When to change your tennis coach

It was a fresh spring day, the kind that ought to have generated goodwill and showcased freshly strung racquets. I arrived at the public courts in West London for my Tuesday lesson in a bad mood. My morning had involved what could generously be called a hectic school run. My coach, on the court beside mine, was on the tail end of his own hectic morning: a group lesson with four disinterested youths who had shown roughly the athletic commitment of a pot plant. He was, as he always was, finishing his session five minutes late. I stood by the fence, watched the kids drag their bags towards the exit at the pace of continental drift, and when he came over I mentioned the lateness.

He answered quickly and not carefully. He had, he said, so much demand that he did not really need me. I stood at the baseline for a second, said that was fair, and walked to the ad court to hit.

By the end of the hour we had both apologised. He had been having a difficult morning. I had picked the wrong day to run out of patience with someone who had never done me wrong on any Tuesday before. We closed on a fist pump at the net, a nod, and a see-you-next-week.

Almost every difficult coaching relationship I have had, before or since, has been a version of that Tuesday, differently handled. Some coaches, when a small friction landed on their court, could have the exchange. Most could not.

What is not a reason to leave

A bad match on a Sunday morning is not a reason to change your coach on the Monday. Nor is six weeks of feeling like nothing is going in, or a personality dip after a shared bad session, or learning that the coach a friend uses charges less, or discovering another coach on a different court whose Instagram looks more current. When you lose a match to a player you should have beaten, the first place to look is your own game.

Coaching is a relationship, and no relationship reads well from inside a single bad week. Give it the four to six weeks that any working coaching intervention needs to show up (in your tennis, business or personal life) and read the room again.

The one test

When something in the work is not landing, can you and your coach talk about it, in words, on the court, at the water break, or in the car park after the session? Where that conversation is available, most frictions repair. Where it is not, they compound, and no amount of loyalty, no more months of trying, no third-party opinion will rescue the relationship. Whatever else a player looks at first, at some point they end up looking at whether the honest conversation is available at all.

What a coach who has it looks like

The coach I have kept booking, over the years, is a former Wimbledon journeyman with the kind of deep, slightly wounded appreciation for the game that only players who came within a set of the second round tend to hold. He watches you play for ten minutes before he says anything. What happens in those first ten minutes with a new coach is often what the whole relationship becomes. He walks the doubles alley while you hit, an unhurried patrol of a man who has seen everything a club player can do wrong and feels no obligation to interrupt it yet. Then he stops the drill and asks a question.

The first thing he asks, always, is what you think you are good at and what you think you are bad at. The first time he asked me, I answered too quickly and got both wrong.

Good coaches ask questions. They have the confidence to. Where were you standing on that return, and why. Where would the ball land if you let the serve toss fall to the ground. What are you trying to feel here, or rather what was your intent with that shot. A coach who never asks questions is working from a fixed script, and that script eventually shows up as pedagogical rigidity.

They also commit. He watched long enough to see that as a left-hander my forehand pulled right-handers out wide by natural geometry, that my flat backhand down the line was confident enough to be worth following in, and that the way to make both of those matter more was to get me to the net more often. So we worked on approach shots. We worked on volleys. And we worked, week after week, on what to look for in the opponent: the way their body opens up in the split step, the racquet-face angle that says the ball will float. He would exaggerate that cue for me at slow speed, in a drill, until I started spotting it in a match without thinking. Weeks in a row on the same skill.

A good coach also runs the whole session on purpose. Most players skip the serve, and most coaches allow that because the player has decided the serve is not the fun bit and the coach has decided their job is to keep the lesson enjoyable. But the serve is where matches are decided, and a coach who never asks about the serve is not building your game. Point play and structured work each do the work the other cannot; a good coach names at the top of the hour which one is on the menu today and why, and if they cannot, they are winging it. The water break is where a lot of the coaching happens. The Wimbledon journeyman explained the whole left-handed pattern in about three sentences at the net, a too expensive water bottle in each of our hands, having said nothing about it for the previous forty minutes. Then we went back on court and worked on it for the next three months.

None of the coaches who have worked this way, in my case, needed to have been former touring professionals. Their sessions rooted on a genuine interest in the specific player in front of them.

