The following post is an excerpt from the Second Edition of The Tennis Parent’s Bible NOW available through most online retailers!
COMPETITIVE DRAMAS: INTERNAL STRUGGLES
Champions Experience Failure
Discuss how most tennis champions have probably lost way more matches than your child has even played. Ambitious people experience many failures. One of my past students is Sam Querrey (ATP top player). He’s been playing full time on the ATP tour for ten years and has won 7 ATP singles titles and a handful of double events. That means, most of the time, Sam goes home losing week in and week out. Would you say he’s a loser? Not a chance- Sam is a top touring professional!
Never Outgrow Fun
You often see top professionals battle and still smile in the course of a match. Negative thoughts, stress, and anger clutter an athlete’s thought process and tighten muscle groups, both of which decrease the player’s ability to perform. Pessimism affects both an athlete’s physiology and psychology. Optimism is a coping skill used to combat the negatives that are found in one-on-one competition. Smile, laugh, and enjoy the competition.
Tennis Is a Gift Not a Right
Discuss how there are millions of natural-born athletes that are the same age as your child that will never get the opportunity to compete at a high level. Tennis isn’t fair, right?
But has your child thought about how lucky they are to be able to play tennis and have a family that wants to support their passion?
Good Judgment Comes from Experience
So where does experience come from? The ironic answer is bad judgment. Talk to your child about how it is far less painful to learn from other peoples’ failures. After a loss, stay at the tournament site and chart a top seed. Analyze their successes and model them and their pitfalls and learn how to avoid them.
Rehearse Focusing on the Solutions Not the Problems
Ask the athlete to allow you to videotape a few matches. As the athlete and coach watch the matches, ask them to spot unforced errors and then categorize them into their cause of error chart. Ask them to recognize negative thoughts, loss of concentration, or an emotional breakdown on the court. Now, remind the coach not to ask the athlete to think about NOT repeating the problem. That only draws deeper attention to the problem. Instead, discuss the development of the solution to the problem. Then simply focus on the rehearsal of the actual match solution.
A Genius Simplifies the Complex
In the higher levels, most lessons should be focused on “trimming the fat” off of strokes and/or off of the player’s thought control. Going from really good to great is not always about adding more. There are often hidden contaminants that bog down gifted athletes.
Maturing the mental and emotional components is a life skill. Athletes need to manage anger and stress. The old Buddha saying is “Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”
