Should vs. Going To: The Mental Shift That Separates Players Who Compete From Players Who Participate

Why the word you use before you swing matters more than the swing itself…

There is a question I ask almost every student I work with, and I ask it constantly. Not once at the beginning of a lesson and never again — constantly. Every missed shot, every moment of confusion, every time a player looks at me like they genuinely cannot figure out what went wrong.

The question is simple: what did you want to do?

Not what happened. Not what went wrong. Not what you think I wanted you to do. What did you want to do.

And here is where it gets interesting. More often than I can count, the answer is some version of the same thing: "I just wanted to get it over the net." Or "I don't know, I just hit it." Or my personal favorite — said with complete sincerity, every single time — "I just wanted to make it."

And every time I hear that, I say the same thing back.

Then what happened is exactly what should have happened.

Uncommitted shots give you uncommitted results

This is not a criticism. It is not a judgment about the player's ability, their effort, or their desire to improve. It is a statement of fact — physics and psychology operating together in real time, producing an outcome that was, in the truest sense, inevitable.

When you step into a shot without a clear intention — without a target, without a decision about what you are going to do with that ball — you are not really hitting a tennis shot. You are hoping one lands somewhere useful. And hope, on a tennis court, has a very low percentage.

The swing might look the same from the outside. The mechanics might even be technically identical. But there is a fundamental difference between a shot that is executed and a shot that is attempted. Execution requires a decision. Attempt requires only a swing.

When I ask a student what they wanted to do and they cannot answer, I do not tell them what they should have done. I do not give them the answer. I ask them a different question instead: what were you going to do?

Because those two questions — what should I do, and what am I going to do — are not the same question. They feel similar on the surface. They sound almost identical when you say them out loud. But they come from completely different places psychologically, they produce completely different internal states, and they lead to completely different outcomes on the court.

The weight of SHOULD

Should is a word that carries enormous weight. It implies an expectation — something outside of you that already knows the right answer, a standard you are being measured against, a way to be wrong before you have even swung. When a player stands behind the baseline thinking about what they should do with the ball, they are already in a negotiation with failure. They are trying to identify the correct answer before they act, which means they are simultaneously aware that there is a wrong answer waiting for them if they choose poorly.

That awareness is pressure. And pressure, sitting in the middle of a swing, is the single most effective way to destroy the thing you are trying to protect.

Should turns every decision into a test. It transforms a moment of choice into a moment of evaluation. And when you are being evaluated — even if the only evaluator is yourself — something in the brain shifts. The swing gets tentative. The commitment wavers. The body does something that the mind never fully endorsed, and when the ball goes into the net or sails long, there is a specific kind of frustration that comes with it. Not the clean frustration of a committed miss — the murky, unresolved frustration of a swing that was never really yours.

I see this constantly in adult players. Not because they are not talented. Not because they do not understand the game. But because at some point — in a lesson, in a clinic, in a match — they learned to think in terms of should. What should I do here. What does my coach want me to do. What is the right shot. And that framing, however well-intentioned, quietly replaced the most important skill in tennis with its most dangerous substitute: the appearance of thinking without the substance of deciding.

The freedom of GOING TO

Going to is a different animal entirely.

Going to is forward-facing. It does not ask whether the decision is correct — it assumes a decision has been made and moves toward executing it. Going to closes the door on hesitation before hesitation has the chance to do its damage. It is not reckless. It is not blind. It is committed.

When a player steps into a ball thinking I am going to hit this crosscourt with topspin to the backhand corner, something shifts. The body organizes itself around that intention. The eyes find the target. The swing path adjusts to serve the decision. The grip pressure — which should sit at a 2 on a scale of 1 to 5 through the swing — stays loose because the brain is not second-guessing, it is executing.

And when that shot misses — when it clips the net or lands wide — we have something to work with. We know what the player was trying to do. We can look at the contact point, the swing path, the timing, the racket face angle at contact, and find the gap between the intention and the execution. That is a productive conversation. That is how players improve.

But when a player hits a ball into the net and I ask what they were going to do and the answer is I don't know — there is almost nothing to fix. You cannot adjust a commitment that was never made. You cannot refine an intention that did not exist. All you can do is go back to the beginning and ask the question again: what were you going to do?

What I reward on the court — and why it might surprise you

Here is something I want to be direct about, because it matters and because it runs counter to what a lot of players expect from coaching: I do not only reward correct decisions. I reward committed ones.

If a student goes for a winner down the line and it goes wide by two feet, I want to know one thing before anything else — was that the shot they decided to hit? Did they see the opening, choose the target, and commit to the swing? If the answer is yes, we talk about the execution. We find what to adjust technically. We have a real conversation about what needs to change for that decision to produce a better result next time.

But if a student hits a ball that clips the net and drifts long, and I ask what they were going to do, and the answer is I don't know — that is a fundamentally different situation. Not because the miss was worse. Because there is nothing to work with. The miss is not information. It is noise. And you cannot build anything on noise.

This is the thing that separates players who improve quickly from those who plateau for years: the players who improve are always competing with full information. They always know what they were trying to do. They miss, they identify the gap between intention and execution, they adjust, and they try again. The process is clean. The feedback loop is functional.

The players who plateau are often technically capable — sometimes very technically capable — but they are operating without decisions. They are reacting rather than choosing. And reaction, without intention underneath it, produces inconsistency that no amount of technical work can fix. Because the problem was never technical.

This is not just a tennis observation…

I want to step off the court for a moment, because this idea does not live only in tennis.

Think about the moments in your own life where you have been paralyzed by what you should do. A conversation you needed to have but kept postponing. A career decision you kept researching instead of making. A creative project you kept preparing for instead of starting. A relationship moment where you knew something needed to be said and you said nothing because you were not sure it was the right thing.

The paralysis almost never comes from not knowing the options. We almost always know the options. The paralysis comes from the weight of the expectation attached to choosing correctly. Should turns every decision into a test with a right answer. And when the stakes feel high enough, the fear of the wrong answer is enough to prevent any answer at all.

Going to dissolves that. Not by removing the uncertainty — the uncertainty is still there, the outcome is still unknown — but by shifting the locus of the decision from the outcome back to the person making it. Going to says: I have assessed what I know, I have chosen a direction, and I am moving. The outcome will tell me what to adjust. But I am moving.

That is not recklessness. That is agency. And agency, on a tennis court and off it, is the foundation of everything.

The shot that fails with commitment is information.

The shot that fails without a decision is just noise.

I want to leave you with that, because it is the most practical thing I can offer from everything above.

Every shot you hit in a match — every shot — should be preceded by a decision. Not a perfect decision. Not the optimal decision according to some external standard. Your decision, made with the information you have, committed to fully before the swing begins.

Some of those decisions will be wrong. You will go down the line when crosscourt was the smarter play. You will go for the winner when the reset was what the situation called for. You will attempt the drop shot at the wrong moment and hand your opponent a short ball. That is tennis. That is all of us.

But when those moments happen, you will know exactly what you were trying to do. And knowing what you were trying to do is the only way to figure out what to do differently next time.

Stop thinking about what you should do with the ball.

Start thinking about what you are going to do with it.

Should implies an obligation — a standard to meet, a way to fail, a test with a right answer already written somewhere you can't see. Going to is a decision. Decisions are executable. Obligations are just pressure.

Make the decision. Then we will figure out if it was the right one.