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Why Your Best Player Keeps Losing to a Worse One
I've coached tennis for over 30 years now, and there's one thing I see at every level, from mini-tennis right up to national squads: the player with better technique doesn't always win.
For a long time I put it down to "competitiveness" or "mental toughness" the vague words coaches reach for when we can't quite explain what just happened. Then I started watching more carefully, and I noticed something specific. The player who kept winning wasn't just tougher. They were reading their opponent, and the other player wasn't.
That gap between players who watch and players who just hit is what my new book, Find the Hole, is built to close.
We coach hitting. We don't coach seeing.
Think about how many hours go into a player's own game: grip, footwork, swing path, patterns, movement. Years of it. Now think about how much time gets spent teaching a player to actually watch the person across the net and work out what they can and can't do.
For most coaches, the honest answer is none. We assume it comes with experience. For a few players it eventually does usually after enough painful losses. Most players never really learn it.
That's the whole premise of the book: reading an opponent isn't a gift, it's a skill. It can be broken down, drilled, and built the same way we build every other part of a player's game.
The four-step method at the heart of the book
Everything in Find the Hole runs on one simple framework:
- Look — watch before you hit. The warm-up tells you far more than most players ever use.
- Test — hit a ball that asks a question: a high ball to the backhand, a short ball, a serve to the body.
- Confirm — one mistake isn't a pattern. The book teaches the Rule of Three: see it three times before you believe it and build a plan around it.
- Exploit — use what you've found, without making it obvious you're using it.
That last point is where a lot of players go wrong on their own. They find a hole and hammer it so relentlessly that even a moderate opponent adjusts by the third game. The book spends real time on this: setting the hole up so it's the natural finish to a point, not the first shot.
Nine stages, from the warm-up to the big point
Find the Hole is structured as a nine-stage pathway, the same way the whole SYSTEM-9 series is built on, so it slots straight in alongside the Yellow Ball and Singles Tactics books your coaches may already know.
It moves through the serve, the return, groundstrokes, movement, net play, and match patterns, before finishing on the part most coaching books skip entirely: what changes under pressure. A player might return well at 30-love. What happens at break point? A backhand might hold up fine early in a set. What happens after they've just dropped three points in a row?
Technical holes are useful. Pressure holes are usually where matches actually turn and that's exactly where the book spends its final stages.
Built to be coached, not just read
Every one of the book's exercises follows the same format, so a coach can pick one up and run it without any prep: a match situation, a setup, one clear question for the player to answer, what to look for, how to record it, and what to do with the answer. There's a full nine-session programme in the back, so a club can take a player from "notices nothing" to "builds a game plan live in a match" in nine weeks.
It also comes with a set of ready-made Opponent Cards for training hidden profiles a coach can play so a player has something real to find and a one-page scouting sheet players can genuinely take onto court.
Why it matters
If you've ever coached a talented player who keeps losing to someone who "shouldn't" beat them, this is usually why. They've never been taught to look. Find the Hole gives coaches a proper, structured way to teach it not as a vague "match awareness" chat, but as a coachable skill with real drills behind it.