Players Should Coach; Coaches Should Play

hemisphere differences — criticism — driven benevolence — self-reflection — value traps — generalists

“To be truly effective, a good narcotics agent must know and love narcotics. In fact, a good narcotics agent should have narcotics in his blood.”

Detective Alonzo Harris had sinister reasons for compelling his green officer, Jake Hoyt, to unknowingly take a hit of PCP-laced marijuana in the 2001 American crime-thriller, Training Day, but the notion touches on a perspective of experience that has implications for understanding in any field, tennis included.

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The Master and His Emissary is a 2009 book by Iain McGilchrist, a British psychiatrist and literary scholar, who describes the specialised functions of how our left (the ‘Master’) and right (his ‘Emissary’) brain hemispheres operate in a state of tension. An excerpt:

"One of the more durable generalisations about the hemispheres has been the finding that the left hemisphere tends to deal more with pieces of information in isolation, and the right hemisphere with the entity as a whole, the so-called Gestalt – possibly underlying and helping to explain the apparent verbal/visual dichotomy, since words are processed serially, while pictures are taken in all at once" (p. 4).

McGilchrist spent twenty years painstakingly researching evidence for his theory, and while he makes ambitious conclusions on our broader culture in the latter pages, the initial chapters are full of erudite connections that make a convincing argument for how our hemispheres experience the world in different ways.

More than 30 years earlier, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance wrestled with a similar phenomenon in the opening pages (emphasis added):

"You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness" (p. 4).

Pirsig makes a distinction between ‘romantic’ and ‘classic’ modes of thinking that McGilchrist would identify with the right and left hemispheres, respectively. To bring this back to tennis, the right hemisphere experiences the live rush of being the player in the throes of a match. Intuition, feel, emotion, complexity, depth; every match is different, in fact, every moment is different.¹ To riff a little Heraclitus: ‘no man ever plays the same shot twice’.² In contrast, the left hemisphere ‘re-presents’ experience, typically with explicit language. It uses labels and categories that enable us to focus in on particular aspects of reality that can be held up for examination in a mechanical, fixed set of terms. Biomechanics, statistics, and post-match analyses come to mind as left-hemisphere specialties. We can group aspects of the game into categories like ‘winners’ and ‘errors’ or ‘1-4 shot rallies’ and measure speeds, spins, depths, and placements of each shot, as well as break down strokes — a fluid one-piece act — into various parts (the unit turn, the drop, the forward swing, the follow through, recovery, etc.).

“Explicit knowledge is made up of facts and rules of which we are specifically aware and therefore able to articulate. Implicit knowledge is made up of that which we ‘know’ yet are not aware of and thus cannot articulate” (Masters, p. 343).³

Neither mode of thinking is ‘better’ and McGilchrist argues that it is the tension created through their opposing mechanisms that “make possible finely calibrated responses to complex situations” (p. 9). A motor-patterned example that all Jenga players would be familiar with:⁴

“If you want to carry out a delicate procedure with your right hand that involves a very finely calibrated movement to the left, it is made possible by using the counterbalancing, steadying force of the left hand holding it at the same time and pushing slightly to the right” (p. 9).

— The Master and His Emissary

This image is a pop psychology model that McGilchrist would argues mistakes the what with the how. “Attention, however, intrinsically is a way of which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a ‘howness’, a something between, an aspect of consciousness itself, not a ‘whatness’, a thing in itself, an object of consciousness. It brings into a being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values” (p. 29) Master and His Emissary. Photo Source.

As the title suggests, players and coaches can benefit from an understanding of this divided-brain by seeking experiences of the game from other perspectives: coaching engages more of the analytical left-hemisphere; playing, more of the grounded right.

"To live headlong, at ground level, without being able to pause (stand outside the immediate push of time) and rise (in space) is to be like an animal; yet to float off up into the air is not to live at all – just to be a detached observing eye. One needs to bring what one has learned from one’s ascent back into the world where life is going on, and incorporate it in such a way that it enriches experience and enables more of whatever it is that ‘discloses itself’ to us (in Heidegger’s phrase) to do just that" (p. 21)

— The Master and His Emissary

We saw an example of a player bringing what he learned from the ‘observing eye’ of the commentary booth back down on the court this year.

Christopher Eubanks enjoyed a breakout year in 2023. Currently sitting at 34 in the ATP rankings, the American enjoyed a stellar grass season where he won his first ATP title at the Mallorca ATP 250 (def. Mannarino) and reached the quarterfinals at Wimbledon (lost to Medvedev).

Christopher Eubanks had the fastest forehand on tour in 2023. Photo Source.

