Advice and (Not Much) Consent

It’s hard to believe, from the way most people in tennis talk about on-court coaching, that it has now been legal on the WTA tour since 2008. Even after seven years, there’s still a provisional quality to the discussion, as if the whole enterprise isn’t quite legitimate and might happily go poof and disappear one of these days. Part of this is due to the fact that the tour, realizing that it was committing a serious heresy in the eyes of the game’s purists, began by labeling it an “experiment.” But mostly it’s a sign of how deeply the anti-coaching tradition and sentiment goes in tennis. “Figure it out for yourself” is one of the game’s creeds; now the women don’t have to do that.

None of this seems to have fazed the WTA, which has begun to monetize the visits. Last year, the tour signed a deal with SAP to produce a statistical-analysis app that, starting in 2015, coaches could bring on court with them. I’ve yet to see anyone use it, but the visits themselves, which are allowed once per set, are as popular with the players as ever. Over the last month or so, I’ve also detected a few signs of tentative acceptance, from others around the sport, that on-court coaching may not destroy the women’s game after all.

This spring, Simona Halep credited her coach, Victor Ionita, with helping boost her confidence during her three-set comeback win over Jelena Jankovic in the Indian Wells final. Nick Saviano has been praised for his pep talks with Sloane Stephens. Lindsay Davenport, who had been skeptical of the rule, took advantage of it by visiting her player, Madison Keys, in Indian Wells, and was praised for the advice she gave. (There's nothing like a former Grand Slam champion to lend a coaching visit credibility.) The conversations between Jankovic and her coach, Chip Brooks, as she was melting down against Halep made for an entertaining 180 seconds. And Mary Carillo’s rants against the rule from the commentator’s booth have started to sound like blasts from a traditionalist past.

Are we finally getting to be kind of OK with coaching? Personally, I’m not for or against it, but I’m OK with the way the WTA's rule is set up now. As a journalist and fan, I like hearing what the coaches have to say. It may not be earth-shattering stuff, and some of it may not sound all that helpful; but it’s interesting to find out exactly what a coach says to a player in different situations, and to get a little window into their relationship.

At the same time, I don’t think their advice necessarily improves the quality of play. I also don’t miss coaching at the majors (where it’s still banned), I don’t feel a need to see it on the men’s side, and I doubt I would find matches at WTA events less entertaining without it.

Mainly, I find myself disagreeing with some of the arguments that are used against coaching. Here, seven years in, are a few thoughts on the rule, and the discourse—the arguments for and against—that have grown up around it.

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This has been a common theme among detractors, and it comes up because on-court coaching remains illegal on the men’s side. The perception, the argument goes, is that the women alone look like they need extra help.

Yet every athlete, in every sport, is coached. No one called Muhammad Ali weak for listening to the trainer in his corner; no one called Michael Jordan weak for running a play designed by Phil Jackson; no one will think Rory McIlroy looks weak when he takes his caddy's advice on a putt this weekend at the Masters. And no one calls male tennis players weak for listening to their captains in Davis Cup. Pancho Gonzalez once wrote about how a friend of his helped him win the U.S. Nationals by flashing him signals from the stands; Gonzalez was called a lot of things, but weak wasn’t one of them.

It would be a different story, obviously, if the WTA, when it created the rule, had stated that women players need more help than men. But the tour created it as a draw for broadcasters, and a way to discourage illegal coaching from the stands (which still goes on anyway, of course).

It’s true that watching Thomas Hogstedt stand over Maria Sharapova and lecture her while she stared at the ground was not a good visual, or a good advertisement for the coaching rule. But more visits these days involve some give-and-take, or at least an attempt to keep the player upbeat. That’s not to say there won’t be harsh words from coaches in the future, but presumably the player, who has hired the coach, knows what might happen when she calls him or her out there.

Which brings me to my next point...

