Club to Competitive
The largest single decision window in junior tennis. First tournaments, first ratings, first real choices about academies, coaches, and the calendar. Families who make good decisions here build sustainable paths. Families who rush this stage often face burnout or expensive course corrections.
Listen in this order.
Five episodes, in sequence. They're chosen to give you honest footing.
"What separates a great coach from a busy one?" — fifteen voices, one question.
Cross-section reel auto-assembled from coaching-philosophy episodes.
Building the right tournament calendar
The most expensive mistake families make at this stage — chasing every tournament because the ranking app rewards activity. The episodes here are about choosing fewer events with intent.
The academy decision — how to evaluate
"Cafeteria approach" — seven academies by age twelve — is what the archive's coaches see most often, and what they all warn against. The decision pattern below is what they wish every family knew.
Ratings, rankings, and what they really measure
UTR. Sectional ranking. National standing. Each is a real signal about something — and a poor signal about almost everything else. The episodes here untangle which is which.
Strength, conditioning, and the overtraining epidemic
The most overlooked stage for serious S&C work — and the easiest stage to break a kid by overtraining them. Dean Hollingworth and Mark Kovacs on what's actually appropriate.
The lines from the archive that families come back to.
"We were on academy number four by the time he was twelve. It was the cafeteria approach Macci warned about. We just didn't know we were doing it."
"The day we deleted the ranking app, training got better inside a month. Our kid stopped playing scared."
"Pierre Arnold told me my Ivy League D1 players couldn't hit four balls in a row. That sentence reframed everything I thought I knew about junior development."