In an interview from July, Eubanks highlighted how stints in the commentary booth aided his match play:

“I think since I started doing a little bit of commentary, it really helps my perception on the court, I can take a little bit of the emotion and say, hey, if I was watching this match and calling it, what would I be telling myself? I plan on continuing to do it”

I often wonder if simply watching your own matches is enough to nourish this other perspective, whereas providing commentary, or writing, or coaching, forces you to ‘unpack’ what is happening in a way that then helps clarify your own understanding; you realise you didn’t have the thing of interest properly grasped until you’re faced with finding the words.

From @AdamMGrant

Furthermore, the universality of language opens you to criticism; iron sharpens iron.

"What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same" (p. 13).

— The Beginning of Infinity

Karue Sell, the man behind My Tennis HQ on YouTube, is another example. Sell quit playing pro tennis in his mid-20s (he reached a career-high #371 and had wins over Christopher Eubanks) but quickly found himself in other roles: he was the hitting partner of Naomi Osaka; he coaches ATP #60 Marcos Giron; and he provides coaching content and matchplay streams on YouTube. These ‘outsider’ perspectives aided his own game, and he has recently started playing professionally again and documenting the journey on his channel. Some excerpts from podcasts (emphasis added. Excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity):

Jonas Eriksson: “You can see if you worked on the forehand, like you did in a recent video, that can be content also, like ‘I didn’t play well today. Why did I not play well?’ It’s like a new video, right? So you have a new way to use what’s happening in the matches to also learn from and teach other people.”

Karue Sell: “It’s almost like you can use it [YouTube] as reflection. You make content, but you reflect on things.”

— Tennisnerd

Craig Shapiro: “So you’re telling me that each little ingredient [from coaching] made you want to get back and play matches?”

Karue Sell: “Yeah well, you know, you obviously spend some time coaching, coaching juniors or whatever, and you see all the shit that they do as well. And you start picking up on that and saying ‘I do that too’ and you almost learn by just observing.”

Craig Shapiro: “What’s an example?”

Karue Sell: “I’d say just decision-making stuff, you know, why go for this shot? You see a kid doing that and you’re like, ‘that was just dumb’, but at the same time I do this as well. And how they feel nervous and tight and can’t perform, like, you’re playing a J3 in San Diego. It’s not that big of a deal, but they’re so tight about it and you look back and think ‘man I was this tight as well. Why was I this tight? Why was I not able to just — again, feeling tight, that’s okay — but still perform under that pressure? And by doing all that and enjoying tennis without being conscious of getting better, I was getting better. I wasn’t training that much…so it’s a little bit of everything, obviously coaching online and all kinds of things that by now, make it a very simple thing. Can I execute or not? And if I don’t I lose and it is what it is, and then you move onto the next, but you don’t have to overthink everything. So tennis has become a lot simpler and that’s why I feel I’ve been having success.”

— The Craig Shapiro Tennis Podcast

So players can benefit from wearing the coaching hat, but coaches who continue to play in some capacity will also enjoy a more grounded experience of their sport.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the famed psychologist of ‘flow states’, conducted a study on developing talent in teenagers and found the best coaches were able to foster environments conducive to producing flow states in their athletes.⁵ Interestingly, these coaches also had a natural disposition to seek flow experiences themselves that went above and beyond their work role. Continually experiencing flow in their domain motivated the coach to find ways to bring out similar experiences for their athletes.

In a similar strain, a study by Mallett and Lara-Bercial (2016) on ‘Serial Winning Coaches’ — a rare cohort of coaches who have found repeated success at elite levels of sport — found that much of their drive for knowledge sprung from a desire to be viewed as competent themselves, which they then hoped to pass on to their athletes.⁶ Mallett and Lara-Bercial coined the term ‘driven benevolence’ to describe this dual motivation. They also tended to be hardworking optimists who were able to channel difficult emotions into positive behaviours; self-reflection into action.

“…ten years of coaching without reflection is simply one year of coaching repeated ten times” (p. 114)

— Gilbert & Trudel, 2006⁷

I think Eubanks and Sell have stumbled on these acts of self-reflection in their commentary and coaching experiences and seen the benefits. The narrative rings true for myself as well; after coaching for 10 years I think I play better now than when I was in college because I was forced to reflect and clarify things that were latent and intuitive, and things you value as a coach can often differ from things you value as a player. Perspective matters. As Sell hinted at in an earlier excerpt, players can get so wrapped up in the results because they only value winning and certainty, but coaching forces you to value mastery and curiosity. It’s the well-worn ‘outcome vs process’ mindset that many coaches and athletes grapple with.