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Before the Miami women’s final on Sunday, Serena Williams' coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, told ESPN that he wouldn’t come on court because he and Serena don’t want her to get used to having him there, when she can’t have him there at the tournaments that count most, the majors. “I don’t want anyone out there on the court with me,” Serena has said. “It’s my moment.” Commentator-coach Darren Cahill, who has made successful on-court visits with players in the past, has said he’s not in favor of the rule for the same reason.

It’s certainly possible that a player will start to use a coach as a crutch, then struggle when the crutch is pulled away. And Serena has only helped herself by cultivating self-reliance on court; maybe more players should follow her lead. The world No. 1 aside, though, many of the women who have been successful at the Slams recently have also taken advantage of coaching visits when they’re not at the Slams. Maria Sharapova, Petra Kvitova, Eugenie Bouchard, Simona Halep, and Caroline Wozniacki all heard from their coaches on court at other tournaments in 2014, and all reached the semis or better at one or more major that year—Sharapova and Kvitova won the French Open and Wimbledon, respectively.

This doesn’t prove that players can’t come to rely on coaching too much. But I think it does show that the person who understands its effect best is the player herself. If Sharapova felt that she was becoming too accustomed to her coach Sven Groeneveld’s advice at non-Slams, and this was hurting her at the Slams, she would, presumably, stop calling him out on court. As it is, Serena goes it alone, while Maria gets coaching. Each has her method.

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Tennis is not always an individual sport. At the pro level, there are team competitions like Davis Cup and Fed Cup. At the rec level, doubles is played just as often, if not more often, than singles, and team leagues have steadily increased in popularity over the years. During collegiate matches in the U.S., the teams’ coaches roam the courts. (In my case, his advice often began with an exasperated question: “What are you doing?”)

Yet the result of any singles match, whether it involves a coach or not, is always decided by the player. If you watch enough WTA events, you’ll see that coaching visits have various effects. Sometimes they’re productive; Saviano was credited with helping Stephens stage a comeback against Bethanie Mattek-Sands earlier this week in Charleston. Sometimes they’re counterproductive; you always question why a player would need to hear from her coach when she’s winning and everything is going smoothly. Most of the time on-court coaching doesn’t appear to sway the result either way. For example, at Indian Wells, Davenport came out in the third set of a match that Keys was losing; she gave her good advice, but it was too late for Keys to change the match’s momentum, or raise her level of play significantly.

A coach can advise the player to do certain things in specific situations. But pro tennis, with its rapid-fire rallies and hair-trigger reactions, will always be a game of instinct and muscle memory, a game of in-the-moment decisions. Every swing is one of those decisions, and only the player can make it.

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During the 2014 Australian Open men’s final, Stan Wawrinka faced a quandary: How to keep his nerve and win his first Grand Slam when his opponent, Rafael Nadal, was clearly struggling with a back injury. The pressure, which had been on Rafa, had suddenly swung over to Stan. As Wawrinka began to wobble under that pressure, a few people on Twitter and in the press room in Melbourne mentioned, rightly, that the moment would have been made less dramatic if Stan had been able to rely on a coach for help on court. The individual’s battle with himself was what tennis should be all about. I agreed, which makes me hope that the WTA’s rule is never expanded to the point where a coach can sit on the sideline with a player for an entire match. The once-a-set limit should be maintained.

My colleague Tom Tebbutt, tennis writer from Toronto, has also said he doesn’t like coaches intruding onto the “sacred” space of the court. That space is for the players and officials only; symbolically, it exists in a separate sphere from the audience, and creates a gladiatorial atmosphere. I agree with this as well. On a practical level, I don’t mind the WTA's rule, but there is still something not quite right about seeing a coach scuttle across the court—that sacred space—in the middle of a match.

As I said, I don’t miss the on-court visits at the majors, and I don’t think I would miss them much if they went away entirely. But if we're going to continue to be skeptical about the rule and wish for its demise, we should do it for the right reasons.