Teenage tennis champion Emma Raducanu goes through coaches like a knife through butter.

Six world-class coaches and practitioners have come and gone from her team in the past 12 months alone.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde’s redoubtable Lady Bracknell, “to lose one coach, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose six looks like carelessness.”

Emma’s father, Ian Raducanu, is even said to have considered engaging a different coach for every single shot. Is this trigger-happy Svengali, with his financial services background, recklessly destabilising her game by chopping and changing so frequently?

Andre Agassi, 2010 © Left Eyed Photography

Tennis champ and Olympic gold medallist Andre Agassi says “tennis is about problem-solving. You can't problem-solve unless you have the ability or the empathy to perceive all that surrounds you. The more you understand what the problem is through other people's lens the more you can solve for people—in life and in business.” (Andre Agassi, 2009)

British coach Calvin Betton describes problem-solving and interpersonal "soft" skills as 85% of the role.

“The truth is that only 15 per cent of coaching is about the mechanics of strokeplay,” Betton said in a recent interview. “There’s a lot of quiet guidance and support and mentoring that goes into the job". (Briggs, 2022)

Which begs the question, is Raducanu senior jeopardising his daughter’s ability to build supportive, creative relationships with the coaches who are there to help her problem solve?

Or is his strategy a wildly innovative approach, in a coaching industry that has been described as “unthinking, unchallenging and uncritical” (North, 2019).

Coaching research suggests that activities that might lead to new ideas, such as deliberate critical thinking, reflection and, collaboration beyond existing networks (Abraham and Collins, 2015) are often missing from coaching practice.

We also know that coaches tend to problem solve with very little external input.

In a survey of UK coaches (North et al., 2020) most coaches (61%) rely on their immediate network.

And a significant number of coaches (39%) did not reach out for any help at all (Fig. 1) 

61%

of coaches use their immediate coaching environment,

 i.e., their team and/or organisation, for additional input

39%

solved problems without external assistance, there was little evidence that the coaches solved problems in alternative ways

Fig 1. data from ‘An Empirical Examination of U.K. Coaches’ Issues and Problems, and Their Support and Advice Networks’, International Sport Coaching Journal,

The National Centre for Creativity enabled by AI, has developed an app, Sport Sparks, specifically designed for coaches to apply creative problem solving strategies to their practice.

The app uses proprietary state of the art algorithms to search for new and highly relevant data and information.

It delivers these search results along with a broad range of creativity prompts that are specific to the challenge the coach is considering.

These tools enable the coach to think more broadly, to move out of their habitual thinking rut, and easily explore and implement atypical solutions.

The World Economic Forum is pretty clear that creativity and problem solving are two of the top five skills all organisations need most to compete in the 21^st Century (Whiting, 2020). Sport coaching is not excluded from this requirement.

Coaches must apply creative problem solving processes to the increasingly cross-disciplinary and complex tasks they face, from planning and organising training, setting standards, to establishing clear roles and deciding how programmes should operate (Youngson, 2018).

Culturally, they are much less likely to change the status quo than professional managers in other industries.

To date there has been little wide-scale use of creative problem solving processes in coaching, despite their successful uptake in other sectors.

Maybe this is why Raducanu is finding it so hard to settle on a single coach?

 The creative process tends to revolve around four generally agreed stages - Exploration, Creation, Reflection, and Implementation (Stickdorn and Schneider, 2012; Csikszentmihalyi, M, 1997; Popova, 2013)

The Raducanu team are most certainly widely exploring all their coaching options. Indeed, Ian Raducanu is said to have a "constant thirst for information" by one tennis insider (Fuller, 2022). 

This desire for new knowledge sees Raducanu Snr pushing hard against the traditions of establishing long-held coach/athlete relationships.

Patrick Mouratoglou famously coached Serena Williams for ten years.

Rafael Nadal has only had three coaches in his entire 20 year career, two of whom he still works with.

Current world number one women’s player Iga Świątekthey stuck with her coach for six years as she climbed the rankings.

And yet team Raducanu confidently change their coaches like other player change their socks.

Innovation also requires divergent (generating lots of alternatives) and convergent (bringing lots of information together) ideation techniques.

And, team Raducanu might benefit from another form of exploratory creativity, called combinational creativity, which is the process of making unfamiliar connections between familiar items in the pre-defined search space, using a different set of generative rules (Boden, 2004)

Alternatively, if they really want to ace it, they could just log on to our Sport Sparks app, which has all of this creative problem solving theory baked in and would do much of the heavy lifting for them!