Coaching/teaching/writing can nudge players toward mastery and curiosity values because it puts them in a different environment. There’s a good book on this topic based on the research of Clare Graves called Spiral Dynamics that outlines how our environment, or ‘life conditions’, and our values — what the authors call ‘vMEMEs’ (values systems) — interlink, ultimately shaping what are our life priorities and behaviours:

“What biochemical genes are to our cellular DNA, vMEMEs are to our psycho-social and organisational DNA” (p. 4).

“A vMEME transposes itself into a world view, a value system, a level of psychological existence, a belief structure, organising principle, a way of thinking, and a mode of living” (p. 40).

However, unlike genes, humans have the ability to alter their vMEMEs and live in an almost infinite array of psychological states. Graves theorised that within the ‘wetware’ of our brains were latent systems that, when triggered by changes in our environment, could alter our perceptions and behavioural systems.

Coaching is enough of a lifestyle change compared to playing competitive tennis to create a necessary change in values and behaviours. The lack of a salary in professional tennis is one factor that could make adopting a mastery mindset difficult, whereas the steady income and less ego-threatening role of coaching and commentating affords one to more easily lean into and experience a mastery mode of living. The mistakes you make when playing — hidden because of your proximity to the problem — become obvious when you can step back and experience the phenomenon from another vantage point.

Players and coaches could benefit finding ways to create a system of engaging these different life conditions/perspectives/brain hemispheres/vMEMEs. To recycle another McGilchrist phrase, “duality refines control” (p. 19). Continuously shifting between playing and coaching, between acting and reflecting, between implicit and explicit, provides the necessary tension for a more polished performance as values shift and prior problems, hidden from one perspective, reveal themselves from the other (emphasis added):

"Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values. In motorcycle maintenance, you must rediscover what you do as you go. Rigid values makes this impossible. The typical situation is that the motorcycle doesn’t work. The facts are there but you don’t see them. You’re looking right at them, but they don’t yet have enough value. This is what Phaedrus was talking about. Quality, value, creates the subjects and objects of the world. The facts do not exist until value has created them. If your values are rigid you can’t really learn new facts. This often shows up in premature diagnosis, when you’re sure you know what the trouble is, and then when it isn’t, you’re stuck. Then you’ve got to find some new clues, but before you can find them you’ve got to clear your head of old opinions. If you’re plagued with value rigidity you can fail to see the real answer even when it’s staring you right in the face because you can’t see the new answer’s importance" (p. 279).

— Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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Now more than ever the professional tennis team is highly atomized. Thirty years ago a player had a coach and maybe a physiotherapist. Now a player may have a different person for statistics, biomechanics, strength and conditioning, physiotherapy, psychology, racquet customisation, and tactics. On-court coaching during matches has furthered their access to resources. It surely presents the player with an almost endless amount of information, but if the player is always catered for and never steps outside their playing role or wrestles with the problem from another perspective, they may be handicapping their long-term improvement, stuck within the rigid values of competing. The same could be said for the coach; they too, must seek different hats.

“Take your skills to a place that’s not doing the same sort of thing. Take your skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely new skills” (p. 245).

— Nobel Prize Winner Oliver Smithies in, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

1. Further still, the idea of a ‘moment’ or a finite ‘period’ of time is a left-hemisphere concept less familiar to the right-hemisphere’s perception of the ‘flow’ of time:

“Time is essentially an undivided flow: the left hemisphere’s tendency to break it up into units and make machines to measure it may succeed in deceiving us that it is a sequence of static points, but such a sequence never approaches the nature of time, however close it gets.”

— Iain McGilchrist

2. Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

3. Masters, R. (1992). Knowledge knerves and know-how: The role of explicit versus implicit knowledge in the breakdown of a complex motor skill under pressure. British Journal of Psychology, 83, 343–358.

4. A similar link could be made to the reactive breaks I touched on in the Federer movement piece.

5. Csikszentmihalyi, M., Rathunde, K. R., Whalen, S., & Wong, M. S. M. (1993). Talented teenagers: the roots of success and failure. Cambridge University Press.

6. Mallett, C. J., & Lara-Bercial, S. (2016). Serial winning coaches: People, vision, and environment. In M. Raab, P. Wylleman, R. Seiler, A.-M. Elbe, & A. Hatzigeorgiadis (Eds.), Sport and exercise psychology research: From theory to practice (pp. 289–322).

7. Gilbert, W., & Trudel, P. (2006) ‘The coach as a reflective practitioner,’ in R. L. Jones (ed.) The sports coach as educator: Re-conceptualising sports coaching. Routledge.