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.
