The Coaches Playbook Newsletter

Hi everyone, Two new releases have landed inside My Tennis Coaching Academy this week. 🎙️ Wayne Elderton — Member Q&A Replay (CLICK TO VIEW) Wayne joined us for an open Q&A shaped entirely by Academy members' questions. We discussed: 🎾 Scaling and modified equipment for adults — why scaling doesn't have to stop with junior tennis. 🎾 The Game-Based Approach — its strengths and some potential limitations when viewed through an Ecological Dynamics lens. 🎾 Deep attractors — how manipulating the...

One misunderstanding I regularly see around the Constraints-Led Approach is the idea that we manipulate a constraint and a particular behaviour should appear. Make the court wider → player hits wider. Change the scoring → player comes forward. Award bonus points → problem solved. But players aren’t machines. Constraints don’t prescribe solutions. They change the landscape of possibilities available to the player. And different players can respond to the same constraint differently. That’s...

Serve practice. Then return practice. Then volleys. Then maybe some points at the end. We’ve practised all the important doubles shots. But have we actually practised doubles? The problem isn’t necessarily the shots we’re practising. It’s what we’ve removed between them. The serve changes the return. The return changes ball three. Ball three changes ball four. And every action changes what the other three players can do next. 3 Coaching Ideas Keep the information between shots. A serve isn’t...

A player returns serve. Where are they looking? The ball? The server? The net player? The space between them? We often talk about players needing to “watch” or “look” for particular things. But there’s another question that interests me more: What are they trying to do? Because intention and attention aren’t separate problems. What a player is trying to achieve helps organise what information becomes relevant to them. That’s particularly important in doubles. 3 Coaching Ideas Start with...

I’m pleased to announce a new live webinar: The Education of Intention and Attention in Doubles Monday 26 October at 4:00 p.m. UK time Earlier this year, I delivered a four-hour practical workshop exploring how we can design better doubles practices. We filmed the complete workshop not only the activities, but also the interactions, questions, adaptations and conversations that emerged as the coaches experienced them. For this webinar, I’ll combine that on-court footage with the original...

My coaching did not change because I found a better collection of drills. It changed because I learned to see practice differently. For a long time, I started with an activity and asked how I could deliver it more effectively. I thought better demonstrations, clearer instructions and more repetition would eventually solve the transfer problem. Now I start somewhere else. What problem is the player trying to solve? What information do they need to detect? What actions are available? What does...

Once a coach recognises that a practice is too predictable, the natural response is to make it busier. Add targets. Move the cones. Create a rotation. Introduce a scoring system. Tell the player to recover after every shot. The activity now looks more dynamic, but the player may still know exactly what is coming and exactly which action to perform. The practice has changed on the surface. The learning problem has not. I made versions of this mistake for years. I collected new drills and...

One reason coaches struggle to change their practice is that we have been taught to label activities too quickly. Good drill. Bad drill. Traditional drill. Ecological drill. Those labels may create an argument, but they rarely help a coach decide what to do next. When I began looking more critically at my own practice, the important shift was not replacing every activity with a game. It was learning to ask what each task invited the player to perceive and do. A predictable basket-fed backhand...

For years, I judged the quality of a practice by what I could see. Were players making cleaner contact? Were the rallies lasting longer? Were they making fewer mistakes? If the answer was yes, I usually left the court believing the practice had worked. Then the player competed. The timing changed. The ball was less predictable. An opponent occupied space, disguised intentions and created pressure. The player who had looked technically strong in practice suddenly appeared unable to use the...