A Non-competitive Approach to Teaching
Tennis

by Brent Zeller

Competition and the Need to Win

Competition, the need to win, to be number one is pervasive in American society. Our schools, sports, mass media, corporate culture, and politics all stress winning as the be all and end all of any human effort. Winners are lionized while everyone else is dismissed as “also-rans” or, worse “losers”—the ultimate put-down.

Success is stressed over accomplishment. Many people are convinced that if competition is taken out of the learning process the motivation for excellence will disappear; this can be, but does not have to be, the case. In the right framework, having no competition actually promotes and encourages a desire for excellence and achievement. The goal is excellence without competition. We are working toward peak performance. It is exciting to see how good we can be at something, without having to defeat, or prove that we are better than someone else.

Since reading Tim Gallwey’s groundbreaking book, The Inner Game of Tennis, in 1974, I have been developing and perfecting a comprehensive, integrated learning system for the game of tennis. My goal is not to teach people just how to play tennis, but to help them learn about themselves and the learning process, and eventually be able to attain that elusive state of being “in the zone.”

Being “in the zone” is what peak performance is all about. One of the most important facts my research has confirmed is that in order to learn how to get “in the zone” on a consistent basis, it is necessary to eliminate all competition from the learning process. To be able, eventually, to access that “state of being” known as “the zone,” it is best not to have the additional pressures that competition brings to the learning process. First someone must be able to access “the zone,” with no competition, before they can consistently access that state in competition.

The notion of sports as a collaboration between players, not a competition, is a revolutionary one that evolves in the process of learning the skills of sport and the value of cooperation. This system is adaptable to any sport or movement activity, and it is applicable also to academics; the details are different, but the principles are the same.

I have played tennis for thirty-three years, including eighteen years of tournament level competitive tennis. Since 1975 I have taught 20,000 hours of lessons, over 6,000 of those since I removed competition from the program. In the eight years of non-competitive instruction, I have taught nearly 500 different people, adults and juniors, from six years of age to seventy, in both private and group lessons.

The information and insights gleaned from these years of on-court observation and experimentation have led to the conclusion that a non-competitive based education system is, across the board, superior to a competitive based system.

Non-competitive education works better for players of all levels, abilities, and ages: it is easier and more nurturing for beginners to learn in this environment; it is more supportive in helping players work through the challenges and frustrations of intermediate play; it gives advanced players the opportunity, finally, to achieve their full potential; it allows children to learn in a nurturing environment; it gives couples the opportunity to play together in an environment which nourishes their relationship; and it enables seniors to continue to play the game, getting a great workout with less stress and strain on their bodies, and without having to compete to feel good about themselves.

Long-term, a non-competitive education system produces better results. Without any competition in the learning process, players gradually learn how to be successful in competition. A higher percentage of players succeed more frequently, and with greater consistency than in a competitive system. When you know how to play the game, success is the “natural” outcome. Welcome to the world of Effortless Tennis.

Winning and Losing

Like many small town boys growing up in the 1960’s, I played many different sports. The ‘60’s everybody talks about didn’t get to my hometown until the mid ‘70’s. Baseball and basketball were my first sports. From the very beginning these activities were competitive. The general scenario was that we would practice as a team for a few weeks, and then we would start playing games against other teams. Although during practices there was some drilling going on, practices revolved mainly around competition; most drills involved some form of competition. When I got to tennis, at age fourteen, it was the same thing; they showed us how to hit each of the strokes, let us practice a little while, taught us how to keep score, and had us start playing matches.

Tennis, like most other activities in life, has been based on a competitive model of learning and behavior. You compete against an opponent to prove who is better, who is the winner. Psychologist Alfie Kohn calls it “mutually exclusive goal attainment.” I can’t win if you don’t lose. This is how we demonstrate our ability and worth in this culture. Competition starts almost from day one of our involvement with any activity; in some subtle form or another, it’s always us against them. People say, “well that’s how life is, it’s one big competition.” That can be true, but where does it say that we throw babies into the lion’s den and let them work it out for themselves. This is, in essence, what we are doing to our children from their earliest days, if we put them into competition before they have the skills to succeed. This is not the ideal approach to having people learn, yet this is how we do most of our learning. No matter how “harmless” it seems, it is a competition; since these kids or adults don’t have any of the skills necessary to succeed yet, they will, however subtly it might be, begin to tighten up around learning and performance, leading to experiencing less success and enjoyment.