What a coach who does not have it looks like

For a couple of years I worked with a coach at a pay-to-play indoor facility in central London who was, in the first six months, comfortable with the tie-break-and-live-ball work I like to do to bridge drill practice and match play. He would run three or four games at the top of the hour and let the rest of the session build from what those games surfaced. Then something changed. His body language during the games grew heavier. Somewhere around the twelve-month mark, he said the sentence I remember most clearly. “This isn’t going to help your game. It will damage it.”

I never learned why. Fatigue on his side, three more classes that day and my games tiring him. A competitive instinct that he was not enjoying feeling in front of a player he was meant to be coaching. A quiet decision that the drill-heavy approach fitted his teaching philosophy and there was nothing to negotiate. Perhaps all three. He never said. What I noticed, on the tube home from the indoor facility, was that I had started walking on eggshells about a preference of mine that I had been paying, at central-London rates, for the privilege of expressing.

One summer on holiday in Croatia, the reception of the club my family was using assigned me a coach for the fortnight. Dusty red clay, thirty-five degrees, midday slot: the slot no other coach on the roster had been willing to take, left by administrative process of elimination to a former tour player who had presumably drawn the short straw. My son played on an adjoining court, which turned out to matter.

Inside the second session it was clear that when rallies started, he was hitting every ball as if the tour points table depended on the outcome. No soft consistency at the top of the bounce so I could work my court position around it. No simulation of the tennis I was about to face at home in West London. Smoke, and more smoke. Halfway through the third session he muttered something in Croatian between points to the other coaches on adjacent courts. I heard the tone rather than the words, and even if I could have heard the words my Croatian is atrocious. My son heard both. What he had said, my son informed me on the walk back to the car, translated approximately as: watch this fellas, this guy thinks he can stay with me.

I finished the assigned fortnight and did not book another the following summer. Being able to hit a tennis ball at that level is not the same as being able to teach it. When the coach cannot moderate their striking to yours in a rally, and cannot be asked to because the rally is to them a small public referendum on whether they are still a tour player, the lesson is not a lesson. You are a foil.

For nine months I worked with a coach whose answer to every groundstroke question was a shortened backswing. My main play was on hard court, which was the basis he gave. One summer, I was heading to the Rafa Nadal Academy courts in Mallorca for a week of red clay, and I asked him at the start of a Wednesday session whether a longer take-back might be worth having in reserve for the higher bounce and the slower surface. His answer was that a long, looping backswing is untidy, and not necessary on quick courts. No conversation about how surface changes ball height, foot preparation, stance, or timing. No caveat about which surface I was about to spend a week playing on. The instruction re-asserted, with a tidiness argument thrown in for the road. A coach who cannot adjust technique to context has stopped teaching. He is rehearsing.

And this year, at the end of a session I had been paying for at the same rate for a while, I handed over the cash and the coach mentioned, as if in passing, that the rate had gone up by ten quid. When I raised an eyebrow, he explained that court fees had gone up and this and that. The rise was defensible. The absence of a message the night before was harder to defend.

Every one of these was fixable in a conversation of a few minutes. The tie-break coach could have said, at any point in the two years, what he actually needed from a session that day, instead of dressing it up as tactical damage to my drills. The Croatian smoker could have said, at the start of session one, that he found it hard to lose points on court and would rather run drills. The backswing coach could have fed high looping top spin heavy balls to simulate a two-week experiment on clay. The ten quid could have been a text. None of those exchanges took place, and the small unresolved things compounded until each relationship was, if not over in each and every case, soured.

How to leave well

If you have decided the conversation is not going to happen, the mechanics of leaving are the easy bit. Settle up, give notice, tell the coach directly what you are doing and why. End-of-term is the tidiest exit but any point in the year is fine if the reason is stated cleanly. Do not disappear on a text message unless you have already tried the conversation and been rebuffed. Leave the door open. Tennis, like most small worlds, brings people back to each other, and the coach who suits one chapter of your game may be exactly right for another chapter later. If the exit is handled well, most coaches will refer you on to a colleague they think will suit you better. Ask them to. And when you are working out whether the next coach is actually right for you, the thing to look for is the same one. Can you have the conversation about the work.

The exit conversation is the easy part. Finding the next coach to work with is where the difficulty starts.

