Tennis is a Gift, Not an Investment with Jeff Bearup, Tim Donovan, and David Benzel

Summary

Jeff Bearup (founder of New England Academy of Tennis, 21 years; USTA faculty coach), Tim Donovan (Brown University Ivy League Player of the Year twice; 4 years ATP at top 300; 21 years of college recruiting consulting through Donovan Tennis Strategies), and David Benzel (Growing Champions for Life; former elite water skier and US national water ski team coach; sport family coach across tennis, swimming, gymnastics, soccer, figure skating) join Lisa Stone to discuss their newly formed company Cross-Court Consulting. The episode covers the developmental planning gap in junior tennis, the fractured landscape of information available to families starting in the sport, the “performance team” model (analytics coach, nutritionist from the Boston Bruins, sports psychologist, sport family coach), how junior coaches react to an external consulting service, the ROI conversation when parents question spending on consulting after already investing heavily in training and travel, and David Benzel’s core diagnosis: “a child’s greatest fear is disappointing mom and dad.”

Guest Background

Jeff Bearup founded the New England Academy of Tennis in the Boston area 21 years before this episode and served as a USTA player development faculty coach. His academy has worked with players from national champion level through early red-ball introduction. He transitioned out of the academy to co-found Cross-Court Consulting.

Tim Donovan grew up in Pittsburgh, played collegiately at Brown University (twice Ivy League Player of the Year), played professional tennis for four years (peaked just outside top 300), then joined USTA New England as director of player development and junior competition before founding Donovan Tennis Strategies — 21 years of college recruiting consulting. He describes college tennis as “the most rewarding time in my tennis career.”

David Benzel grew up in Minneapolis, became an elite competitive water skier in Florida, coached the US national water ski team to a world championship, then discovered that “elite athlete” and “elite coach” did not prepare him for “elite parent.” He founded Growing Champions for Life to educate parents and coaches across multiple sports. He has worked with USA Swimming, USA Gymnastics, US Figure Skating, and soccer in addition to tennis. His working thesis: “All the challenges are the same across every sport.”

Key Findings

1. Developmental Planning Is the Missing Infrastructure in Junior Tennis

Tim Donovan’s original insight, from his USTA New England role: families were having conversations about college recruiting without any coherent developmental plan underpinning them. “It was: I’ll take a lesson here, do a clinic here, maybe play some tournaments — without a lot of real cohesiveness about what’s happening and really, goals.” Cross-Court Consulting’s primary offering is developmental planning — assigning a coherent narrative and trajectory to the family’s investment in a player, so that individual decisions (coaching, scheduling, schooling) connect to a framework rather than operating in isolation.

2. The Information Gap Starts at the Entry Point, Not the Advanced Level

Jeff Bearup’s diagnosis of the tennis system’s educational failure: “USTA provides information at their high performance camps and national tournaments — but it’s not at the introductory level tournaments, which is where the parents need the information, when they’re just getting started.” Parents encounter the sport at the 7-to-10 age group level, where misinformation and inconsistent expectations are most concentrated, and where no one has systematically organized guidance. By the time a family reaches the high-performance level, years of miscalibrated decisions have already accumulated.

3. Performance Team as the Model: Analytics, Nutrition, Psychology, Family Coaching

Cross-Court Consulting’s “gold plan” includes access to a full performance team: analytics coach, nutritionist from the Boston Bruins, sports psychologist, and David Benzel as sport family coach. The team model acknowledges what every senior person in the sport knows but rarely systematizes: “We can’t do everything.” Individual junior coaches are on the court for most of their working hours and simply do not have time to address the full ecosystem of development — academic planning, family dynamics, nutrition, mental performance. The consulting layer supplements what the coach does on court with the infrastructure most families don’t know how to access.

4. Children’s Greatest Fear Is Disappointing Mom and Dad

David Benzel’s core diagnostic, drawn from working across multiple sports and demographics: “Across multiple sports, multiple demographics, it doesn’t matter what socioeconomic area you come from, what ethnic background — kids’ greatest fear is disappointing mom and dad.” This fear, when unaddressed by parents, becomes the mechanism through which parental support becomes parental pressure. Parents who apply pressure for performance issues — believing they are being supportive — are inadvertently triggering the fear that blocks performance. Benzel’s prescription: parents must “practice the art of non-interference” on performance issues, which is the coach’s domain, while maintaining clear ownership of character and behavior issues.

5. The Performance vs. Behavior Distinction

Benzel draws a precise role-assignment framework: “I make a clear distinction between performance issues and behavior issues. Performance issues are between the athlete and the coach. Parents need to be supportive but practice the art of non-interference. Behavior and character issues are the parent’s domain.” This distinction gives parents a clear lane — they are not abdicating responsibility by not coaching the forehand; they are correctly understanding their role. Parents who collapse these two categories into one tend to both undermine the coach’s authority and apply pressure for outcomes they cannot control.

