For a long time, we’ve tried to teach the game through ideas. Through concepts. Through pre-made knowledge. Through someone else’s experience.
We take technical, tactical, or mental frameworks, and try to impose them on the player, as if the game could be built from a formula, as if creativity could be controlled by thought.
But real tennis doesn’t come from thinking. It comes from the body. From rhythm. From spontaneity.
When we give the player an idea, a “correct” way to play, we may be planting a seed… but we’re also creating a boundary.
Because no matter how “right” that idea sounds, it’s not theirs. And as long as the idea is present as a rule, the player cannot create. They can only imitate.
Children understand this better than anyone. They resist molds. They push back against instructions that suppress their natural impulse. And in that rebellion, clumsy, raw, but real, there is more truth than in a thousand theories.
The problem is not in teaching. It’s in trying to impose a game through a premise. The true coach doesn’t impose ideas. They help generate rhythm. They create the inner conditions for the player to discover their own way. Not the “right” way. The real way.
Because only when the fixed idea disappears can the real game emerge. Not the one we imagined, but the one that actually happens.
And that game can’t be taught. It must be revealed.