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Tennis Rudimentary Anticipation

Posted on June 8, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

The Psychology of Tennis Parenting
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Rudimentary Anticipation

Anticipatory speed is one of the mental components that we need to teach much earlier. Anticipation is linked to cause and effect. It is based on the understanding that each shot hit in a match has finite responses from the opponent across the net. Experience gives athletes feedback, and the athletes who pay attention mentally log those responses. The mentally tough players log their winning and losing trends into their memory, which they use to anticipate where the ball will likely be in the future.

The more matches your athlete plays, the more they can apply subconscious programming. Because there are only milliseconds between shots in tennis, our athletes need recognition by intuition. There isn’t sufficient time to analyze the situation and set the proper shot selections and motor programs into play. Athletes build memory logs of data and feedback. Once the experience of going through similar events takes place, anticipation is applied.

Solution: Parents and coaches would be wise to start to develop their young athlete’s anticipatory skills at an early age with this rudimentary three-step process. (Examples are assuming both athletes are right-handed)

  • Returning Serves: Be mindful of the opponent’s ball toss. When they toss out in front to the right, the serve is most likely to go to your athlete’s right, which is their forehand. If the opponent tosses back over their head, to their left, it’s most likely going to your athlete’s backhand.
  • Rallies: Pay close attention to the opponent’s strike zone. A waste-level ball is typically hit with an offensive drive. A low, sock-level strike zone is often a slice reply. A head-level strike zone stroke usually falls short.
  • Volleys: Be aware that a high, shoulder-level volley is typically hit with pace and cross-court. An opponent’s low volley is usually a drop volley.
  • Identify Offensive, Neutral and Defensive Situations: Opponents who commit fewer unforced errors play high-percentage tennis. They do this by understanding zonal tennis and attempting to hit the shot the moment demands.

Once these foundational anticipatory clues are established, ask your athlete to log match clues between point routines and changeover rituals.

Run Toward the Fire

Posted on May 29, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

The Psychology of Tennis Parenting
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Run Toward the Fire

Tennis players that rise to the occasion in those pressure-packed finals have courage and confidence in themselves and their training. These athletes tackle problems head-on and cope with the hardships of the sport in an unstressed fashion. Developing mental and emotional strength is essential for long-term tennis goals. Share with your athlete this analogy.

Ask them to think of themselves as a firefighter. Firefighters walk into the fire versus running away from it. Regarding your athlete’s fears, I recommend asking them to do the same. It’s human nature to avoid scary situations, so you’ll have to show your athlete how to face fears. If your child avoids difficult moments like closing out a set versus a better player, they’ll crumble in those moments unless they are trained to regulate their emotional state. Does this require exposure to the stressor or avoidance?

Solution: Athletes who thrive under pressure replace their mechanical thoughts like how they are hitting their forehand, backhand, serve and volley with focusing on emotional essentials such as managing momentum, maintaining intensity, focusing on the here and now, and retaining their positive mindset.

While solid strokes get the athlete into the events, the additional software skills enable them to hold up another trophy.

Self-Sabotage

Posted on May 24, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

The Psychology of Tennis Parenting
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Frank Giampaolo

“Run Towards Winning Versus Running Away from Losing.”

Self-Sabotage

Self-sabotage is an “inside job.” If your athlete is their own worst enemy in competition, the issue likely lies in the relationship between your athlete’s conscious and subconscious mind. The conscious mind is the analytical, neurotic part of each athlete’s personality. It wants to help so badly that it causes problems. The issues occur because the conscious mind is constantly editing and evaluating every aspect of the performance. It is rarely possible to get into the zone and stay in that flow state if the athlete is editing too much during competition. You see, great competitors apply effortless effort. Meaning they’re putting out effort without the worry.

The subconscious mind is easygoing. It trusts the fact that it has performed these routines thousands of times. It’s the automatic pilot relaxed performer. Gifted athletes choke and panic at the most inopportune times because their conscious mind is overthinking and worrying about the possibility of future failure. This catastrophic way of thinking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Stressing out about the possibility of future failure causes dopamine and adrenaline to flood the body systems as fear and muscle tension take center stage. Too many of these released hormones hijack an athlete’s brain.

Solution: Remind your athlete that it’s a privilege to be able to play tennis. Worrying about the outcome brings unwanted visitors through the conscious judgmental mind. Ask your athlete to observe their performance and make adjustments without judging. Before competition, preset solutions to possible future problems. Accepting an excellent performance versus a perfect performance is a great start to distressing an athlete. Great performances are born in inner silence.

The Fault Finder

Posted on May 20, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

The Fault Finder

Sadly, most parents think they are helping after losses as they discuss the athlete’s laundry list of faults. Feeding the monster, or as we call it, the Inner Critic, is the last thing you want to do.

