ParentingAces with Harsh Mankad (Tenacity Update)

Summary

Harsh Mankad returns for a follow-up episode seven months after his first appearance, providing an update on Tenacity’s development and the learnings from his extensive travel to academies, college programs, and coaching conversations across the country. The conversation has matured from product introduction to field validation: Harsh has been meeting with junior coaches, college programs, and professional players, identifying the common pain points his platform addresses. Two primary themes emerge: the need for focus and alignment within coaching teams, and the need for systematic development management that creates a growth mindset culture. The episode also includes Lisa’s observation that she saw Harsh’s All-American banner at the University of Minnesota — a moment that humanizes his legacy as a player and frames the college-tennis-to-pro pathway he represents.

Guest Background

Harsh Mankad — same background as the April 2016 episode, now seven months deeper into building Tenacity. He had been traveling extensively, meeting with coaches at junior academies, college programs, and country clubs to understand how Tenacity could adapt to the real-world constraints and workflows of different program types. He was also working with the University of Minnesota women’s team on Tenacity adoption.

Key Findings

1. Alignment on One Page Is the Core Unmet Coaching Need

Across his travels — junior academies, college programs, country clubs — the single most consistent need Harsh identified was getting everyone on the coaching team (and the player-parent unit) pointed in the same direction. A player dashboard on Tenacity — with the game assessment, identified strengths, areas of opportunity, and goals all in one place accessible by coach, player, and parents — directly addresses this. Without a shared reference document, coaching teams operate from different assumptions, parents hear inconsistent messages, and players receive fragmented guidance.

2. Managing and Tracking Development Over Time Is the Second-Tier Need

Once alignment is established, the ongoing challenge is managing the development arc and learning from it. Tenacity’s systematic approach — a player goes from identifying where they are today to defining what success looks like to measuring whether they’re heading in that direction — is what Harsh describes as the “Minneapolis to Chicago” framework: you need to know where you are, define where you want to go, chart a path, and have a measure of whether you’re heading in the right direction or toward Wyoming.

3. Growth Mindset Culture Is the Outcome Coaches Are Seeking

Harsh identifies “growth mindset” as the word that keeps coming up from coaches across his travels — and the word that Tenacity is designed to operationalize. A growth mindset culture means players grow and learn from practice, from matches, from video, from data. The platform supports this by making learning visible: assessments, progress charts, match feedback, and goal-tracking create a continuous loop of learning that makes growth tangible rather than abstract.

4. Player Engagement Features Complement Coach-Driven Assessment

Beyond coach-driven assessments, Tenacity includes player-driven assessments: goal-setting exercises where the player articulates what they want to achieve. Harsh emphasizes that engagement from players — not just coaches — is essential for the platform to drive real behavior change. When players are active participants in defining their goals and tracking their progress, they develop ownership of their development arc rather than being passive recipients of coaching.

5. College Tennis as a Life-Setting Platform — Not Just an Athletic Venue

The episode includes an extended discussion of college tennis’s non-athletic value: Harsh speaks about how the relationships built at Minnesota — with coach David Gets, with teammates, with the university community — are relationships he still calls on at crossroads in his life. He frames college tennis not as a developmental stepping stone that you leave behind when you turn pro, but as a formative environment that builds the relational and professional network you draw on for decades. This is a qualitatively different framing than the athletic pathway narrative.

6. The Logistics Barrier — Not Lack of Intent — Is What Prevents Structured Feedback

In response to Lisa’s question about why coaches don’t provide more structured feedback to parents, Harsh identifies logistics as the primary barrier: not that coaches don’t want to, but that they don’t have an efficient system for doing it. Without Tenacity, sharing an assessment requires assembling information from emails, texts, spreadsheets, and memory, writing it up, and distributing it. With Tenacity, it takes minutes. Removing the logistics barrier converts coaching intent into coaching action at scale.

7. The Tenacity Business Case to Coaches: Differentiation, Retention, and Referrals

Harsh reiterates the commercial argument for coaches: structured, transparent development management builds parent loyalty and referrals that informal coaching relationships cannot generate. The coach who can show a parent a six-month trend chart of their child’s serve accuracy is demonstrably differentiated from the coach who gives verbal updates after practice. This loyalty translates into retention and referrals — the two most important commercial drivers for any coaching program.

Actionable Advice for Families

• Before accepting a coaching relationship, ask whether the coach has a systematic way of tracking your child’s development over time and sharing that data with you — coaches who cannot answer this question are operating informally in a domain that benefits enormously from structure
• In any coaching team (even a two-person arrangement of coach and player), insist on a shared written statement of where the player is today, what the goal is, and how progress will be measured — this is the minimum version of the alignment that Tenacity provides
• College tennis relationships — with coaches, teammates, and the university community — have value that extends far beyond the athletic career; cultivate them as professional and personal assets, not just competitive context

INTENNSE Relevance

• Player development management at the professional level: Tenacity’s framework — player dashboards, goal-setting assessments, progress tracking, coach-player-parent alignment — translates directly to INTENNSE’s player management context. The “parents” in the triangle become “front office and coaching staff”; the structure remains identical
• Harsh Mankad as a pathway archetype: India → U.S. college tennis (Minnesota, NCAA title) → ATP tour → business world → back to tennis. This is the exact kind of international-college-to-pro-to-tech-and-back career arc that INTENNSE’s player development ecosystem should be designed to accommodate and celebrate
• Growth mindset as culture, not slogan: Harsh’s observation that growth mindset keeps coming up as the desired coaching culture outcome is an alignment signal with INTENNSE’s format philosophy — a league built on unlimited subs, rally scoring, and mic’d coaches is structurally designed to create learning opportunities in every game
• Alignment infrastructure: The need for a shared “one page” development reference accessible to the entire coaching team is identical to the alignment challenge INTENNSE faces in coordinating coaching staff across ten teams — a shared development language and documentation system would provide that infrastructure
• University of Minnesota women’s team: Harsh’s active work with the Minnesota women’s tennis team on Tenacity adoption is a data point on the college-team partnership model. INTENNSE could develop similar partnerships with college programs as a talent pipeline and brand presence strategy

Notable Quotes

“At every level — whether it’s a junior group trying to develop certain skills, or a collegiate program that wants to go from top 50 to top 10, or a professional player looking to get to the next level — once you’ve identified what you need to work on, you’ve got to have the ability to manage that and to learn from it and make adjustments.”

“One of the words that keeps coming up from a lot of coaches — and what we are driving also towards — is this growth mindset. To grow and learn from practice, from matches, from videos, from all of these aspects, from the data.”

“The relationships you develop in school with coaches and players — those are lifelong relationships. Whenever I’m faced with the crossroads in my life, I pick up the phone and talk to my coach.”

“The very busy coach is doing a lot of hours on the court — and the logistics become the barrier. It’s not that coaches don’t want to provide feedback. It’s just that it becomes difficult to manage that communication and organize it. That’s where we’re coming in.”