For Coaches: Words Point, Experience Reveals
The only path to getting better at tennis, and everything else, is direct experience. Experience leads to greater awareness, an intuitive knowing of how things work. The experience is already happening when someone plays, and our job is to guide them into expanding their awareness so they can play with a sense of freedom and express what they intend to do with physical clarity. We help our students develop by creating the environment for them to explore directly. We notice what they’re familiar with, we see where their fundamentals are at, and we design drills, scenarios, and exercises for the student to grow their abilities.
Language is a big part of how we communicate to students. It’s the medium in which we explain what we wish the student to learn and get better at. We communicate our vision for the student whether it’s technical advice, footwork and positioning, teaching them to relax, to stay engaged with their attention, or tactical advice for point play. There are nearly infinite things we can say about a student’s game. But words are not what gets the player to improve. They simply point, make reference to, an experience that you want them to be aware of.
Your coaching will be far more effective when you start to pay attention to the relationship between what you say and what is experienced by your students. Are your words translated into felt experience or is the student focused on them on a conceptual level?
Words convey concepts. When I write or say “lemon,” everyone knows what I am referring to. A reference to the fruit. Here, it’s the word “lemon” that you see and not the actual fruit. An image of a lemon might appear in your mind. But that’s not the lemon either. If you’ve never tasted lemon before, then me describing the experience of a sour explosion in your mouth will not truly convey the actual experience felt by biting into a lemon. You will only know it once you bite into a lemon yourself. It’s the same for any advice you give on the tennis court.
Suppose you’re telling your student to engage their footwork more. They are moving, but not active enough to truly adapt with good spacing before striking the ball. Your student has not yet experienced moving their feet rapidly. In their mind, they feel like they’re moving a lot already because that’s the only degree of movement intensity they have experienced so far. You might end up mentioning “move your feet” hundreds of times, and yet nothing really changes. Conceptually they understand, but experientially it doesn’t yet make sense. The issue is easily solvable by giving them a taste of what it feels like to truly move to get in the right position for their shots.
You might consider giving them the experience of rapid and intense movement without using the tennis ball by doing some footwork drills. You do this to have them pay attention to what it feels like to move deliberately quick. This is not about quantity but the quality of their experience. As they do the drill, you notice they’re finally moving with the right intensity. This is when you ask if they noticed what it felt like in their body to move quickly. They will know because you’re guiding them to pay attention to this experience.
Then you might want to progress by helping them connect that feeling with actual play. So you do another drill where you feed balls while guiding them to draw on the feeling from the previous footwork drill. The student will know what it’s like to move at a greater intensity because they have experienced the related sensations already. It makes a lot more sense now. It is much easier to draw from this experience into a new drill because they are now aware of what needs to be done. That awareness came from their experience of doing it.
You then can progressively build from the second experience into the rest of their tennis. That experience and everything that follows will remain in their awareness forever. Every time you mention “engage your footwork more,” they will internally know what you’re talking about because they have lived it. That’s the purpose of training. Every subject in any field is learned progressively through lived experiences. By understanding this, you will find yourself better at guiding your students to discover from their own experience and they will improve at a much faster rate.