Why Not?

At the start of a recent session, a student asked me something I had not been asked before. He wanted to try playing with a two-handed forehand, without changing grips between forehand and backhand. Not as a warm-up curiosity, not for five minutes before returning to normal. He wanted to spend the whole session exploring that as his actual solution.

My first instinct, I will admit, was not immediately enthusiasm. There was a brief internal hesitation, the kind that comes from years of playing within a certain picture of what tennis should look like. But then I asked him why, and what he said changed the direction of everything.

He had thought about it. He had specific reasons, connected to how he felt on court, to the problems he was trying to solve. It was not a whim. It was a genuine idea. So that became the session.

We played points, I adjusted the task design as things emerged, I created different problems for him, and my questioning ran alongside all of it. And he kept solving them, one by one, creating different kinds of trouble that he usually doesn’t cause, finding angles he usually doesn’t find, having a capacity for returning the ball with height and depth that usually he doesn’t can’t, consistently.

The session was genuinely enjoyable. He was curious, engaged, and trying things. Whether a traditional coaching lens would call it a “good” session, I am honestly not sure. But I left feeling that something real had happened. He left feeling happy, more engaged with tennis, wanting to explore this new way of playing in his next game.

A question I kept asking myself

There are certain preconceived ideas that many coaches carry, and I have thought them myself in the past:

“If he spends the next three months doing this, it will ruin his technique.”
“This is a waste of time.”
“This solution will never work.”

But are these assumptions really true?

How many times do we see two-handed players reach for a one-hander when the ball gets wide or awkward? How often do we see right-handed players hit a left-handed shot because, in that particular moment, it is simply the more practical solution? Players adapt constantly. They find tools. They build their games from the experiences they have, not only from the models they are handed.

So who are we to say that exploring a two-handed forehand will not eventually add something to his toolset? Who am I to say that an exploration which feels uncomfortable or unorthodox today cannot become the thing that helps him solve a specific problem under pressure six months from now?

That question, more than any other, is what stayed with me after the session.

Why not?

That question then opened into something bigger, one I find myself returning to more and more.

Because if we look at elite tennis, particularly on the men’s side, there is something striking about how uniform the technical picture has become. One-handed forehand. Two-handed backhand. Similar grips, similar patterns, similar ideas of what a player should look like. There are variations, of course, but compared with how many different ways humans can move and solve problems and play games, the top of the sport can feel surprisingly narrow.

Which leads to a question I find genuinely difficult to answer: is this uniformity there because one model is clearly the most effective, or is it partly because most players are formatted into that model before they ever have a chance to explore anything else?

I am not certain. And I think being uncertain here is the honest position.

Tennis history gives us enough examples to make us pause. Marion Bartoli won Wimbledon hitting with two hands on both sides. Monica Seles became one of the greatest players the game has ever produced using two-handed groundstrokes from both wings. Fabrice Santoro, “The Magician”, caused problems for some of the best players in the world with a game that looked almost nothing like the standard template.

It is worth sitting with some simple questions:

Would Bartoli have won Wimbledon if someone had decided early enough that her forehand needed to be rebuilt into something more conventional?
Would Seles have become the same player if she had been redirected toward a more standard technique before her game was fully formed?
Would tennis have gained or lost something if Santoro had been told, firmly and early, that his style was simply too unusual to work at the highest level?

We cannot know, and that is exactly the point. Sometimes, when we try too hard to make players look correct, we risk losing the thing that makes them dangerous, creative, and genuinely themselves. This is not a defence of the two-handed forehand, or of any particular technique. It is something more specific than that: it is about what happens when we close down exploration before the player has had a chance to find out what their game might become.

Player-centred does not mean anything goes

This is worth being careful about, because the idea can be misread.

A player-centred approach does not mean the coach disappears. It does not mean every idea the player has is equally useful, or that exploration needs no direction. It means that when a player arrives with genuine curiosity and a real question about their game, the coach’s first response is not to shut that down because it does not fit a familiar model.

It means taking the player seriously. Helping them test the idea properly: under pressure, in points, against different problems. Designing environments that reveal real information rather than simply confirming what the coach already believes.

In that session, my job was not to say “no, don’t do that.” But it also was not to say “yes, this is definitely the future of your game.” My job was to create a space where the player could explore his own idea honestly, and where the game itself could give him some of the answers. To be someone who observes carefully, creates problems, asks better questions, and helps the player discover what the idea can actually do inside the game.

“The coach’s role is not to approve or disapprove the idea. It is to help the player find out what the idea is actually capable of.”

That, for me, is where learning tends to become real: not when the coach has already decided what is worth trying, and not when the player is simply left alone to figure everything out. But when the player is genuinely inside a question, and the coach helps shape the session so that the question can be tested, challenged, refined, or even abandoned.

Discovering your tennis

What I keep coming back to, after sessions like this one, is a simple distinction.

There is a version of coaching that gives players your tennis: the model you understand, the technique you have learned to value, the patterns you have seen work. That version of coaching is not without value. Knowledge and experience matter, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise.

But there is another version that helps players discover their tennis. Not because it rejects knowledge or structure, but because it uses those things in service of the player’s own journey rather than as a boundary around it. It starts from the player’s question and builds from there.

This student came in with an idea. I helped him investigate it for a session. I do not know whether the two-handed forehand becomes part of his game or disappears from the next session onward. But I do know that he left having genuinely explored something, having found angles he had not found before, having solved problems in a way that was entirely his own.

And maybe, before we correct or redirect or quietly steer a player back toward the familiar, it is worth asking one simple question first:

Why not?

You might also enjoy: The Player Comes First, Technique Is Not a Shape to Copy, and Aoi Ito: Tennis as a Video Game