COACHING BEYOND THE OBVIOUS
Coaching Beyond the Obvious
By Paul Dale – 3AM Master Series
Every coach has been there: watching a player make the same mistake repeatedly, offering correction after correction, trying drills, gimmicks, analogies—only to see the problem stubbornly remain. It’s tempting to think the player just isn’t “getting it.”
But what if we’re the ones not seeing it clearly?
Years ago, my colleague and mentor, Bernard Gusman, introduced me to a concept that transformed my coaching approach. He called it “Coaching beyond the obvious.”
It’s a phrase that sounds simple, but it holds a profound truth. In tennis coaching, the real issue is often hidden beneath the surface. What we first see as the problem is rarely its root cause. If we settle for addressing only what’s obvious, we risk misdiagnosing the issue entirely and wasting a significant amount of time.
A Serve Problem That Wouldn’t Go Away
I once worked with a young girl whose serve was falling apart at the most crucial moment: just before contact, her feet would retreat. Instead of launching upward and committing to the serve, she would skip backwards, subtly lifting or stepping off her base—bailing out at the moment of truth.
I tried everything:
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Verbal cues: “Interact with the ground.”
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Visual ques
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A racquet placed on top of her foot
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Serve practice with checkpoints
The result? Minor, temporary improvements that always faded. No matter what we tried, the pattern returned.
“What Do You See?”
Bernard and I often used to analyse players together. we'd be watching a player, and Bernard would ask:
“What do you see?”
I’d give my interpretation, and Bernard would respond:
“No, no. That’s obvious. What else do you see?”
And so the conversation would go, sometimes for 30 minutes or more. Me insisting I’d run out of layers to peel back, and Bernard insisting there was more.
“Go beyond that.”
At times, it was frustrating. But every single time, he was right. There was another layer. There always is.
The Real Reason for Her Bailing Out
One day, Bernard’s voice echoed in my head as I watched this young player continue to retreat on her serve. I stopped everything and asked her a different kind of question—not about her technique, but about her experience:
“Have you ever hit your legs with your racquet on the follow-through?”
She looked stunned. Then nodded:
“Yes… I used to do that a lot.”
There it was. The real issue.
She wasn’t moving her feet back because of a technical misunderstanding or because she was a poor student. She was protecting herself from pain. She had, in the past, cracked her shin or knee during the follow-through, and it hurt. Deeply. Her body had adapted not by improving her follow-through, but by avoiding it. Her nervous system had developed a habit of prioritising self-preservation, not poor footwork.
No drill in the world would have fixed that unless I addressed the root cause.
Why Coaching Beyond the Obvious Matters
If we don’t look deeper—beyond the obvious mistake—we risk missing the real problem, wasting time, confusing the player, or worse, sending the wrong message.
The player might hear:
“You’re not disciplined.”
“You’re not listening.”
“You’re not trying hard enough.”
When in reality, they’re dealing with something, as coaches, we haven’t seen yet.
Coaching beyond the obvious means:
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Asking deeper questions
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Observing what’s not immediately visible
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Treating every persistent error as a clue, not just a flaw
Final Thought
Technical corrections matter. However, without the ability to diagnose what lies beneath the technical fault and get to the root cause of those problems, we’re merely treating symptoms.
So next time you're stuck with a "problem player", take a step back and ask yourself:
What do I see?
Now… what’s beyond that?
Because often, the real coaching work begins after the obvious has been identified.
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