In Bob’s mind, life has a funny way of showing you where the current is already flowing. You can fight it, sure—spend your days trying to paddle upstream with a kid who barely tolerates algebra but lights up the moment their hand wraps around a racquet. Or you can do what any seasoned woodsman would do when a river splits: follow the side that actually moves. A decent tennis player who could be great isn’t telling you they need more workbooks; they’re telling you where the magic is already trying to grow.

Bob has seen enough busted compasses and crooked trail markers to know this one truth: potential is like kindling. If you dump water on it—say, an extra two hours of forced math tutoring—it’ll smolder and sputter. But if you give that spark of talent the dry wood it deserves—like a coach who can shape the swing, sharpen the instinct, and fuel the fire—you might just watch the forest light up. Kids don’t hide their gifts. They display them loudly, joyfully, sometimes annoyingly. It’s the adults who forget to listen.

That’s not to say math doesn’t matter. Bob respects a good ledger, especially when it tells him where the bourbon budget wandered off to. But he also knows there’s a world of difference between “good enough for everyday life” and “this could turn into something extraordinary.” If your kid is average at math, they’ll be fine. The world is built for average math. Calculators exist. Taxes can be outsourced. But raw, authentic talent? The kind that shows up early, uninvited, and refuses to leave? That’s rarer than a well-behaved raccoon.

A great coach doesn’t just fix technique; they unlock parts of a kid that school can’t measure. Confidence. Grit. The thrill of chasing something that feels like theirs. Bob’s seen kids who couldn’t remember a single multiplication fact but could read a tennis court like a seasoned tracker reads footprints in fresh snow. You don’t sand down a gift like that. You sharpen it. You let it lead. You give it the tools to become what it’s itching to become.

So if you’re standing there wondering whether to hire the math tutor or the tennis coach, Bob would tell you this: invest in the place where the spark already lives. Life gives every kid one or two windows where greatness is possible, and those windows don’t stay open forever. Strengthen the thing they love, the thing they’re good at, the thing that could carry them far beyond what any worksheet ever will. Math can stay average. Dreams don’t have to.