Tennis Court

Coaching interviews at the high school and small college level, mostly relate to your philosophy. At a certain point, folks want to know what you’ve done well, how you structure a practice, and so forth. As someone who dabbles in coaching perpetually, rather than doing it for a living, I have evolved my lens based on who I’m with and what I’m doing.

One consistent pattern across the lineage of my programs is ‘giving players something to play for.’ I think that even if you’re just printing certificates at summer camp, having benchmarks as a critical way to motivate growth and evolution.

Competition is healthy, but fun is even more important. If we’re not enjoying ourselves in a pursuit like a sport, there’s really no point. It does not mean that every moment will be happy or fun, working hard and sweating and sometimes hurting isn’t always joyful. But those moments when you see growth — and with younger players, it’s often exponetial — can be such a valuable experience that tracks to other parts of life.

On Trust One of the deals with this high school thing was evolving my practices to coach high performance players. I relate well to those bottom of the lineup kids who work their way up, because I was one of those kids. But for the elite “I’ve been pretty good since I was really young” ranked types, I have to relate to them differently. As a youth player, it was studying their habits and preparation. Eventually, I realized that my willingness to remember and track stats made me an asset to the top players on my own high school team — I played with a bunch of D1 guys — and it’s something that stuck with me later in my career as a coach.

For years, I’ve wanted to introduce a robust film study practice. But this is difficult to do in high school because the setup can be a slog and often, you’re the only coach managing 30+ kids and some days just don’t lend themselves to isolating a small group to work on a few things.

One of the other ruts to fall into as a youth coach is overemphasizing technique, at the risk of ignoring other things. I’ve always been more interested in mindset and kids trusting themselves, I emphasize that since I’m not on the court with you, I’d much rather you figure out how to work out of a jam than always look back relying on me to bail you out. I can only do so much with body language, when I can’t take the racquet from you and win a few points on your behalf. So I don’t care if the shots are ugly, if your movement isn’t very orthodox. Underhand serve for all I care, just figure out what works and get it done. We can tweak the rest later.

This confidence building exercise over time has yielded me several classes of young players who indeed learn to trust themselves, and more important, faith that “Ron isn’t ever going to freak out if you play bad,” because there are more important things than tennis. For me, it’s all about the life lessons anyway.

Honestly, I take it especiall seriously as the coach of young women players that they don’t need some man’s permission to make a decision on the court, nor do I want them always looking back at some dude doubting themselves. I don’t ever say this explicitly, but it’s an implicit lesson in my approach to this, as if to say “hey, you’re smart and you can figure these things out,” and I hope it’s the sort of thing that they embed in their lives as they grow up.

Trying some new things in 2025 As a self-professed analytics dork, I’ve long had designs on bringing more basic data to the high school game. One year, I coached in a place the boys & girls teams played at the same time and you were the coach of both.

As a result, matches were super long and kind of a slog. But it meant you also had 8-10 kids sitting around waiting to play with nothing really to do besides homework or wandering off, so I started giving them sheets to track matches in the simplest way possible. Aces, winners, unforced errors. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but it turns out the whole thing was a hit. At a certain point, I stopped having to ask people to track matches because the top singles players would enlist someone to do it for them.

This is harder to do in Oregon, since we travel only as a team (and frankly, my girls would rather do homework than track someone’s match.) Still, I have some ideas around not only analytics, but my own low-density ways to communicate tenets and tactics that I want to make resilient this year. This isn’t something you can for every player.

A 4th doubles player on most teams isn’t going to take your shot selection lecture to heart, it’s mostly reserved for the top of the lineup in singles & doubles, but you can still ladder down messages that resonate for each player that ultimately results in similar things — playing smart, making good decisions, don’t beat yourself — but doing so in repeatable parables that help players begin to understand consistent things they’re doing and to be able to fix them in real-time.

One of the nice things about evolving every year is you’re kind forced to. Kids grow, their games change and the opponents do too. Some stuff stays consistent, but the best ways to truly stay ahead of the competition is to be willing to evolve before anyone has a chance to get comfortable with what you’re going to do as a program, all while maintaining your core values.