Coping with COVID: Instructors derailed but not daunted by pandemic

The impact of COVID-19 on professional tennis has been extensively covered, and TENNIS.com will continue to keep you updated on all developments. Many other sectors of the tennis industry have also been deeply affected. Over the coming months, we will bring you “Coping with COVID,” a series of portraits on the ways various people within the tennis world are handling this unprecedented, difficult situation. We begin with a look at teaching professionals.

A new tennis instructional website is both jarring and timely. Take a look at Florida teaching pro Todd Rubinstein's newly launched quarantinetennis.com. When Todd and I spoke several days ago, he was adding 20-second tips to his new domain with exceptional urgency.

“The big question now,” says Rubinstein, “is what can I do to stay relevant? We’re all leaders and we have to take charge. Talk to your clients, make videos, write a book. Most of all, stay connected.”

Recent events have hit the world of tennis instruction with tsunami-like fury. Morgan Shepherd, an independent teacher based in El Cerrito, Calif., has gone from teaching 20-25 hours a week of private lessons to zero. Chuck Kuhle, general manager and director of tennis at the Decatur Athletic Club (Ill.) and employed there for 40 years, has filed for unemployment for the first time in his life. Lisa Dodson, tennis director at Shenrock Country Club in Rye, N.Y., estimates that in April and May she will earn 90 percent less money than usual.

Says Jeff Jacklich, who splits his time between a seasonal job at the Wessen Lawn Tennis Club in Pontiac, Mich., and independent work in Northern California, “This exposes how fragile being a teaching professional is.”

Patrick Kearns, based in Charlottesville, Va., is the executive director of the Mid-Atlantic section of the United States Professional Tennis Association (USPTA), the 14,000-member organization of American tennis instructors. The current crisis, says Kearns, “has devastated us. It’s going to be a while before pros can dive back in and start teaching.”

In March, Kearns became chairman of the USPTA Covid Task Force, a group intended to provide support for teaching pros. Currently, more than 1,300 USPTA instructors have joined a private Facebook page, seeking input on everything from managing unemployment to new ways to provide instruction to best practices for teaching once facilities reopen. (And while no one will state this publicly, there are reports of instructors and students, particularly ambitious juniors, working on private courts.)

When that uncertain date occurs, there will be a wide range of precautions that need to be in place, with everything from balls to gloves to sanitizers to grips, and of course contact with students. As Lisa Cheng, an instructor based in the San Francisco Bay Area, says, “It’s mind-boggling.”

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With the on-court model in tatters, instructors have been forced to reassess and reinvent.

“You can’t just feed balls out of a basket,” says Brent Abel, an instructor since the early 1970s who has been aware of this for a long time.

Back in 1998, the year Abel turned 50 and was typically on the court at least 35 hours a week, he looked down the road and saw both an increasingly broken-down body, and a scarcely robust future revenue stream.

Leaving the court behind, Abel created an instructional website, webtennis.com, that over the years has offered instruction on everything from tactics to stroke production to fitness and health advice to private, long-distance lessons. One popular offering called What’s The Right Shot? features a live doubles point and a pause in the video—Abel then taking in input from students before letting the point conclude and explaining the rationale for its subsequent conclusion.

A more personal approach will call for a student to send Abel an iPhone-made video clip of four games from a practice match, a tremendous launching point for everything from footwork to technique, body language, pacing in between points, and more.

More recently, Abel has offered webinars and private consulting sessions for instructors looking for ways to generate revenue through various online teaching approaches—Zoom seminars, YouTube videos, private consultations. But in a globally connected world, no longer is teaching tennis heavily focused on who wanders into your facility. Instructors need to become much smarter about who they can most aid.

“If you try to connect with everybody, you won’t be able to get a clear message across," says Abel. "So look at your lesson book and identify the one person you most look forward to coaching. That’s your demographic.”

In Abel’s case, it’s NTRP 3.5–4.5 men, looking for that incremental breakthrough that will help them win more matches. For Dodson, a recent Abel client, it’s a 3.5 woman who started the game in her 30s and only plays doubles.

Like Abel, Atlanta-based Peter Freeman’s longstanding engagement with video instruction has made him well-equipped to navigate current conditions. Starting in 2011, Freeman mixed in-person and video instruction, the latter through his site, crunchtimecoaching.com. A year ago, Freeman went to full-time video. His latest offering is a 30-day “Tennis Technique & Fitness Challenge,” providing both technical input and workout routines students can perform at home. Total cost: $37—what Freeman calls “crisis pricing,” with 25 percent of the proceeds going to United Way.

Some instructors are just getting engaged with online approaches. Neely Zervakis is associate director at the McCormack-Nagelsen Tennis Center, a six-court indoor facility located in Williamsburg, Va. Earlier this month, she created the online video “Easter Egg Soft Hands Challenge,” where players threw an egg and tried to catch it on their racquet. Zervakis has also created a running Google doc with various tips, quotes, and suggested reading on everything from mental toughness to match tactics. But there are other teachers who admit they have hardly ever considered how to do anything other than stand across the court from their student and hit and feed.

Instructors note that this can be an ideal time for recreational players to learn the game. With league play and tournaments cancelled, tennis’ outcome-based culture, often focused on winning an upcoming match, has been taken off the table. Tennis now is heavily about process, be it with a backboard, practice serves, off-court fitness, furtive rallies on a discreet court, or simple shadow swings in your living room—swings that can be taped and sent to an instructor for input.

As Freeman asks, “If you can’t do it right without the ball, how can you do it with the ball?”

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Perhaps, at a moment when the ball-feeding model is unworkable, tennis instruction has the opportunity to emulate such disciplines as the martial arts, where extensive attention is paid to such fundamentals as posture, balance and subtle movements. This is a far cry from group lessons that can often appear more like aerobics classes with racquets than any form of significant cognitive engagement. Then again, physical exertion is what the customers often want. The adult recreational world teems with players who care most of all about exercise and competition and scarcely feel the need to study such skills as serving with a backhand grip, volleying with a Continental or the subtleties of an effective overhead. Alas, just about anyone who’s ever taught tennis reaches those moments of feeling more like a concierge than an instructor. How might all that change?

Strategy and tactics could also be explored in an innovative way. Consider the idea of an instructor and student concurrently watching a ten-minute YouTube clip of an historic match and then picking apart shot selection, how to play to the score and other dimensions of the competitive process. Sadly, of the dozens of tennis instructors I have spoken to for more than 30 years, rarely do any ever address these topics.

But surely, in our shelter-in-place situation, this is a chance for instructors to peel back the layers of how they work and define their value and meaning in a new way. Few dare overtly admit it, but there has long been a dysfunction pecking away at the core of tennis instruction, of students who mostly wish to be catered to rather than challenged, of teachers who rely heavily on demonstrations of their own smooth technique and merely data transfer rather than truly connect with their student, of juniors and parents who demand exercise and groundstrokes over variety and tactics—and of the vast majority of recreational players who don’t even bother taking lessons because they perceive the instructor as someone heavily focused on technique, rather than being able to help you play the game more effectively.

Call this a mutual, unstated agreement of sorts, inching along, one league and tournament season at a time. But at this moment, and likely for several months to come, business as usual is not possible. One wonders what attitudes, expectations and skills students and teachers will bring when they return to full-scale tennis. Says Rubinstein, “For your next teaching job, be prepared to answer: What did you do professionally during this time off? Were you part of the solution? What were you doing to help yourself become better?”

Might the model be shattered forever? Maybe that’s good. Teaching so heavily on technique… or concierge services… will students want that? Who can afford it? Are you getting better?

Instructional mindset changing… Mind-boggling.