Tag Archives: elite coach Frank Giampaolo

Tennis Top Ten Secret Skills Number 4

Posted on February 27, 2024 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential, The Psychology of Tennis Parenting, The Second Edition of The Tennis Parent's Bible

The following post is an excerpt from Frank’s upcoming Playbook Series.

Being Improvement Minded

“The trouble with not having clear improvement goals is that you can hit balls all day… every day and never achieve results.” Frank Giampaolo

It’s not enough to simply hit balls endlessly without deliberate direction. Champions understand that actual progress requires a clear focus on improvement—a hidden skill that propels them at a faster rate toward their outcome goals.

Successful athletes have a secret: they maintain a deliberate and customized developmental plan. They don’t just practice for the sake of hitting; they know precisely what they’re working on, why they’re doing it, and how it will help them achieve their goals.

To adopt this hidden skill, you’ll set clear, achievable weekly goals. These goals should be based on your tournament performances, where you objectively assess your strengths and weaknesses. After each event, list three target improvements you’ll focus on. Share these topics with your team of coaches.

The process doesn’t stop at setting goals. After planning these improvements, taking actionable steps to reach them is essential. Develop a blueprint for your improvement plan, detailing your strategies. Then, rigorously execute your plan, staying on target until you are satisfied with your progress.

This secret skill transforms practice into a more purposeful endeavor. It ensures that every moment you spend on the court is a step toward becoming a better player. It shifts your focus from quantity to quality, from mindless repetition to intentional progress.

With a clear focus on improvement, you can avoid hitting a plateau where your efforts yield diminishing returns. You may find yourself stuck in a cycle of frustration, endlessly repeating the same mental mistakes without understanding how to correct them.

Consider the journey of a tennis player as a series of milestones. Each improvement goal you set is a step that brings you closer to your ultimate destination. This approach separates those who merely hit balls from those who systematically build their skills.

You can accelerate your journey toward success by understanding the importance of setting clear goals and continuously working to improve. Improvement is not a destination but a perpetual process, and it’s a skill that anyone can cultivate with the right mindset and dedication.

Tennis: Beyond the Comfort Zone

Posted on November 28, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

To Order THE SOFT SCIENCE CLICK HERE

Beyond the Comfort Zone

Elena was a naturally gifted athlete. She played years of sports, honing her athleticism. Elena dominated local girls’ 12’s tournaments. Yet, the allure of her comfort zone was too great. As we trained, change wasn’t a welcome topic. We often talked about her talent being confined within the invisible walls she built inside. I tried like crazy to motivate her to venture beyond her familiar boundaries. Elena wouldn’t budge. Her fixed mindset led her down over and over. Now a D-3 college player, her greatest memories are in the girls’ 12’s when she was the Southern California “It girl.” She was the one everyone predicted could go pro. Elena’s mindset serves as a reminder that genuine contenders need much more than strokes. They need the inner strength to face and then overcome the unfamiliar.

1. Stepping Beyond Boundaries

Within the competitive game, a stark truth emerges: True contenders aren’t content with staying within the confines of their comfort zone. They understand that the comfort zone while providing solace, is a place where growth remains elusive. Champions aren’t developed in comfort. They’re eager to test their limits and push themselves to evolve.

2. The Silent Opponent

Complacency is the silent killer. Recognize that to excel, you need to expand your horizons continually. Beyond the safety of routine lies the lessons where true growth occurs. The decision to venture beyond comfort is a deliberate choice that requires courage, an open mind, and the willingness to embrace the unknown.

3. Where Growth Occurs

The most impactful lessons are learned outside the familiar. Contender like Elana, who remained stagnant within their comfort zone, limited their potential. Athletes like you bravely explore uncharted territories and uncover hidden dimensions of strength. The game becomes a stage for competition and a playground for self-discovery and transformation.

Let Elena’s story inspire you to step outside your comfort zone, view challenges not as obstacles but as opportunities for transformation and recognize that only exploring the unfamiliar will reveal your true capabilities.

TENNIS DISRUPTING RHYTHMS

Posted on November 15, 2023 by in The Soft Science of Tennis

To Order THE SOFT SCIENCE CLICK HERE

Disrupting Rhythms

Riley: “Well, if I’m winning, I don’t worry about it. If I’m losing, I definitely add the mental strategy of controlling the speed of the match. If they’re successful in playing fast, I slow it down to a snail’s pace. I try to dictate the tempo out there.”

Understanding your opponent’s preferred speed of play and being able to disrupt their rhythm can provide a distinct advantage. Pay attention and dictate the tempo to compete on your terms.

