The Backhand Breakthrough

This piece was originally posted on LinkedIn.

The Backhand Breakthrough

I started playing tennis about a year ago.

And I’ll be honest, I like to talk a little smack on the court because that’s what I do. But real talk? My game needed some serious work, especially my backhand. To say it was awful would be generous.

Then something wild happened this weekend. My backhand improved noticeably. Like, measurably better. I wasn’t even aware of it until I was forced into backhand drills at a clinic this Saturday. Serve after serve, something clicked. My strokes were smoother, more controlled, more powerful. My coach even said, “Wow, Sash, your backhand has really improved.” You know I had to do a little on-court dance after that.

Driving home, I kept thinking, how did this happen all of a sudden?

The Science Behind the Sudden Leap

Turns out what felt like an overnight win, actually fits into something researchers have been studying for decades. In skill development, there’s this thing called the learning curve, and it’s almost never a straight line. You start out making fast progress, then you plateau. For weeks or months, it looks like nothing is changing. But underneath the surface, your brain and body are quietly rewiring. It’s called latent learning, which is progress that’s happening invisibly until it suddenly shows up in your performance.

According to the Fitts and Posner model of skill acquisition, learning moves through three stages:

1. The Cognitive Stage, where you’re overthinking every move (classic Sash).
2. The Associative Stage, where you start refining and adjusting.
3. The Autonomous Stage, where the motion becomes second nature.

That backhand breakthrough was my shift into autonomy, when the thinking quiets down and the body takes over. Months of hidden progress had finally crossed a threshold, and my brain basically said, “We got this.”

The Dopamine Kick: Why Growth Feels Addictive

After that clinic, I couldn’t stop thinking about playing again. I wanted to hit more serves, more drills, more everything. That “I can’t wait to do it again” rush isn’t just motivation. It’s biology.

When you nail something challenging, your brain releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter that signals, “Yes, that worked. Do more of that.” It fires from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the nucleus accumbens, part of the brain’s reward pathway. It’s not the pleasure chemical itself, but rather the drive chemical. Dopamine doesn’t say, “That felt good.” It says, “That’s worth chasing again.”

And that’s exactly what I felt: hungry, motivated, energized. Like something inside me flipped on. That internal high creates a feedback loop. Success leads to reward. Reward drives repetition. Repetition builds mastery. The same neural mechanism that keeps people hooked on their favorite habits can be harnessed to fuel growth.

So maybe I’m chasing a little tennis high, but it’s the healthy kind.

What the Court Taught Me About Growth

This whole experience reminded me that growth rarely announces itself. It happens in small, almost invisible increments—the days you show up when you don’t feel like it, the hours you put in when nobody’s watching, the repetition that feels redundant until it doesn’t.

It’s easy to quit when you hit a plateau, but staying through that quiet stretch is what builds resilience, in sports, business, and in life. That’s where real character gets built.

Standing on that baseline I learned: once you taste progress, your brain and your spirit want more. That hunger is what keeps us showing up and it’s the same fire that turns good into great.

So to my fellow work in progressers: your breakthrough is probably closer than you think. Keep showing up. Keep taking the swing. You might not see the growth every day, but trust me, your brain is working on it.

And when it finally clicks, do your own victory dance. You earned that.