The Changing Face of Junior and College Tennis Through Carl Goodman's Eyes

Summary

Carl Goodman — Lisa Stone’s 81-year-old father, former Tulane University tennis team member in the late 1950s, orthopedic surgeon, lifelong competitive player — provides a generational contrast to modern junior tennis development. Starting tennis at 14 in New Orleans, coached minimally, competing in daily player-arranged sets with no parental involvement, Goodman went on to play three years at Tulane on a court whose number four player won the NCAA individual championship in one year. He attended the American College Placement Showcase at SMU with his daughter and offers an outside observer’s assessment: tennis has become a big business that benefits coaches, equipment manufacturers, and schools — but rarely the players or families paying for it. His observations span 65 years of watching tennis evolve, including the physical game transformation (racket head speed, two-handed backhands, injury rates) and the cultural transformation (parental involvement, multi-coach support systems, scholarship mythology).

Guest Background

Carl Goodman is Lisa Stone’s father, an 81-year-old retired orthopedic surgeon based in Shreveport, Louisiana. He started tennis in New Orleans at 14 after his father handed him an old wooden Davis racket and enrolled him in instruction with the Tulane coach, Emmett Parre (a French Davis Cup player). He played competitively through high school and ranked number four in the South as a junior. He played three years at Tulane — freshman year on a team with Crawford Henry (#1 in the South), Ron Holmberg (Junior Wimbledon champion), and Ham Richardson (Davis Cup player, later internationally ranked). Tulane’s number two player won the NCAA individual title that year. Goodman later served as the Tulane coach’s teaching substitute in summers and spent his career as an orthopedic surgeon in Shreveport. At 81, he still plays singles once or twice a week with Austin Robertson, a friend and tennis rival of 60-65 years. He has no social media presence and was not previously on the podcast.

Key Findings

1. Players Owned Their Development — Parents Were Present Only for Finals

Goodman’s junior development in 1950s New Orleans had essentially no parental involvement in day-to-day tennis. Players arranged their own matches. Parents attended only if their child made a tournament final. The sport belonged entirely to the player as a personal identity — he describes tennis as his “individual identity” that was “very important to me” precisely because it was his own achievement, not a family project. He contrasts this explicitly with what he observed at the SMU college showcase: “Today you have the parents very involved, so much so at times that I’m not sure the sport belongs to the player. It belongs to the family or whoever is so involved.”

2. Daily Player-Arranged Match Play Was the Primary Development Mechanism

Goodman’s training was informal by modern standards: one lesson per week with the Tulane coach in high school, daily player-arranged sets with a peer group of competitive players, and no drills, nutritionists, strength coaches, or therapists. The competitive peer group — players who also competed against each other at tournaments — provided both the training and the motivation. “We played matches. Just the teammates. And we were competitive enough to have good enough players that you wanted to beat each other.” The organic daily competition structure produced results competitive with any structured modern program: a teammate won the NCAA individual championship while playing number two.

3. Tennis Is Now a Big Business — and the Money Doesn’t Flow to Players or Families

Goodman’s most direct observation from the SMU showcase: “Tennis is a big business. Big business for parents, big business for coaches, big business for the schools, big business for the tennis manufacturers, ball, strings, shoes. Somebody is making a lot of money — and it’s not the kids playing and it’s not the parents.” This is an 81-year-old orthopedic surgeon with 60 years of watching the sport evolve, offering a blunt structural diagnosis: the financial architecture of modern junior tennis extracts money from families without providing commensurate return to the athletes who create the value.

4. Scholarship Mythology Is Gender-Unequal — and Families Don’t Know It

At the showcase, Goodman heard enough to reach a conclusion: “For girls, maybe [a big scholarship] is true. For guys, it’s not available.” This mirrors the structural reality Widom and others have noted — men’s college tennis scholarships are scarce (11.5 per team vs. no headcount limit on women’s), full rides are rare, and partial scholarships split three or four ways between international players don’t provide the financial return families project when they begin the investment. The scholarship mythology drives family spending behavior in ways that don’t survive contact with the actual availability data.

5. College Tennis in the 1950s Was Player-Led, Low-Infrastructure — and Produced Elite Results

Goodman’s college tennis experience at Tulane (late 1950s): eight o’clock classes six days a week, afternoon matches 1-5pm, no nutritionists, no gym time, no strength coaches, no formal coaching during practice — just players competing against each other. Travel was by personal cars to nearby schools; the furthest trip was Nashville by car. Equipment was minimal (coach arranged racket stringing; players provided their own clothes). Yet this program won the NCAA team championship in 1959 and produced individual NCAA champions. The lesson: infrastructure creates comfort, not necessarily results — the competitive peer group and the daily match play were the actual performance variables.

6. Physical Game Transformation Has Directly Driven Injury Rate Increases

Goodman’s orthopedic perspective on why injury rates have exploded compared to his era: racket head speed, two-handed backhands, Western grips, and the physical intensity required to win a modern point. His generation sliced backhands and hit topspin forehands with the heaviest possible wooden racket — power came from racket mass, not swing speed. Modern players generate tremendous spin through explosive racket head acceleration; the repetitive torque and loading on joints produces overuse injuries his generation never saw. “I never saw any injuries. None of us ever got hurt.” The physics of the modern game are fundamentally more injurious than the 1950s game.

