This thesis examined the efficacy of contemporary tennis practice for maximizing skill
learning and transfer to competition performance. Theory suggests that experimental and
practice tasks should be designed to promote emergent behaviours that are functional and
adaptable to changing situations that occur during competition. Current evaluations of
practice design in multiple sports, however, suggest that coaches do the opposite, prioritising
tasks that promote mechanical consistency over adaptability. Practice in many sports may
therefore be sub-optimal. To address this concern, Representative Learning Design (RLD)
has been proposed as a framework for assessing the extent to which a task is representative of
a situation of interest (e.g., an athletes competition environment). The terminology within the
RLD framework, however, requires simplification for application by coaches in applied
settings. Moreover, despite suggestions of its importance, no empirical work has assessed the
longitudinal benefits of practicing in tasks more representative of competition contexts. This
thesis combined the experiential and theoretical knowledge of experts in skill acquisition and
tennis with concepts from RLD to design the Representative Practice Assessment Tool
(RPAT). Application of the RPAT confirmed that tennis coaches prioritised tasks low in
representativeness. This is a concern given it was also found that athlete behaviours observed
in matchplay are best simulated in tasks that more closely represent matchplay contexts. Most
importantly, this thesis provides empirical evidence which suggests that increasing the
representativeness of a task does not simply imply enhanced skill learning, rather changes to
task representativeness promotes different learning outcomes/adaptations that remain specific
to how practice was conducted. To summarise, this thesis extended current knowledge of
designing practice tasks for enhanced skill learning and transfer. Practitioners and coaches
are recommended to individualise the representativeness of tasks to the specific needs of their athlete in a manner which facilities the emergence of functional behaviours that are
transferable to competition.