From Coaching to Collaboration
If you are doing your job well as a coach, harvesting improvements in your students should get harder over time as they develop. Most people don't think it will be as hard as it turns out to be, either vastly overestimating their own ability, or assuming the knowledge gap between them and their student is much greater than it actually is.
With a beginner, you can have a noticeable effect almost daily. But as they grow, the "big rocks" you can drop into their game that produce giant leaps become much rarer, and this is a sign you are doing things right, this is exactly what should happen.
In these later stages, your mission is less about those big rocks and more about helping them achieve balance and clarity. You are now at the stage of high-level refinement, and here, you have to accept that they will know enough to spot holes in your solutions. If you don’t know the answer, say so, figure it out, and come back with a good one.
Over time, fewer of your arrows will hit the bullseye. This is also by design. The process is moving from a purely teacher-student dynamic to a collaborative one where you solve problems together as they bring you curiosities that challenge you as a coach.
Unfortunately, this is where many coaches lose touch with the sport, deciding to ignore its evolution and focus on kids' classes, or settle on a forever-curriculum of their essentials, leading to endless repetition of the same thing for years.
So, as a coach, you have three main choices:
Get yourself up to snuff with the things you don’t know in isolation.
Figure out a way to bridge the gap between what you do know and what you don't.
Get so elite at what you do know that you become one of the best in the world at it.
We would strongly suggest the second path. This brings you closer to the target, whereas the other two options force you to either make the target come to you, or shoot from where you stand. Both are hard.