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I have to admit that I’m pretty jealous of team sport coaches because their games usually have fans, it would be kind of neat to see what it’d be like to modify my methods of coaching for a sport different than the only one I’ve stuck with my entire life practically. As a sports fan though, I’m always learning from other sports. I have a lot of multi-sport athletes in my programs over the years, and one of the fun things about them is they’re pretty coachable if they’re playing a different sport that’s not their primary. They like learning and it’s fun for me to take my sports knowledge and translate the concepts from their sport and bring them to tennis when it makes sense.
I’ve rarely had football players in my programs — at this point, I’ve coached girls a lot longer than I coached boys or men at the HS and college level — but I was listening to someone talk about the read pass option in football parlance and the idea that you give a quarterback the decision to respond on what the defense is showing and it hit me, “What if I could translate that to tennis?”
The first question might be, “why would you want to do that?” Well, I’ve already been doing this. I am strongly believing that part of the success I’ve had at this stage of my HS coaching career with players regardless of their level from very elite junior players to kids who are new to picking up a racquet is one word — trust. I treat my players a lot like I’d treat a coworker in the sense that I want them to have the confidence to figure things out, not to think that making a mistake is somehow the end of the world.
This was always my thought, but really where my mental model changed as a coach was early on in my first year with my current program. On a changeover, a player seemed to be really stressing herself out about a really early part of the match and it occurred to me that my job on these changeovers was going to be part-therapist, part-strategist, but 100% about getting them not to feel like they needed me to get them out of a jam. It’s key to be visible early, I feel strongly that if I can interview at a key decision point of a match things won’t get too out of hand if a kid isn’t extremely outgunned by their opponent.
So that first year, I started changing how we practiced. It’s a lot more instructional, a lot more player-led in terms of directing where they think they need help and I also bring in my own notes from what I’m seeing. Stats are useful for patterns, but it can be difficult to aggregate that data in high school without a manager or a JV team that wants to sit and do that, plus the talent disparities are so diffuse that it doesn’t really matter all that much a lot of the time when you’re playing in smaller pools.
Anyway, back to RPO. I hear that term and I thought, I’m already doing this. I’m writing this up partially as a way to aggregate my own learnings from coaching in this iteration of high school, but I think this stuff will work for club tennis, even at the college level since a lot of the issues are the same and I’ve coached players at all levels of skill, ability and in different parts of the country. I think ultimately, tennis being in an individual sport makes it harder than most to produce the sorts of canon lit that other sports have, coupled with how much the game has changed means that those old books you’d get off the shelf don’t really necessarily lend themselves the same way.
The other thing is trying to adapt our coaching methods to how kids learn and play today. Most high school kids don’t pick up a racquet between seasons and most will never pick one up again when their high school careers are done. If I had a dollar for every person I meet at a party or public event who tells me “I played tennis in high school…” I’d have a pretty good dinner tab by the end.
RPO is a modular framework that’s really about giving coaches a blueprint for adding the “mental game” to their practices. It’s easy to drill all the time, to operate games and talk through problems. But the mental part of the game is harder to introduce and tactics aren’t always easy to layer into conversations when your 1st singles and 1st doubles teams might be skillwise in a different place than your lower doubles/singles pairings. Being in a state with a 12-person varsity roster — far too many in my opinion — does conjure two advantages, one it allows more kids to get reps, but it also means that you can develop talent from the bottom up because it doesn’t take kids having to be super elite to make the lineup in all but the strongest programs.
I’m going to spend some time over the next few months, building out this site based on my own work with my team including using stuff I’ve got on my own like decision cards and slides that you can use for yourself. This site will be Creative Commons licensed zero where you can’t sell any of this, nor can you use it for commercial purposes, but if you want to use it for your team please feel free, email me or ask questions too.
High school tennis coaching is as rewarding as any other sport, but the nature of our game means we need more resources for people who find themselves doing this, and I’m hoping to provide that on this site.
P.S. Oregon still doesn’t have a team HS tournament, but we’re working on getting one passed here in the next year. I’ve developed a power ranking system for team tennis that is flight-weighted and I think it could be useful for other states that have team tournaments too for determining at-large bids, even if your state somehow uses UTR or whatever. My last blog post talked about this.