Go Where the Questions Are

If I were starting a junior tennis program from scratch tomorrow, I wouldn't begin by hanging around the biggest tournaments. I'd go to the L7s and the L6s.

That runs against instinct. Most programs want to be seen where the best juniors play, at the national events and the high-level sectionals, next to the kids who are already winning. That's where the visibility is, where the recognition is, where a coach can stand near a top player and let some of the shine rub off. I understand the pull. I've felt it. But if the actual goal is building something, I think most of that instinct points a program in the wrong direction.

The families with the most unanswered questions usually aren't at the top of the pathway. They're at the bottom of it, trying to figure out what the pathway even is.

What I Saw at Courtyard

I've written about that Courtyard weekend three times now, mostly through the lens of the players competing and the coaches watching them. But there's another thing I noticed that weekend that had nothing to do with any single match.

I was one of almost no coaches there. I saw one other, and only for a little while. Meanwhile the place was full of parents at the beginning of the pathway, standing along the fences trying to make sense of what they were watching. Rankings and levels and schedules. What a good loss looks like versus a bad one. Whether their kid should play up or stay put. What any of it is supposed to add up to. Real questions, asked by people who cared a great deal, with almost nobody around who could actually answer them. That gap is the opportunity, and it's sitting in plain sight at every entry-level tournament in the country.

Teresa

Not long after I moved to Charlotte, I was at the North Carolina Closed, in Raleigh as I remember it, watching junior tennis the way I always did. A family struck up a conversation with me, mostly because I was there and willing to talk. Their daughter was twelve, an itty-bitty thing, raw and green but with something worth paying attention to. Her name was Teresa Wang.

I didn't recruit Teresa. I want to be careful about that word, because the story gets misremembered if the word slides in. Her parents talked to me because I was present and because I was useful in the conversation, and the relationship grew from there. She became one of the first players at what became Midcourt Tennis Academy. Her father used to drive her and her brother down from north Charlotte, and I found out later he was drilling both kids across the street from their neighborhood at night, refusing to let that long drive get spent repeating what she already knew. The whole family understood development in a way that made my job easier. None of it happens without a conversation in the bleachers that started only because somebody from the tennis-development side was sitting there when nobody else was.

That's the whole lesson. Not that a tournament is a place to sign players. That usefulness and presence, offered honestly, tend to create relationships on their own.

Why the Bottom of the Pathway

There's a reason the earlier part of the pathway is the richest place to build, and it comes down to where the questions are. Families at the beginning have more of them, and fewer places to take them. A parent whose kid just started playing tournaments doesn't yet know how the ranking system works, or what a level number means, or whether the schedule they're being sold is the right one. They're forming their whole picture of what good development looks like right now, in real time, often from whatever fragment of information happens to reach them first. Higher up the pathway, much more of that is already worked out. The player has a coach, a program, a set of relationships, a story about who they are. Those things can still change, and they do, but they're built and they don't move easily. Earlier on, far less is fixed.

So the earlier part of the pathway concentrates two things a program actually needs: parents with real questions and very little professional presence available to answer them. That's a rare combination. It's much harder to find at national events, where the coaching presence is heavier and most families already have established relationships. It sits waiting exactly where most programs don't bother to show up.

Worth saying plainly: earlier on the pathway doesn't mean brand new. Plenty of families at an L6 have been competing for a while, and at an L5 most of them have. What I mean is the part of the pathway where families are still working out how the system fits together and where coaching relationships haven't fully hardened yet. Those are different things, and the second one lasts a lot longer than the first.

Say What You're Doing

Here's where I want to be direct, because there's a coy version of this that I don't respect and won't recommend. If a program shows up at these tournaments to be helpful, it should also be honest that it's building something. There's nothing wrong with a coach saying, plainly, that he runs a program and is looking for the right players and families to be part of it. The dishonest version is the one that pretends a development conversation carries no business interest at all, then acts wounded when the business interest surfaces. Parents can tell the difference, and the pretending costs a coach more trust than the honesty ever would.

So the posture is simple. Be genuinely useful first. Answer the questions a family actually has, about levels and scheduling and how to read a result and what to watch for as their kid grows. Be available without hovering over other people's children or wedging into other people's coaching relationships. And when it's the right moment, say the true thing: I'm building a program, and if what I believe about development makes sense to you, I'd be glad to tell you more.

There are lines that matter here. A tournament isn't a poaching floor, and a coach who spends his time running down other programs has already told you what he's worth. Parents are also at their most vulnerable right after a loss, when the frustration is loud and the judgment is thin, and that's precisely the moment not to sell anybody anything. Usefulness first. Transparency second. Never use a bad afternoon to close a deal.

What Presence Says

There's something a program communicates just by showing up at a developmental tournament, before it says a word to anyone. Where a program puts its limited tournament presence says something about its priorities, because that allocation is a choice somebody made on purpose. A program that makes room for the L7s and L6s is signaling that the early part of the pathway deserves professional attention too, that the families doing the hard, confusing work at the beginning are worth a knowledgeable person's time. That's a decision about what the program is for, and it gets made at the program level, not by whichever coach happened to be free that Saturday.

I want to keep that distinction clean, because I made the opposite argument two essays ago and I meant it. A coach who isn't at a tournament may have a dozen good reasons, and most of them are nobody's business. You can't read a person's values off an empty chair. But a program can decide, deliberately, where it wants to be present and why, and that decision is visible over time in a way one absence never is.

And the tournament becomes a place to show what a program actually believes before asking a family to pay for any of it. A conversation along a fence about what a parent should be watching for is a better demonstration of a developmental philosophy than any brochure. The family gets to see how a coach thinks, in a real moment, about their real kid. That's worth more than a pitch, and it costs nothing but presence and honesty.

Strip the tennis off all of this and what's left is a principle I'd apply to almost anything worth building. Put expertise where the uncertainty is highest. Be useful before you're promotional. Let people experience how you think before you ask them to buy it. Every one of those runs against the ordinary instinct, which is to put your expertise where it will be admired, lead with what you're selling, and describe your philosophy instead of demonstrating it. The ordinary instinct is easier and it feels safer, and it often puts you in front of the people who already have the most help. There's a whole other conversation buried in there about how you'd staff a program, what you'd teach parents, and what kind of culture you'd build from the first day. For now the tournament version is enough, because it's the one I can point at.

If I were building again, I'd make sure the families at the very beginning knew there was somebody there willing to help them understand it. Not because it's a clever way to find players, though it is. Because the bottom of the competitive pathway may be one of the best places to build the top of a program, and because the questions being asked there deserve someone willing to answer them.

Go where the questions are, not just where the trophies are.