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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

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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.

Did You Win?

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

The Psychology of Tennis Parenting
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Did You Win?

It is incredible how much self-inflicted contamination is created daily by parents and junior tennis players. Here is a prime example: what is the worst question parents can ask after practice sets or a match? The answer was, “Did you win?” Now guess what the most common question parents ask after practice sets or a match is? You guessed it, “Did you win?”

Parents need to replace an outcome obsession with improvement questions like: “Did you perform well today?” Remind your athlete that their real competition is in their mirror, and the only person they have to beat is the person they were last week. Asking your athlete, “Did you win?” pulls them away from focusing on their daily improvement goals and towards outcome goals because of the need for your love and approval. Athletes stressed about proving their worth to their parents are not free to focus on improving their untrustworthy skills. Athletes in this “winning is everything.” mindset only applies the comfortable skills they already own, not to disappoint their parents. This behavior stunts the growth parents seek.

Solution: Exchange the “Did you win?” question with performance-based inquiries. Another typical tennis parent blunder is booking their athletes into practice sets with higher-ranked players and then being crazy upset when their child does not win. Practice sets are learning tools to strengthen your athlete’s match play skills and identify those skills that are not ready for prime time.

If the parent is constantly in need of wins and a shelf full of plastic trophies, schedule sets with lower-ranked individuals and only register your child into low-level event.

The Pain of Changing

Posted on April 12, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

The Psychology of Tennis Parenting

The Pain of Changing

Improving stems from changing; to some junior athletes, change is more painful than losing. That’s correct. The pain of making needed changes is more agonizing than losing tennis matches. Use the dieting industry as an example. We know that exercise and eating healthy are the answer, but that agony is more painful than not fitting into our skinny jeans. So, we don’t change.

For some, change only happens when the athlete is tired of not getting the results, they are capable of reaching. When that pain is greater than the pain of hard work, they’ll choose the hard work because it’s less painful. If improving is of the utmost importance, I suggest a quarterly reboot. Here’s how:

Solution: To maximize potential, routinely take your athlete out of the tournament cycle for a couple of weeks every quarter. This scheduled time off will kick start the freedom change demands for improvement. After all, if they don’t continually improve, their results will disappear.

Opponents around the globe are training with sports science efficiency. If your athlete wants better results, they must become better athletes. This desire takes a parent who can organize the athlete’s enhancement schedule and an athlete mature enough to focus on making the changes required. You first have to develop a better competitive athlete to achieve those better results.