The Psychology of Tennis Parenting
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The Secret of Pattern Recognition
Bill thinks he’s pretty good. He has the club pro feed him balls weekly, polishing up his strokes. He grooves with the other 3.5-level guys in the Thursday night men’s clinic and hits the gym a few times a week. Bill is now at a charity tennis event. He stands to receive serve against a world-class ATP Professional. Even though he’s been playing for decades, to him, returning a 130mph serve seems impossible. Decision-making abilities at that speed appear to be superhuman.
At the professional level, the receiver has milliseconds to decide how they will return a 130 mph serve. The truth is that experienced professional athletes have an extensive database stored in their subconscious minds of past opponents’ specific types of deliveries. They’ve played thousands of points, and their brain picks up patterns of successful and unsuccessful choices.
Solution: What makes tennis professionals exceptional is that they’ve seen thousands of 130 mph serves, thousands of points, and hundreds upon hundreds of matches. After so much experience in live-ball point play, they can chunk patterns. Chunking is the term for seeing individual patterns, which are the opponent’s most likely stroke options and pattern probabilities.
The secret expertise that only comes from live-ball point play is recognition. Recognition leads to chunking data into the subconscious and later applied through intuition. It is the same in almost every field; past experiences lead to quicker recognition of high-percentage replies and options. So, if you’re looking to help your athlete improve their mental game, replace grooving strokes with live-ball decision-making exercises and match play.