Why leaving is often harder than it should be

Per the ITF’s 2024 Global Tennis Report, world coach numbers hit just over 175,000 for a playing population of 106 million: roughly one coach for every 606 players. Europe is the best-served region in the world, at about one coach per 253 players; everywhere outside Europe works out at roughly one per 1,100. In the UK, secondary racquet-sports data puts the ratio in the region of one coach per 230 players, at the good end of the global range.

Try booking a lesson at your preferred time in the week or weekend and see what those numbers mean on the ground.

A national ratio spreads every coach across every player as if they were interchangeable. They are not. Your court has a handful of contracted coaches, prime time is oversubscribed, the coach whose approach you respond to is booked out, and the slot you can get is not the one you would have chosen. The 6:00pm hour is the fight, the 11am hour is easier, and not everyone gets to take an 11am. Not everyone is an entrepreneur, retired, or on a shift pattern.

There is a second friction on top of the ratio, and on this one I have first-hand data from a source most reporters do not: our players. All Court members organise paid hitting partners when they are travelling, and paid hitters and coaches for visitors passing through their own city, and they report back on what happens when they try. The answer is almost always no. London’s public courts say it. London’s private members’ clubs say it. Public and private courts elsewhere in the UK, and every European tennis market our players have written back from, say the same. A contracted-coach model is the norm at almost every court a serious club player has access to, and any player who tries to bring in a coach from outside the contract gets shut down. So does any player who tries to bring in a paid hitting partner who is not even there to teach. Not just outside coaches. Outside hitters.

The stated justification for the model is that outside coaches would erode the contracted coaches’ livelihood. If a contracted coach has all their prime-time slots booked, and the court would otherwise sit empty, and the player is bringing their own paid hitter or coach at no cost to the contracted coach’s own book, whose livelihood is being eroded? It is the taxi-versus-Uber shape of that argument, and the players know which side they sit on. The model persists, and the players absorb the friction.

This is also why padel is happening

The LTA said in May that Britain now has one million padel players, up from around 400,000 at the end of 2024, 129,000 at the end of 2023, and 15,000 in 2019. UK padel-court numbers passed 1,500 across almost 560 venues by the end of last year, up from 870 courts and 293 venues twelve months earlier. Pickleball is smaller but growing, at roughly 200,000 UK players with Sport England recognition.

Around two in three British padel players also play tennis. They have not left tennis for padel. They have added padel because padel is a sport where they can, at present, get on court. The court is smaller, the coach dependency is lower, the learning curve to enjoyable play is shorter, and the doubles-by-default format solves the playing-partner problem in a way tennis has never solved it for the amateur. The venues have been built for the modern racquet-sport user, in ways many tennis clubs pre-date and struggle to match.

Over the past year, the number of padel WhatsApp groups I have been added to has grown to the point that the notification sound has become its own tell. I recognise most of the names in the groups. They are all tennis players I know. None of them have left tennis. They have added padel to their week, on Sundays, or on Wednesday evenings, or in the weeks when the 6:00pm tennis slot they wanted was gone by Monday morning.

What we are doing about it

All Court exists because the answers should exist inside tennis, and I could not find them being offered anywhere in the market. What we are building is a coach in your pocket. A touring professional watches what you played on Saturday and tells you what to work on for Tuesday. You put your phone on the back fence, record a few games, and the platform pulls the data out of the footage on a shot by shot basis: what is breaking down, where in the point it is happening, what pattern it fits. Which you get in real time. The pro reviews the video with the data alongside, and the two of you agree on the single most pressing fix to work on first. It sits alongside the local coach whose slots you cannot always get, at a level of feedback that schedule pressure on club coaches makes hard to sustain across every client. It gives the serious club player, at whatever level they play at, the kind of feedback the tour player takes for granted.

If any of that sounds like your week, check out our home page on this site.

Players should not stay with a coach who cannot have the conversation, and the tennis coaching market as currently structured does not make it easy to find an available coach (or switch to another one). I and the All Court team are building All Court because we have been the players standing in the middle of that gap, and there was no answer available other than to build an improvement platform that you can carry with you.

The bad-mood Tuesday coach is still coaching, at the same public courts in West London. We are still friends. I still play with him regularly, most Tuesdays if the school run holds together. We aired out the dirty linen that morning, there and then, apologised in the same hour, and got on with it.

Much like a good marriage.