Your job as the parent is to foster the belief in their ability over being the fault finder. As you intuitively know, an external and internal battle rages in competition. Your youngster is not just battling the opponent and trying desperately to please you but also fighting a conflict within their head. If you are counting folks, that’s three wars raging simultaneously inside their underdeveloped brain.

Defeating the inner critic is the conflict inside the conflict. I hear a common statement from parents every weekend: “The opponent didn’t beat them … my kid beat themselves!” This statement implies their inner critic got the best of them once again.

How do we, parents and coaches, convince athletes that they will perform better if they tone down the attack from their own judgmental minds?

Solution: On match days, please remember it’s your job as the parent to avoid adding outcome-oriented, contaminating thoughts. (Your kid already knows you want them to win). Stick to performance-based dialogue with a relaxed demeanor and a chill tone of voice. Solutions to defeating their inner critic require calming, confidence-building dialogue that will help rid their mind of the typical outcome of “What If” worries.

This inner stability happens before your athlete is ready for the higher levels of the sport. Defeating the athlete’s inner critic requires the fault finder to stay silent and the loving parent to appear.

Red Flags

Posted on May 15, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential, The Psychology of Tennis Parenting

The Psychology of Tennis Parenting
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Red Flags

A red flag is a signal that goes off when something’s not quite right. A commonality in sports is when the students’ words often don’t match their actions. Their words say, “I want to be a professional athlete,” and their actions say, “I don’t want to actually work for it.”

If your athlete brings internal drama and is unpleasant and frightening to be around on match days, the family is in for a world of uncommon hurt.

Solution: Here are a dozen red flags we do not see in the top competitors. Be honest as you read the list of common stumbling blocks. Do any sound too familiar?

  1. Inconsistency in effort
  2. Entitlement issues
  3. Inappropriate anger issues
  4. Lazy choices/poor decisions
  5. Avoids solo training
  6. Negative attitude
  7. Faulty nutrition habits
  8. Poor sleep habits
  9. Substandard time management
  10. Lack of gratitude
  11. Second-rate preparation
  12. Chooses mediocrity


An age-old saying provides insight: “There are contenders and pretenders.” Which do you have?

If you have a pretender, it may be in everyone’s best interest to put an end to the weekend drama’s and enjoy a normal life with a normal child.

Performance Anxiety

Posted on May 10, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential, The Psychology of Tennis Parenting

The Psychology of Tennis Parenting
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Performance Anxiety

Performance anxiety affects every competitive athlete at one time or another. Without proper understanding, it crushes enjoyment, causes devastating losses, and destroys self-confidence. Your athlete’s anxiety symptoms may include a racing heart rate, rapid but shallow breathing, dry mouth, trembling hands, nausea, and blurred vision.

Reduce your athlete’s anxiety by helping them practice in the manner they’re expected to perform. Prepare them properly for long tournament days of pressure by reminding them to focus on what could go right.  As your athlete confronts their fears and learns ways to handle the below common stressors, they’ll develop resistance. Resiliency comes from facing fears.  As I’ve mentioned, they need exposure, not avoidance.

Solution: Discuss how managing common performance anxieties pays off. These common performance anxieties include:

  • Fear
  • Nervousness
  • Choking
  • Panicking
  • Tanking
  • Overcoming Lapses and Concentration
  • Self-Doubt
  • Self-Condemnation.


Start by asking your athlete to describe their description of these topics. Then ask them to Google any topic that relates to them. Next, ask them to YouTube those topics to better understand how common they are in sports and life. Lastly, ask them to write a brief paragraph describing the issue and their very own plan to conquer the anxiety.

Teaching Emotional Health

Posted on May 5, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

The Psychology of Tennis Parenting
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Teaching Emotional Health

Coaches typically teach physical health, but who is teaching emotional health? It’s a given that a physically healthy athlete is needed to pursue high-performance sports. Athleticism and a solid tool belt of strokes are the hardware required to play the game. But the software’s needed actually to win the game.

Mental health is the ability to think, understand self-awareness, opponent awareness, and generally make good decisions in competitive play. The key to the mental game is having the level-headedness to hit the shot the moment demands.

Emotional health is the ability to manage emotions under stress. This involves mastering performance anxieties common to the game.

The most common cause of our athlete’s painful losses is due to emotional self-destruction. It is often easier to blame a loss on poor mechanics and sloppy footwork, but performance anxiety is the most painful cause of a loss to accept.

To the uneducated tennis parent, this means there’s something broken deep inside our child, and it’s likely our fault. I’m here to tell you that they are not broken; they are normal. It just takes digging deeper to find solutions to emotional problems. Here’s a start.