6. The ROI Question — Tennis Is a Gift, Not a Return

Lisa frames the financial exhaustion question directly: “You could have paid for college three times by the time you get through the junior process.” The three guests’ unified response: the value of the sport is not extractable through a return-on-investment calculation. Tim Donovan: “We don’t want to lose sight of the fact that there are kids who really enjoy the sport and may go on to play college tennis at a modest D3 level and get great enjoyment and a great education — and tennis may provide an entry into a fantastic school where they would not have had an opportunity otherwise.” The reframe: tennis is a gift to the child, not an investment whose returns should be evaluated by scholarship dollars.

7. Junior Coaches’ Reception — Coaches Need Support Too

Tim Donovan on how junior coaches respond to Cross-Court Consulting: “Many coaches simply are on the court a ton — to have an organization like ours working in partnership is a team approach. They know they often don’t have the extra hours to do these things off the court that are important.” The reception has been positive because Cross-Court Consulting positions itself explicitly as supplemental, not competitive: “We’re not trying to coach players, we’re not trying to take players away from coaches — we’re trying to supplement what they’re doing on the court.” The partnership with USTA New England formalizes this: Cross-Court Consulting will present at sectional events alongside USTA staffers.

8. “In the Absence of Good Information, We Make Stuff Up”

Benzel’s distillation of why parent education matters: “Parents love their children very much — but in the absence of good information, we make stuff up.” The consequences of well-intentioned improvisation: undermining player self-confidence through excessive analysis and judgment, applying pressure that generates exactly the fear of disappointment that blocks performance, and creating the dynamic where “the parent is coaching the kid” in a domain that belongs to the coach. The remedy is not better parenting instincts — it is information, delivered by a credible neutral third party.

Actionable Advice for Families

• Build a written developmental plan before making individual decisions about coaching, scheduling, or schooling — the plan makes individual decisions coherent instead of isolated
• Understand the performance vs. behavior distinction: you own character and values; the coach owns the forehand; blurring this creates pressure that backfires
• Evaluate the sport as a gift that develops character, relationships, and opportunities — not as an ROI calculation — and make decisions within that framing
• If you feel like you’re improvising your way through junior development, you are — seek systematic information early, not after years of trial and error
• Ask your junior coach explicitly what happens off the court in their program: nutrition, mental performance, family communication. If the answer is nothing, understand what’s missing

INTENNSE Relevance

• The performance team model is INTENNSE’s baseline: Cross-Court Consulting’s team (analytics, nutrition, psychology, family coaching) is exactly the infrastructure INTENNSE should provide as standard for its players. The consulting model exists because individual coaches cannot deliver this alone — INTENNSE should build it in, not offer it as an add-on
• Parent education as league community infrastructure: Benzel’s work — reaching parents across sports and demographics with the same core message about role clarity — is directly relevant to INTENNSE’s pipeline academy programs. Families of developing players are the community INTENNSE needs to cultivate for long-term pipeline health. Parent education is not a soft benefit; it is infrastructure
• “Tennis is a gift, not an investment” as messaging: This framing is directly applicable to INTENNSE’s player and family recruiting narrative. When INTENNSE recruits a player, it is inviting them into a professional structure that provides the gift of continued competition without the ROI pressure that makes unsalaried tour life unsustainable. The league’s salary model is literally the answer to the ROI problem
• Tim Donovan as a pipeline relationship: Donovan has 21 years of college recruiting relationships and a player network that spans from Brown through USTA New England. His consulting work with families at the D1-D3 transition level is exactly the population INTENNSE targets. A relationship with Donovan Tennis Strategies or Cross-Court Consulting could be a direct pipeline into the college-to-professional transition market
• Coach supplementation as positioning: Cross-Court Consulting’s framing — “we supplement what coaches do on court; we don’t compete with them” — is the exact framing INTENNSE should use when engaging with junior coaches for player pipeline purposes. INTENNSE is not competing with the coach; it is giving the coach’s best players a professional destination

Notable Quotes

“A child’s greatest fear is disappointing mom and dad. Mom and dad have to learn how to play their role in a way that says there’s unconditional love and support here — no matter what the results are.” — David Benzel

“In the absence of good information, we make stuff up. And so getting information into the hands of parents about what works and what doesn’t — that’s the job.” — David Benzel

“I make a clear distinction between performance issues and behavior issues. Performance issues are between the athlete and the coach. Parents need to practice the art of non-interference.” — David Benzel

“We don’t want to lose sight of the fact that there are kids who really enjoy the sport and may go on to play D3 tennis — and tennis may provide an entry into a fantastic school where they would not have had that opportunity if it hadn’t been for their tennis.” — Tim Donovan