something, we may first have to help him learn to see it. You can't own what you can't recognize. And you can't really hold yourself accountable for something you never knew was happening.

In most junior tournament matches, once the player walks on court, the coach isn't coming with him. Whatever a player has learned to see for himself by then is what he actually has once the points start.

Maybe that's the next part of the developmental handoff.

Before the player can become his own coach, he has to become one of his own observers.