7. Tennis’s Lifetime Sport Identity Validates Everything — at 81, Still Playing

The episode’s most compelling data point on tennis as a lifetime sport: Goodman is 81, plays singles once or twice a week with the same friend he met competing in juniors over 60 years ago. They’ve adapted to physical reality (no drop shots, no lobs, no forward/backward running — just lateral movement and a good time) but the competitive relationship and the pleasure of the game continue. “We have a competitive usually one set of tennis.” This is the endpoint of the pathway Tracy Austin described and every parenting philosophy in this batch aims toward: a sport that provides identity, competition, and relationship across 70-plus years of life.

8. The SMU Showcase Observation: Junior Players Are Grinding for Visibility in a Way That Wasn’t Necessary Before

Goodman observes at the showcase: “The day for a high school kid, they play so hard now just to get ranked or seen.” The modern junior must compete to accumulate rankings, UTR, and recruiting visibility from an early age — the sport no longer discovers players organically, it now requires players to actively market themselves into the system. This competitive visibility infrastructure — showcase events, UTR, Tennis Recruiting profiles — didn’t exist because it wasn’t needed when the game had fewer players and coaches found talent through personal networks. The infrastructure responds to scale; the tradeoff is the loss of the organic discovery that defined Goodman’s generation.

Actionable Advice for Families

• Revisit the scholarship financial model with realistic numbers before committing to the full-cost development pathway — for boys in particular, a full scholarship is rare, and the families who don’t run the math early often discover the gap between investment and return only after spending years at high cost
• Build daily player-arranged practice match opportunities into your child’s schedule outside of coached sessions — Goodman’s development was largely peer-arranged daily competition, not coached drilling, and the results speak for themselves
• Watch for signs that the sport has shifted from belonging to the child to belonging to the family — if the player can’t describe what they’re working on or why, without parent prompting, the ownership balance may have shifted in the wrong direction
• Tennis has a 60-70 year horizon as a recreational competitive sport; decisions made in the junior years about love of the game, peer relationships, and personal ownership of the sport set the conditions for that lifetime — optimize for those, not just for ranking outcomes

INTENNSE Relevance

• Player ownership as league culture: Goodman’s generation owned their sport completely — parents were absent from day-to-day development by design. INTENNSE’s team structure requires a similar ownership philosophy: players who are internally motivated, self-directed in their development between coached sessions, and identify with the sport rather than with external validation systems. The coaching environment should cultivate this, not compensate for its absence
• Big business critique as INTENNSE differentiation: Goodman’s observation — “somebody is making a lot of money and it’s not the kids playing and it’s not the parents” — is exactly the structural problem INTENNSE’s salary model addresses. INTENNSE reverses the money flow: instead of extracting fees from players and families, it pays players for their professional performance. This is a fundamental value proposition that can be articulated against Goodman’s critique
• Daily peer competition as team format advantage: INTENNSE’s team format creates the organic daily peer competition environment that Goodman identifies as the primary development mechanism. Teammates who compete against each other in practice and then compete together in team matches replicate the Jack Kramer Club and Tulane team dynamics that produced elite players without structured drilling or nutritional support systems
• Lifetime sport narrative for broadcast: Goodman at 81, playing singles weekly with a friend he’s known for 65 years, is the endpoint INTENNSE’s narrative should be building toward. The league isn’t just a professional career stage — it’s the continuation of a lifetime sport relationship. INTENNSE players, even those who don’t reach the ATP/WTA top 100, are being positioned for a lifelong competitive identity. The broadcast can occasionally tell the long arc story: where do our players end up 20, 40, 60 years from now?
• Injury prevention as institutional competency: Goodman’s orthopedic diagnosis of modern injury rates — racket head speed, explosive swing mechanics, physical intensity of the modern game — is relevant to INTENNSE’s sports medicine protocols. Player load management, off-season recovery, and in-season training volume limits should be designed with the biomechanical demands of the modern game in mind. An orthopedic surgeon’s historical perspective confirms that the physiological demands have fundamentally changed
• Scholarship myth as recruitment argument: The gap between men’s scholarship mythology and reality — “for guys, it’s not available” at the level families imagine — is one of the clearest INTENNSE recruitment arguments for college-age male players. INTENNSE’s salary model can be positioned against the false promise of the scholarship system: instead of accumulating debt or fractional scholarship support during four years of college, INTENNSE players earn income while continuing to compete professionally

Notable Quotes

“Today you have the parents very involved, so much so at times that I’m not sure the sport belongs to the player. It belongs to the family or whoever is so involved.”

“We played matches. We played against each other. We were competitive enough to have good enough players that you wanted to beat each other. That’s how we learned to play tennis.”

“Tennis is a big business. Big business for parents, big business for coaches, big business for the schools. Somebody is making a lot of money — and it’s not the kids playing and it’s not the parents.”

“For girls, maybe that’s true [a big scholarship]. For guys, it’s not available.”

“I never saw any injuries. None of us ever got hurt. It’s the intensity of the game — mental and physical intensity that wasn’t there when we played.”

“Austin and I, we’ve been playing either with or against each other for 60 to 65 years. We have a competitive one set of tennis. And we’re finished. We have a good time.”