Solutions:

  • Emotional healthy athletes have parents who identify the true causes of their losses. They observe competition and listen to their children. In quiet moments, such as before bed, the real cause of a loss is found in the athlete’s words, facial expressions, and body language.
  • Tennis coaches typically teach the hardware and don’t attend tennis matches. So, it’s the parent’s job to understand the common performance anxieties found in competition. These include fear, nervousness, choking, panicking, loss of focus, and inability to close out leads.
  • Parents should teach athletes that their thoughts and feelings aren’t always reality. Emotional speculations shouldn’t control the athlete; the athlete should control them.
  • Parents want their athletes to perform the way they’d love to perform. We get annoyed when our children don’t mirror our self-image. After all, they should be perfect because they came from our gene pool.


The core of most emotional issues stems from the athlete thinking that their outcome goals matter more than their performance goals. As any good coach will tell you, the ability to control one’s performance under pressure secures the outcome goals we all seek.

Emotional Toughness

Posted on May 2, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential, The Psychology of Tennis Parenting

The Psychology of Tennis Parenting
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Where Attention Goes … Energy Flow

The mind creates deeply engrained pathways that instantaneously cultivate solutions or complications to similar situations. This law of attraction either hyper-focuses your athletes at crunch time or completely derails them when it matters most.

So, what mental habits are your athletes forming? Some athletes with a short fuse have trained themselves to default instantly to frustration first. Once behaviors become automatic routines, athletes perform those actions repeatedly without being mentally aware of the conduct. The acronym is ANTS (Automatic Negative Thoughts.)

So, how do we help our athletes recognize the hidden factors that influence their behavior?

Solution: If their negative energy is winning the power struggle, here are seven ways for them to lessen pessimism.

Decreasing ANTS by:

  1. Not Assuming the Worst Will Happen
  2. Avoiding the Words: Never and Always
  3. Recognizing Distorted Thoughts and Feelings
  4. Take a Bathroom Break to Reenergize
  5. Let Go of Past Mistakes
  6. Refocus on Exposing Your Strengths
  7. Flip Your Attitude to Gratitude

Kill the ants (Automatic Negative Thoughts) in their Brain.

Athletes often win or lose in their minds before they win or lose in reality. Where attention goes … energy flow is a tremendous mantra for any athlete struggling against themselves in the heat of battle.

Overthinking Mechanics

Posted on April 27, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

Overthinking Mechanics

We, tennis teachers, are notorious for giving tons of technical advice. We tend to provide too much information to our clients than not enough. I’m guilty of this myself. Parents listen and digest these mechanical tips and “assist” by obsessively reminding their athletes on match days.

Overemphasizing perfect mechanics creates a constant flow of corrections in your athlete’s mind. If the parent’s or coach’s dialog is a continual stream of problems to be fixed, the athlete is most likely to be thinking about all that is broken in a match, and this is a catastrophic mindset. It’s our primary job as parents to build confidence. If your athlete is on high alert for what is broken, they will not be able to find the mindset needed to compete effortlessly in their peak performance zone.

Solution: Teach your athlete that one of the biggest obstacles in matches is overthinking their mechanics. While quickly adjusting technique is fine, the constant over-analyzing stops their positive flow of energy.

A better mindset in matches requires seeking excellence versus perfection.

Nobody’s perfect. Rafa and Serena aren’t perfect so, why should your child be perfect? All of your player’s strokes are not going to be perfect all of the time. Junior athletes are going to make good and bad decisions, to boot! Educate your athlete that it’s not the errors but how they react to them that matters most. After all, your athlete’s thoughts and judgments, good or bad, are self-fulfilling.

Concentration and Focus

Posted on April 18, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

Regulating Focus

There will be stages in your athlete’s future matches when they face dramatic obstacles, from creative line callers to those who flip the score to opponents well-trained to get under their skin. Your athlete needs to preset their protocols in the form of routines to combat future gamesmanship. Regulating their attention around their performances will help them overcome the drama that comes with some matches.

Most importantly, mentally tough athletes need concentrated focus in-between points to desensitize the drama and navigate the match. This emotional strength, of course, is the non-hitting portion of their match performance. In between points, your athlete needs to pay close attention to three areas of their Between-Point Rituals (BPR). They include self-awareness, opponent awareness, and score management. Self-awareness and opponent awareness are based on paying attention to the patterns and tactics of the athlete and their opponents. Score management allows the athlete to modify their aggressiveness based on the score.

Solution: Ask your athlete to take their between-point rituals very seriously. Mentally tough competitors rely on the non-hitting time on-court. Most thinking, perception, memory, learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making happen in-between points. On rare occasions, athletes need to call audibles mid-point.

Most intermediate athletes have focused exclusively on their hardware for years with their technical coaches. If they’ve got great form but aren’t getting the results they’re capable of, it may be time to reroute some attention to their software development.