Tim Mayotte
September 12, 2011
Now that we are at the end of another US Open, the sad news is that American tennis is in the sorriest state it has ever been.
After playing at the highest levels of the game and then teaching tennis for seven years and spending a year and a half running the USTA High Performance Program for Player Development at the US Open site under Jose Higueras and Patrick McEnroe, I am compelled to make a few observations.
A number of ideas as to why we are in this state have been suggested. From where I sit, the main reason we have so few good or great players is that there are relatively few top developmental coaches in our nation.
Other concerns about the quality of our athletes and suggesting our players are “soft” misplaces the blame on the youngsters and allows us grown-ups an excuse for not being smart enough to keep up with the rest of the world.
In the current situation an occasional good player may emerge like Christina McHale or Ryan Harrison, but to become a dominant tennis nation again we must first develop a large number of top coaches who can guide our players to be prepared technically, physically, mentally, emotionally to make a final assault on the highest levels of the game.
Only then will a steady stream top pros and champions emerge from our shores.
An advanced teaching method or methods must be crafted and then used to educate and develop a number of top developmental coaches who can lead our players through every stage to the top. This has never happened here, and the cost is now painfully obvious.
Sadly, the one organization with enough resources to make a significant impact on this problem, USTA Player Development, (PD) has for years, and continues, under Patrick McEnroe and Jose Higueras, to fail at this critical task.
This is not to say Higueras has not proved his mettle as a coach of players who are already pros. The critical point is that Higueras as a coach of coaches and McEnroe as manager of PD are the wrong people for the job.
One of Higueras’ cherished coaching guidelines is, “Don’t Coach How You Were Taught.” I suspect that he is teaching our coaches and players how he was taught. PD is using antiquated teaching methods and enormous resources are being squandered in the process, $60 to $70 million in the past three years is an educated guess.
In this new tennis world the most sophisticated teaching and coaching must be available to our players.
One of the USTA PD’s most ambitious projects has been to educate coaches both inside and outside PD, about Higueras’ “philosophy” (as it is known inside the program) and develop something of a unified teaching method for coaches nationwide.
Besides teaching the 30 or so coaches who train players at the 3 USTA PD sites at Boca Raton, Fl, New York and Carson, CA., McEnroe and Higueras have attempted this through the new Regional Training Centers. Higueras and other USTA PD coaches have been visiting these centers leading workshops while trying to identify top talent.
There are many problems in this plan, but most notably Higueras’ “philosophy” is so bare bones and rudimentary that it offers little insight into the complexities of getting and keeping our young players on track to be pros.
The very idea that you can materially educate local coaches across the nation with a few workshops a year reveals how simplistic Higueras’ thinking is. A telling indictment of what McEnroe and Higueras consider about the value of top coaching particularly in relation to younger players is that PD has hired as coaches people just out of college who have no other credentials than having played D-3 tennis.
This would be comparable to hiring green undergraduates to teach our nation’s most promising young scholars whether they be 10 or 12 or 14. (In this vein I probably should not have been hired to start and run a PD center with only five years teaching experience and no past working with high-performance players as well as having no training in managing a large group of players.)
That this is happening at the supposedly premier training sites in the nation is alarming.
By contrast, other nations demand that coaches study for years before working with players. (There may be budget concerns but this is hard to reconcile with McEnroe’s $750,000 plus salary.)
McEnroe has committed huge resources “educating” our coaches with Higueras’ “philosophy” without sufficiently critiquing the merits of its effectiveness.
Not surprisingly McEnroe has spent little, if any, time working with young players of any age and teaching them the building blocks of the game. (He and tennis would be well served by him getting out of the broadcast booth and on the court with young players for a sustained period of time.)
A teacher who is a close observer would come to understand that by working with players of all ages one becomes more prepared to teach those at all levels, including the top of the game.
Good coaching is enormously complicated. A good or great coach must understand and integrate (or at least be curious enough about to get help with) a wide variety of disciplines. A short list would include building and managing a culture of healthy discipline, helping players deal with frustration by using basic thinking about psychology, developmental physiology, working with and educating parents, besides the more obvious but critical elements of shot selection and finally, teaching technique.
A great leader to a large group of coaches must be a good organizer, systematic thinker and implementer and have the ability to convey that information effectively to a group over time.
Higueras, and McEnroe, who has been vigilant about enforcing Jose’s “philosophy,” have mastered very few of these skills.
It's sad that the USTA has in place a coach of coaches of who by his own admission is “not a technical coach.” This might be acceptable if our nation had in place a large number of coaches competent in teaching world-class technique.
This is not the case. In his three plus years on the job, Higueras has established only a simple set of parameters about the basics of technique. Understanding and teaching world-class technique is anything but simple. Grasping elements of vision, the kinetic chain, how movement affects racquet work and determining an effective progression of learning given the developing player’s physical abilities are all essential. (Just ask any teaching pro who has tried to teach a 50 year old a kick-serve.)
Finally, a great coach helps a young player learn in the most natural and non-conscious (for lack of a better phrase) way possible. And all that is just a start.
Thankfully, both inside and outside PD there are a number of good, (some great) solid, dedicated, hard-working and curious coaches who help young people become good and once in a while, great players.
In other nations those coaches would be recognized as such and financially supported to continue their good work. (The French Tennis Fed is an example.)
Here, the USTA has for years “poached” those players who were developed in private programs (Christina McHale is a most recent example.) and left the local coaches with no on-going recognition and financial support. (They have been trying to develop talent from the ground up recently with meager results given the price tag mentioned above.)
It is no wonder that many coaches I speak with find Higueras and McEnroe arrogant and that the rift between the private coaches and the USTA PD has never been wider.
They need to bring the best coaches in the nation together and craft a world-class educational program to train a core of top coaches. Also, they must also support financially and other wise those that are doing good work.
If McEnroe and Higueras, after their three-plus years on the job, still feel their methods are the best then I think they should be willing to compete. I suggest they allocate funds to a handful of top programs and see after a few years who produces the best players.
The worst that can happen is that we learn a great deal; the best that can happen is that they all prove me wrong and show us that they were on the right path all along.
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