We are coaching juniors to survive rallies, not to end them

Consistency drills win under-14 tournaments and produce twenty-two-year-olds with no way of finishing a point.

Put two thirteen-year-olds on a hard court and the one who misses less will win, essentially always. This is not a coaching insight, it is arithmetic, and the entire junior development system has been built on top of it.

So the drills are consistency drills. Cross-court to a target, twenty in a row, then thirty. Feed and recover. Live-ball rallies scored by who errs first. The kid who does this diligently for five years is very hard to beat at sixteen, banks a ranking, gets funded, and moves up.

Then they meet somebody who is not intimidated by a ball landing a metre inside the baseline, and the entire method is exposed at once.

The problem is not that consistency is bad. It is that a training environment which rewards not-missing punishes exactly the behaviours a professional needs: taking the ball early, stepping in on a short reply, changing direction down the line off a ball that could safely have gone cross-court, hitting a first serve you might miss. Every one of those raises your error count this week in exchange for a skill you will need in a decade. No junior coach with a results-based contract is incentivised to make that trade.

I have watched matches where a seventeen-year-old with excellent movement hit forty consecutive neutral balls and lost anyway, and what struck me was not the losing. It was that nothing in the forty had been an attempt. There was no plan for how the point would ever end other than the other person's mistake.

The fix that gets proposed is scoring change: no-let, shorter formats, timed sets. Some of that helps. What would help more is judging junior development on shot selection rather than on results at all, which nobody will do, because parents pay for wins.

A useful diagnostic, if you coach: count how many of your player's winning points ended because they did something, versus how many ended because the opponent stopped. If the ratio is worse than one in four, you do not have a consistent player. You have a player who has never been asked to close.

And the tour will ask, roughly ten minutes into their first main draw.