How to find a tennis coach who's actually right for you

The single most common reason a serious club player is not improving is that they are working with a coach whose strengths do not match what they specifically need to work on. Not a bad coach. Not an unqualified one. Just the wrong fit for this player, this year, this problem.

Before the matching problem, there is a scarcity problem worth naming. The ITF's Global Tennis Report 2024 puts the number of active tennis players worldwide at around 106 million and the number of active coaches at just over 175,000, a ratio of roughly 606 players to every coach. Adjusting for the coaches with real capacity on the courts you can actually get to, and inside the hours you can actually play, the pool shrinks further. Part of why All Court exists is to give tennis players a proper coaching read even when the local coach with the right hours is not there. Check the end of this article on how we can help you. Because we love tennis, and if you get to the end of this article, we know you do too.

On choosing a coach that stands across you from the net, here is the process most players skip, and what to do instead.

Step one: know what you are actually asking a coach to fix

Before you contact anyone, write down what you want out of coaching in one paragraph. Not "improve my game." Something specific. "I want to stop losing the third set of tight matches at my club level." Or "my second serve breaks down under pressure and I need to build one I can trust." Or "I keep getting passed on approach shots and I don't know why."

Most players cannot do this exercise the first time they try. That is the point of doing it. The paragraph you eventually write is the brief you give the coach on your first session, and it is the specific problem you measure their coaching against for the first three months. Without it, you are asking a stranger to solve a problem you have not defined.

Step two: use the LTA Find a Coach tool as the starting filter

The LTA Find a Coach tool is the safest starting point in the UK. It lists LTA-accredited coaches with their qualification level (Level 1 through Level 5), whether they teach adults or juniors, their venue affiliation, and their contact details. Filter by your postcode, by qualification level (Level 3 minimum for a serious club player, Level 4 or 5 if you are working on tour-level technique), and by whether they teach adults specifically.

Since 2022, LTA Accreditation has been mandatory for coaches at Levels 2 through 5 who operate at LTA-registered venues. Accreditation covers safeguarding training, first aid, insurance, and Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks for anyone working with children. If you are booking coaching for a child, LTA Accreditation is not optional. If you are booking for yourself as an adult, it is not legally required, but the absence of it is a signal worth taking seriously.

The Find a Coach tool will give you five to fifteen candidates within reasonable travel distance for most UK postcodes. That is a shortlist. Given the 606-to-one ratio and the further shrinkage for availability, expect at least a third of them to have no slots for you at the hours you can play. Focus on the ones who do. The next step is not to book a session with any of them yet.

Step three: watch them coach someone else before you book

This is the step almost nobody does and it is the one that will decide most of what happens next. Coaches at clubs and public parks coach in front of other people every day. If you email a coach and say "I am thinking about booking lessons with you and I would like to come and watch a group session or a private lesson from the sideline before I commit," any decent coach will say yes and any coach who says no is telling you something.

What you are watching for during that observation session is not whether the coach knows tennis. It is whether the coach knows the specific player they are teaching. Do they name the mechanism when a shot misses, or do they just say "come on, that's a bad forehand"? Do they explain why they picked this drill and not another? Do they adjust the drill inside the session when it is not landing, or do they run the same pattern for an hour because that was the plan? Do they say "watch, this is what I want" and demonstrate it themselves cleanly, or do they only describe it in words?

You will learn more from thirty minutes of watching a coach teach a stranger than from thirty minutes of the coach telling you their philosophy over coffee. The former is what they actually do. The latter is what they say they do.

Step four: book one paid session, not a package

Once you have watched a candidate coach and think they are worth trying, book one one-to-one session. Do not book a block of six or a term. The coach may offer you a discount for the block. Decline the discount politely and pay the full one-off rate for the first session.

The reason is not only the money. It is that a first session with a coach is a two-way interview. You are assessing whether they can coach your specific game and they are assessing whether they can coach you at all. Either party might reasonably decide, after that first session, that this is not the right match. If you have already paid for a block of six, both of you will keep going through the block because it feels awkward not to. Some of the most expensive coaching mistakes made at club level are ones where a player kept turning up for lessons that were not working because they had pre-paid.

The first session should include a substantial warm-up in which the coach is watching you play, followed by a diagnostic conversation of the kind we described in the first-ten-minutes piece. If the first session is a coach running you through a pre-set drill sequence without pausing to read your specific game, you have your answer.

Step five: at the end of session one, ask the five questions

Before you commit to a second session, ask the coach the five questions from the companion piece. Adapted for the moment: what have you seen change in my game in the last hour of watching me play? What did you specifically see when I missed? What is the one thing you would fix first if you were me? What am I asking you to fix that isn't actually the problem? What should I be doing between now and our next lesson?

A coach who answers these questions in specifics after one hour with you is a coach who was paying attention during the session. A coach who says "I need a few more sessions to see" is a coach who was not diagnosing during the session, and the next few sessions will look like the same thing.

What to look for beyond qualifications

The LTA level tells you the training, not the fit. Level 4 is impressive but does not mean the coach in front of you is the right one for the game in front of them. Three signals matter more than the qualification level.

Depth of experience with players at your level. A coach who spends most of their week with juniors and beginners will find a serious adult club player's problems interesting but unfamiliar. A coach who spends most of their week with adult club players in your rating band knows the specific pathologies that band produces. Ask directly: who are the four or five players you spend most time with, and where are they in their game?

Willingness to say what they cannot fix. A coach who tells you a specific problem is outside their strength area (biomechanics, sports psychology, physiotherapy) and refers you elsewhere is worth double what they charge. A coach who says they can fix anything is a coach you should be sceptical of.

Availability that matches your practice pattern. Coaching for a serious club player works best in weekly one-hour blocks over a season. If the coach can only fit you in once a fortnight for the next four months, the compounding you get from the coaching will be much slower than the price you are paying for it. Given the underlying scarcity in the market, this is the constraint that will most often push you to a coach whose fit is second-best but whose calendar actually works.

What the coach should be asking you back

A signal that is easy to miss on session one is what the coach asks you. A coach who runs the session without asking you a single question about how you have been playing recently, what you actually want to change, what your match schedule looks like this month, or what other pattern of practice you have in your week, is not diagnosing your game. They are running their standard session with your body attached.

The coach who asks you three or four proper questions in the first ten minutes and then adjusts what they do based on your answers is the coach who is going to make the second session worth turning up for.

Read next

Five questions to ask your coach when something isn't working. The follow-up piece to this one, for after you have committed to a coach and hit a stretch where the lessons stop landing.

What good coaches actually do in the first ten minutes of a lesson. What to look for from your coach's side of the net inside the first ten minutes of session one.

About All Court's Performance Operating Platform

If you would like a properly rated read on your own tennis before you commit to a new coaching relationship you may not need, All Court exists for exactly that. You put your phone against the back fence, film a session, and upload it. You get a "talking head" session inside your own video from a touring professional. Plus the AI-enabled platform compares those ratings against thousands of shots from hundreds of players graded by the same touring pros and elite coaches. The output is a personalised coaching session on your footage and an All Court Rating for each shot you hit and a cumulative All Court Rating that compounds every time you film more of your play, so that you can see which parts of your game are improving and which specific things are worth taking to the coach you eventually pick. There is no nominator, no joining fee, and no waitlist that closes inside a generation. Join the waitlist at allcourt.club/join.