Making content accessible

A beginner can't pay attention to ten things at once. Your first task in teaching is therefore to make the content smaller than it is — to reduce it to its core.

Every technique has a hinge point on which it stands or falls. With the grip it's the loose hand, with the serve the point of contact below the hitting hand, with the drive the point of contact in front of the body. When you find this one core and leave out everything else at first, you give the learner something they can actually put into practice. Ten correct cues at once are worse than the one that counts.

Three paths lead to understanding, and they work best together. Showing: demonstrate the movement, slowly and from an angle from which the core becomes visible. Saying: give a brief, clear instruction — what to do, not what to avoid. And giving an image: a good analogy achieves more than ten technical terms. "Shake hands with the grip" lands at once; "rotate the hand into a slightly pronated neutral position" confuses.

An image for it you can use yourself: one image per thing. When you notice you need three comparisons to explain a movement, you haven't yet reduced it to the core.

With career-changers from other racket sports especially: build on what they already know, and name only the one thing that's different. That saves both sides a lot of effort.

Choose a technique from the beginner area — grip, serve, or forehand. Formulate three things for it: the one movement core in a sentence, a brief action instruction, and an image or analogy. Then check self-critically: could the core be reduced even further? This exercise — reduction to the essential — is the basic skill of all teaching.