I
began playing tennis in 1968, and teaching it in 1974. In November of 1992, with eighteen years as a teaching pro, and 15,000 hours of tennis instruction under my belt, I made a bold, some said
crazy, decision to eliminate all competition from his
tennis program. My twenty-four years of playing and teaching
competitive tennis had changed my perspective.
As
long as I’d played tennis, I had noticed how people’s behavior and personalities
changed, often dramatically, when they got into competition. The desire to win,
and its shadow, the fear of losing, became a distracting, even debilitating factor in their play. Players often became tense
and emotional, timid
and deflated, or aggressive
and volatile, often by turns. Bad behaviors and general poor sportsmanship commonly
emerged in competition – cursing, screaming, cheating, breaking rackets, bullying, or
quitting. The enjoyment of the game was often lost completely.
I
began realizing the counter-productive nature of a competitive educational
model, and started questioning an approach to learning in which virtual
beginners were thrust into competition before they’d truly learned, let alone
become proficient in, the basics. I saw how this model turned potential learning partners
into adversaries, retarding rather than enhancing the learning process. It
became increasingly obvious to me that the greatest
obstacle to learning and mastering the basics, and to entering the fabled state of
the Zone, prized by athletes in every sport, was the premature introduction of competition
into the learning process.
How
can we expect people do well in
competition before they've learned the basic skills of that
activity? Competition is an advanced
aspect of any activity, not something for people who haven’t
developed competence in the basic skills. Yet this competitive approach
dominates almost every aspect of our educational system.
By the mid-1980s I had begun deemphasizing competition in my program, now called Effortless Tennis. Shifting the focus away from winning and losing, I
concentrated instead on helping players develop the essential physical, mental,
and emotional fundamentals of the game without competition. I saw how this new
model of teaching diminished the pressure,
frustration, and negativity so many people brought to the game — side-effects
of being raised in a competitive system. My students gradually unlearned the
negative self-talk and self-sabotaging behaviors instilled in them from their
earliest years. They began experiencing the simple joy of learning and playing,
free of the shadow of winning or losing. As I like to say, “When you know how
to play the game, success is the natural outcome.”
I
noticed numerous benefits of a non-competitive learning system. These include:
• Students learn the basic
physical, mental, and emotional skills before they start competing. This makes it possible for them to compete from a place of technical competence, emotional balance, and personal maturity.
• From their first day in the program, players develop relaxation
and concentration skills that enhance physical performance and cognitive
learning. Learning to be relaxed while competing is virtually impossible.
• A non-competitive
learning environment enables players to go back and undo physical and
psychological “bad habits” ingrained in competition. (It’s much harder to undo bad habits while competing,
because you’re likely to lose a lot in the transitional period before attaining
proficiency in the new good habits.)
• In a non-competitive
environment, players experience substantially higher levels of enjoyment of the
learning process, and a significant reduction in performance anxiety. The
elusive “thrill of victory” is replaced by a more deeply satisfying and
rewarding “thrill of accomplishment.”
• In a non-competitive,
learning-focused system, people develop deeper levels of cooperation and
camaraderie. They tend to take more pleasure in helping each other get better. They are friends, instead of adversaries.
Psychologically, it creates a much more positive, supportive learning
environment.
In
1988, I started working with the Drake High School, San Anselmo, CA Boy’s
tennis team during the last month of their season. The team ended with a 0-14
record. The next year, with the head coach’s approval, I worked with the team
on de-emphasizing competition and focusing on practical, emotional and
psychological skill development and enjoyment of the game. Over the next three
years, the team’s results went from 1-13, to 7-7, to 14-0 and winning the
county championship in the spring of 1991. I had proven that my non-competitive
learning system could be successful—even in competition.
Most
people would have been elated by such success, and motivated to pursue more
championships. But at that point, I was so disturbed by the negative side
effects of the competitive system, I decided I’d had enough. I resigned my
position with the team, but continued teaching privately.
Then, in October of 1992, I read psychologist Alfie
Kohn’s landmark book, No Contest: The Case Against Competition. There I found all of my intuitions and insights
about the competitive system confirmed, clarified and amplified. Kohn’s
extensive research showed that a competitive based learning system prevents a
majority of people from achieving their potential, seriously undermining their long-term development, self-esteem, and
enjoyment.
Not long after that, I realized that if I was going
to help people be their best and achieve their potential, I needed to remove all competition from my tennis program.
That
same October, a mother brought her 9 year-old daughter to me for tennis
lessons. I began teaching her in my now completely non-competitive learning
system. By the time she got to high school, she was one of the best players in
Marin County. She won the Marin County High School Girl’s Singles Championship
her sophomore and junior years, in 2000 and 2001. Once again I demonstrated
that a non-competitive learning system could be successful in competition.
In
the intervening eleven years, I have further developed my system. I do not
believe that competition should be eliminated,
just the premature introduction of competition into the learning process. I am
confident that my non-competitive approach to learning will help diminish much of the stress, cheating, bad
behavior, and poor sportsmanship that are rampant in our competitive system,
and that ruin the enjoyment of the game for many people. A non-competitive
learning system creates a better, psychologically
healthier environment for all participants. And it will produce better
long-term results and greater enjoyment for a larger percentage of
participants.
I have
also written a book on the subject, Evolutionary Education: Moving Beyond
Our Competitive Compulsion. Since 2001 I
have taught my non-competitive program through the College of Marin Community
Education. My motto, “Competence Before Competition.” The classes are very popular and many students have
stayed with the program from its beginning days. People like the lack of
competitive pressure. They’ve been so stressed out by competition, that this
approach allows them to relax and learn the skills of this challenging sport
while getting a great physical, mental, and emotional workout, and having a lot of fun. We’ve been conditioned to think that the
only way to have fun and excel is through competition, but that’s just not
true. Excellence and fun can also happen with cooperation.”
This year I returned to the
Drake High School boy’s tennis team as head coach.
Now with twenty years and over 10,000
hours teaching my non-competitive learning system, my model has proven its
value in the lives of many junior and adult students who have gone through the
program.
Yet, the competitive approach to learning is still
the standard model in almost every sport, and also in the world of academia and
business. The false belief, unsupported by scientific research or data, is that
the sooner people start competing, the more “fun” it will be, and the faster they’ll improve in competitive
play. Thus people are routinely thrown into competition in the early stages of
the learning process, before they’ve really learned, let alone mastered, any
of the fundamental practical and emotional skills necessary to do well in competition.
One
premise of my book, Evolutionary Education, is that the myriad problems facing our society and world today are
largely a result of an adversarial system that encourages us not to work together in a cooperative spirit, but rather to compete against each other in a
counter-productive, often unhealthy, manner that can degenerate into needless
conflict, to the detriment of all. We see this clearly today in the political arena. And
yet the consensus is that this approach and the negative behaviors it generates
are somehow normal and necessary.
Competition
is so ingrained into every aspect of our
society and life that it’s disconcerting for people to acknowledge and examine
its many negative aspects. It’s true that humans tend to be competitive, but allowing a competitive mentality to dominate the
learning process is not wisdom, but habit. It is clear to me that the premature
introduction of competition into the learning process sabotages that process,
and, for a vast majority of people, it produces more negative than positive
results. So I’m working to change the system, one class, one student, and one
mind at a time.