For tennis coaches
What wins at 12 isn’t always what works at 22
By Erik Faneker · 4 min read
A trophy at twelve tells you how a player performed. It can’t tell you what the environment is building. Here is what research says, and the questions it leaves for every coach.
“Why is she losing to kids who just push the ball back?”
A parent asks you this after another Saturday. Your player hits cleaner, moves better, tries more. And she loses.
You know the answer. You also know what the parent wants to hear: a plan that wins next month.
That’s the tension every coach faces who brings juniors toward the top. And two pieces of research make it uncomfortably concrete.
The scoreboard has a calendar
Look at who reaches the top of junior tennis. Edgar and O’Donoghue (2005) looked at the birth dates of 476 elite junior and 448 elite senior tennis players. The authors conclude that the cut-off date of the junior competition year, which starts on January 1, is responsible for the skew, rather than regional or climatic factors.
59.5%
of elite junior players were born in the first six months of the year
58.9%
of elite senior players were born in the first six months of the year
I read that as a reminder. Results at a young age partly measure something other than the quality of the environment. Soderstrom and Bjork (2015) make a related point more broadly: what we can observe during instruction is performance, and performance is often an unreliable index of whether learning has taken place.
Two lists that point in opposite directions
Barth et al. (2022) combined 71 study reports on 9,241 athletes from many sports and compared what predicted success at junior age with what predicted success at the top as an adult. The patterns pointed in opposite directions.
Predicted success as a junior
• Starting the main sport earlier
• More main-sport practice
• Less practice in other sports
• Faster initial progress
Marked adult world-class athletes
• A later start in the main sport
• Less main-sport practice
• More multi-sport practice in childhood and adolescence
• Slower initial progress
That second list is compared with national-class athletes. An earlier meta-analysis by Güllich et al. (2022) of 6,096 athletes, including 772 of the world’s top performers, found the same split.
A few honest caveats. This is group-level evidence from many sports, not only tennis. It describes patterns, not recipes. And it doesn’t say that specialization is bad for every player. The authors do suggest that excess specialized practice in childhood and adolescence may hinder long-term development through overuse injury, burnout, a poor match between athlete and sport, and limits on long-term learning capital (Barth et al., 2022).
What I take from it: the things that make a junior look best this season are not automatically the things that build the player who is still improving ten years later.
Five questions only you can answer
You can’t read your own environment from the baseline. But you can ask yourself some uncomfortable questions. These are my own, based on the research above:
Does every session reward winning the point, or also trying something new?
Do my players practice what wins at their level today, or what they’ll need later?
What happens when a player loses while trying something new?
Do my best juniors still move, play, and compete in other ways?
Would this player still choose tennis in five years?
Most of us answer these from habit, and habit is hard to see from the inside.
What you can’t see from the sideline
Here’s the problem. You can ask all five questions and still answer them from the inside. The environment you build is mostly made of defaults: how much you drill, how much you adapt, what you reward, what you let go.
That is what we built the free Player Development Environment Assessment for. In 2 minutes it shows you:
Your coaching profile, from someone who adapts the task a lot, to someone who drills and works more traditionally, to a mix of the two
Where you sit between drilling and adapting
Ideas to build more adaptable, resilient players
If you coach players who are aiming for the top, it’s the quickest way I know to see what your environment is really asking of them.
A trophy at twelve tells you how the player performed. The assessment tells you what you’re building.
For tennis coaches
What are you building?
Take the free Player Development Environment Assessment. In 2 minutes you get a personal coaching profile and ideas to build more adaptable, resilient players.
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References
Barth, M., Güllich, A., Macnamara, B. N., & Hambrick, D. Z. (2022). Predictors of junior versus senior elite performance are opposite: A systematic review and meta-analysis of participation patterns. Sports Medicine, 52(6), 1399–1416. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01625-4
Edgar, S., & O’Donoghue, P. (2005). Season of birth distribution of elite tennis players. Journal of Sports Sciences, 23(10), 1013–1020. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640410400021468
Güllich, A., Macnamara, B. N., & Hambrick, D. Z. (2022). What makes a champion? Early multidisciplinary practice, not early specialization, predicts world-class performance. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(1), 6–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620974772
Soderstrom, N. C., & Bjork, R. A. (2015). Learning versus performance: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176–199. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615569000