Naturally coordinated people, or people who have had the opportunity to
practice other similar skills in the past, will be able to do well enough in
competition, even without having the skills. Somebody has to win; unfortunately, even the winner’s development will be limited because his or her winning has more to do with luck than skill. As for the people who aren’t coordinated, or didn’t have the opportunity to practice other similar skills in the past, a competitive approach to education can be devastating, not only to their ability to learn, but also to their self-esteem, and long-term development potential. We need to look at what we are doing with our underlying approach to education and see if it is what works best to help every individual get the best from themselves.

Learned Behavior

In actuality, competition or competitive behavior is a learned characteristic. We are taught to be competitive; it is the subtext of most every lesson we learn. In 1937 Mark A. May and Leonard Doob wrote, "Human beings by original nature strive for goals, but striving with others or against others are learned forms of behavior. Neither of these two can be said to be the more genetically basic, fundamental or primordial." To this can be added the thoughts of sports psychologists Thomas Tutko and William Bruns, "People are not born with a motivation to win or to be competitive. We inherit a potential for a degree of activity, and we all have the instinct to survive. But the will to win comes through training and the influences of one's family and environment." The big issue with believing that competition is part of our human nature is that it allows people not to take responsibility for their actions. The normal response is, “It’s not my fault. It’s just human nature, and I can’t do anything about it.” This is the easy way out, but it is not the truth.

The fact that people find it difficult to think there is any alternative to competition shows how deeply programmed into our subconscious this belief is. Kohn observed, “That most of us fail to consider the alternatives to competition is a testament to the effectiveness of our socialization. We have been trained not only to compete but to believe in competition.” Sociologist David Riesman stated, “First we are systematically socialized to compete—and to want to compete—and then the results are cited as evidence of competition’s inevitability.”

Premature Competition

The real problem is not competition per se, but premature competition. Premature competition is any form of competition before a person ‘owns’ the necessary skills of whatever activity they are engaging in. What happens in a competition is that the goal shifts from learning to winning.

"It appears that when people are instructed to compete at an activity,” researcher Edward Deci observed, “they begin to see that activity as an instrument for winning rather than an activity which is mastery oriented and rewarding in its own right."

As soon as it becomes a contest, people do whatever they have to do in order to win—winning is all that matters. From what I have seen in tennis, people forget about their strokes and footwork, the mechanics, and do whatever seems to work to try and win. This approach can sometimes be successful in the short-term, but long-term it is not a path for consistent success or reaching our potential.

When people get into competition before they know how to do what they are trying to compete in, not only does it severely limit their physical skills, it also greatly inhibits psychological development. Competition is an advanced aspect of any activity and needs to be entered into only after the basic skills have been mastered.

Premature competition is the primary cause not only for lowering performance levels, participation, potential, and enjoyment, it also undermines long-term psychological health by inadvertently promoting less than optimal emotional states and behaviors such as uncertainty, anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, hyper-aggression, cheating, stealing, lying, an inability to trust, avoidance, and poor sportsmanship—just to name a few.

Everyone has experienced or witnessed many examples of these negative side-effects. If someone can not be successful on her/his own talents, and they know that they must win to be valued, which does seem to be the implied message in this society, then there is a strong pull to do whatever is needed to win; countless examples of this behavior are seen on a daily basis in professional sports, business, and politics. This behavior is not a good example for kids. If any of these above emotions or behaviors are happening while playing, it is preventing the achievement of peak performance. What I have shown is that when competition is removed from the learning process these negative emotions and behaviors gradually begin to disappear. Stress levels go down, while enjoyment and performance improves.

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