How to prepare for a coaching session

Most coaches have a version of this experience. The morning has been busy, the previous client overran by ten minutes, the next one is already on court, and the first fifteen minutes of the lesson are spent catching up to a session that is already moving. The hour ends fine, but it is a fine hour, not a good one. The small ritual that prevents this is shorter than it sounds and changes the texture of the week.

Preparation, for a private coach, is not the same as planning. Planning is what was done after the previous lesson or when the block was first sketched out. Preparation is the act of arriving in the room ready to teach this client, today, in the state they are actually in. The two are different jobs and they need to be done at different times.

The right information is the last lesson note, the current goal for the block, and any message the client sent during the week. That is almost always enough. A coach who reads the last six lesson notes before each session tends to carry too much history into the room and ends up coaching the pattern rather than the person.

The wrong information is the long backlog of historical notes, the running spreadsheet of every drill the client has ever done, the technical analysis from three months ago. These are useful at the end of a block, when the coach is writing the summary or planning the next block, and they are almost actively unhelpful in the five minutes before a single lesson.

For a coach with many clients, a one-line summary of each client kept at the top of their record, updated after each lesson, is the most useful artefact in the practice. "Working on the second serve toss; back from a wrist niggle; mum prefers texts to emails." Three things, refreshed weekly, are enough to walk into almost any lesson prepared.

The first lesson of a block, the lesson before an exam or a tournament, the first lesson back after a break, and the lesson where a significant technical change is being introduced all benefit from longer preparation, often twenty or thirty minutes the evening before. The coach uses that time to write a short plan, gather any specific material, and think through how the conversation will start.

Almost every other lesson is well served by the five-minute ritual and nothing more. A coach who prepares heavily for every session tends to teach the preparation rather than the client, and tends to burn out within a year. The honest distribution of attention, heavy preparation for the few lessons that need it and a calm ritual for the rest, is what makes a private practice sustainable across the years.

A client who walks into a lesson where the coach is still finishing the last one will, often without meaning to, hold something back for the first ten minutes. A client who walks into a lesson where the coach is already in the room, already in the work, already remembers what last week was about, tends to start the hour fully present. Over a block, that difference compounds into something visible: more progress, easier renewals, and a coach who finishes the week with energy left for their own life.

Five minutes, four small acts, and a habit. The preparation is almost embarrassingly simple, which is probably why it is so often left undone.