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What a coach opens before a lesson

Two minutes in the coach console before a Monday lesson, the week it showed, what the coach wrote, and what the next tournament proved. Real numbers from one family.

Most coaches see a junior for an hour a week. The other 167 hours are a parent's retelling, if there is one. This is what one coach opened on a phone before a Monday lesson in August, from a family using TierBreak, and what the record said in the two minutes before the athlete walked on court. Two athletes, 26 matches and 2,334 points sit in that account. No child, opponent or coach is named here.

What the coach can see, and what the coach cannot

The family connected the coach from the app and chose what to share: training, matches, mental progress, schedule, goals and analytics. All six, in this case. That sounds like everything. It is not. The athlete's journal is not on the list, and this athlete has never shared a single reflection with the coach. Thirty-five entries in the log, zero visible in the console. The coach sees which phase of the mental pathway the athlete is on and how many steps are done. Not one word the athlete wrote.

The console says so on every page, and every view is logged where the family can see it. That is the deal that gets a coach in the door.

The week, in two minutes

Monday, August 10. The lesson is that afternoon. The coach opens the player's page. The top of it is the last seven days.

Training. Nine tennis sessions in seven days, 645 minutes. Two of them tagged return, one tagged footwork and recovery. The athlete rated the quality of eight of the nine at four or five out of five. No physical session all week.

Sleep. Three of the seven nights rated three out of five. The rest four. Body and energy mostly fours and fives. A tired week that still got the work in.

Matches. Two since the coach last looked. A Level 4 win on August 2, 6-4 6-4. A practice match on August 6, lost 7-5 3-6 in a match tiebreak, 8-10.

The coach opens the practice match. First serve in 68%, two double faults. Serve points won 59%. Return points won 37%, and eighteen return errors in the match. Break points converted: two of seven. Big points, the ones tagged break, set or match: 20 of 42.

Then the Level 4 win, four days earlier. First serve in only 46%, serve points still won 60%. Return points won 49%. Five of eight break points converted.

That is the whole read. The serve held in both matches even when the first serve did not. The return is where the practice match went: 37% of return points, eighteen errors, and two of seven break points taken. Which is the same finding the family had found on one tracked match three weeks earlier, turning up again in a new match against a new opponent.

None of this needed a parent's summary. The coach did not ask how the week went. The coach knew, and the two minutes went on deciding what to do with the hour.

The lesson, and what the coach wrote

The coach console has a pen. Three fields: what I saw, worked on, next. It is meant to be filled in at the fence, in the words you would say out loud.

Here is what this coach wrote after the lesson, dated August 10:

Worked on: second-serve return position, stepping in to take it early.

What I saw: first-serve pattern from Oakwood held up all session.

Next: same first-serve pattern at Fairview; keep the return depth.

Three lines. The family sees them that night in the Timeline, next to the session the athlete logged. Oakwood is the July tournament the coach could look back at in the same console. Fairview is Wednesday.

Something worth noticing. That same evening the athlete wrote in the journal: "Held serve all practice set. Toss finally consistent." And under improve: "Second-serve returns still floating long." The coach never saw that entry. The coach and the athlete arrived at the same problem from opposite sides, the coach from the numbers and the athlete from the feel of it, and the record holds both, in their own lanes.

Three days later the coach proposed a goal from the console: first-serve percentage over 60 in matches. In TierBreak a coach's goal is a proposal. It sits in the athlete's app waiting until the athlete takes it on. Nothing lands on a junior's plan because an adult typed it.

What Wednesday showed

Fairview Summer Classic, round of 16, August 12. Won 4-6 6-1 in a match tiebreak, 10-7.

First serve in 59%. Zero double faults. Serve points won 64%. Return points won 44%, up from 37%, and return errors down from eighteen to twelve. Break points saved four of five. Big points 22 of 38, which is 58% against 48% in the practice match.

The athlete's journal that night, still unshared with the coach: "Won my opening match and stuck to the plan on big points." Improve: "Start returning aggressively earlier. I waited a set."

The ratings moved too, as they do. WTN from 29.8 in June to 28.4 in August; UTR from 5.9 to 6.3. A parent would tell you those numbers. Neither of them says the return was the problem or that the second-serve return position was the fix. The console does.

Why a coach should want this

A coach's hour is the most expensive hour in a junior's week. Most of it is spent finding out what happened since last time. Preparing for a lesson used to mean a parent trying to remember, and the athlete saying "fine". Now the week is on the coach's phone before the athlete arrives, in numbers the coach can act on, with the athlete's private words kept private.

And the coach's three lines go the other way. They land in the family's timeline the same night, which is more than most families have ever had from a lesson. What to share with a coach stops being a judgment call every week. The family chooses once. The record does the rest.

The coach pays nothing for the console. The family chooses what the coach sees and can change it any day. The record stays the athlete's.

This story puts a guide to work: Connect a tennis coach to your junior's week.

TierBreak is free on the App Store, on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Want to work directly with the founder? Ask for an Inner Circle place.

Written by Thomas House, the tennis dad who built TierBreak. More stories.