You Have to Teach Subtraction Before You Can Teach Fractions

The assumption is almost never spoken out loud, because it doesn't need to be. If someone reached a high level as a player, the thinking goes, they'll obviously be able to teach players at any level, regardless of where that player is starting from. The skill is the skill. Surely it just scales down.

Eric Dobsha found out that assumption was wrong the hard way, and he said so himself, on camera during a conversation we recorded back in 2020, long before either of us thought it would end up in an essay.

Eric played college tennis at a high level, won a conference championship, and spent his early coaching years working with players who were already good. He described that stretch of his career honestly: he wasn't developing anyone from scratch. He was tweaking players who already knew how to play, adding a wrinkle here, a concept there, something to help them past a hurdle they were already close to clearing. That's a real skill, and it's the skill most people assume is the whole job.

Then he started working with beginners, and the skill that had carried him through college tennis and his early coaching years didn't transfer. His own words describe it plainly. He was scared of that group at first, because he genuinely didn't know what to do with them. He knew how to coach at a high level, and when he applied those same techniques to kids just starting out, he lost them completely. The information wasn't wrong. It was aimed at a receiver who couldn't process it yet.

## What He Actually Had to Relearn

The fix wasn't more patience or a slower pace. It was a different kind of knowledge entirely, one he had to go back and build from the ground up. He described it using a math comparison that says more in one sentence than most coaching manuals say in a chapter: he had to relearn arithmetic, subtraction, multiplication, and division, instead of walking in and teaching fractions and decimals from the start.

Think about what that comparison is actually doing. Fractions and decimals aren't wrong information. They're advanced information, built on foundational operations that have to be in place first. A player who already has strong footwork and match experience can absorb a tactical adjustment in one sentence, because the foundation underneath that sentence already exists. A player who has never learned to track the ball consistently doesn't have that foundation yet, and handing them the advanced version of the lesson doesn't just fail to help. It creates confusion where there wasn't any before.

Eric didn't stay stuck there. He rebuilt his own teaching from the foundation up, learned the progressions that actually work for a beginner's stage of development, and ended up loving that group of players as much as he'd loved coaching at the high performance level, for entirely different reasons. He built a program that still runs on that same beginner-and-intermediate foundation today.

## The Real Skill Nobody Names

What Eric described, without using this language himself, is the systematic ability to adapt a message to the way its receiver actually processes information. Not simplifying the truth. Not dumbing anything down. Building the same underlying knowledge in a form the person in front of you can actually absorb, whether that person is a nationally ranked sixteen-year-old or a nine-year-old who has never held a racquet.

That ability doesn't come bundled with playing experience. It doesn't come bundled with coaching experience at one level either, which is the part worth sitting with. Eric had already coached successfully. He had already worked with genuinely good players. None of that prepared him for the moment his own technique failed in front of a beginner, because expertise at one level of a skill and the ability to transmit that skill downward are not the same capacity, and nothing about being good at the first one guarantees you're good at the second.

There's a harder truth buried in this, and it runs against the usual hierarchy. An advanced player brings enormous invisible infrastructure to a lesson. The coach can hand him a one-sentence cue precisely because the player supplies everything underneath it. A beginner supplies none of that. The coach has to know which pieces get built, in what order, through which experiences, and in what language, which means teaching a beginner well can require a more complete command of the subject than advising a good player does. Beginner instruction is where you find out whether a coach understands how the skill is constructed or only recognizes its finished form. That's what Eric had to go back and learn, the way a mathematician has to remember what subtraction actually is before explaining why a fraction reduces the way it does.

The coaches worth paying attention to are the ones who noticed this gap in themselves and did something about it, the way Eric did. The coaches worth worrying about are the ones who never noticed it at all. And the danger there isn't just that they teach beginners badly. It's what they conclude when a kid doesn't get it. They decide the child is the problem, slow, uncoachable, not cut out for it, when what actually happened is that the coach never located where the child was starting from. That mistake seals itself shut. Once a coach has labeled the kid as the limitation, he stops looking for a reason to adapt, because he no longer believes there's anything on his end left to fix. The player pays for a failure that was never theirs.