7.1 Managing Your Speed

First, stick to your preferred playing tempo to control the match speed. This strategy is part of your tennis identity. Learn techniques such as pacing yourself, resetting, and managing your recovery time between points to optimize performance.

7.2 Styles of Opponents

Disruptors prefer playing on the baseline. They take balls early and reduce your reaction time. Grinders play way behind the court in a solid defensive mode slowing down ball speed. Pay attention to the length of their between-point tempo during the different phases of the match.

7.3 Exploiting Fast-Paced Players

Against disrupters, change your shots’ spins, speeds, and trajectory to disrupt their rhythm. Explore strategies to confuse their quick play.

7.4 Neutralizing Slow-Paced Players

Against grinders, apply aggressive court positions, take balls on the rise, and employ swing volleys to reduce their recovery and reaction time. Develop strategies to counter their deliberate slow style of play.

7.5 Mental Resilience and Speed of Play

Explore techniques to stay mentally resilient regardless of the tempo that your opponent is setting. Obviously, they’re trying their best to pull you out of your peak performance level- part of the chess match of competitive tennis. Expect worthy opponents to try to dictate play.

By assessing your preferred speed of play and adapting to your opponent’s speed, you can dictate the tempo. It’s your job to disrupt their decision-making process. Whether facing a disruptor or a grinder, employing strategies to diffuse their rhythm gives you a distinct advantage in the struggle.

Opponent Profiling- OBSERVING THEIR TENDENCIES

Posted on October 24, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential, The Second Edition of The Tennis Parent's Bible

The Tennis Parent’s Bible
CLICK HERE to Order

COMING SOON – THE TENNIS ENCYCLOPEDIA!

Observing Their Tendencies

Kim: “My favorite play is returning a second serve. I’ve got a big forehand, so everyone tries to serve to my backhand. If it’s a positive game point, I watch them begin their service toss. Then I slide three steps to my left and crush my forehand. It’s so fun!”

One of the keys to effective opponent profiling is paying attention to your adversary’s tendencies-their game’s recurring behaviors. Let’s look at the importance of recognizing their tendencies and how you can leverage the knowledge to gain a competitive edge.

2.1 Identifying Recurring Behaviors

Top opponents know their tennis identity. They have preset plans that provide repeatable success. Identifying reoccurring tendencies is essential in competitive tennis.

2.2 Anticipating with Situational Awareness

Analyze your opponent’s preferred offense, neutral and defensive choices. Recognizing situational tendencies lets you predict where the ball is going.

2.3 Assessing Movement Patterns

Observe your opponent’s efficiency in their court coverage. Use this information to exploit their movement limitations and create opportunities for yourself.

2.4 Shot Tolerance

Your opponent’s shot tolerance is their preferred length of point. Analyzing their risk-taking tendencies provides insight into their physical, mental, and emotional stability during matches. By understanding their shot tolerance, you can make opponents play points on your terms.

2.5 Exploiting Predictability

Recognizing and exploiting your opponent’s predictable tendencies hold great benefits. You can disrupt their comfort by taking advantage of their reliance on specific shots or strategies.

Uncovering the opponent’s predictability and adjusting your game plan is critical to success. As you refine your observational skills and apply these strategies, you will become adept at deciphering your opponent’s tendencies and win more tight matches.

Embracing Your Tennis Identity

Posted on September 11, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

The Tennis Parent’s Bible
CLICK HERE to Order

Embracing Your Tennis Identity

Each individual brings a unique set of physical attributes, personality traits, and playing preferences to the court. As you progress in your journey, embrace your superpowers and tailor your performance style to align with your strengths and personality.

“Be smart enough to find yourself and brave enough to be yourself.”

3.1 Building Your Tennis Identity

Staying true to yourself emphasizes the importance of authenticity in developing a tennis identity. Training to play the systems that align with your personality profile maximizes potential. Embracing your personality on-court enhances enjoyment and fulfillment.

3.2 Exploring Different Styles of Play in Tennis

Your tennis identity begins with choosing the right style of play that fits your personality and body type. High-performance athletes develop their A-plan as well as a contingency plan. You’ll apply both nature and nurture to maximize your potential. So, who are you?

  1. Hard-hitting baseliners:

The characteristics of this style focus on leveraging baseline play to control rallies and set up strategic points. Ground stroke power is their weapon of choice. 

  • All-Court Players:

These individuals apply their versatility, adapting to various situations. These athletic individuals blend baseline play and net-rushing tactics to keep opponents guessing.

  • Retrievers:

These counterpunchers thrive on getting every ball back with their patience and incredible court speed. They’re happy to force errors and let their opponents self-destruct.

  • Net Rushers:

These powerful athletes are known for their aggressive net approach. They prefer short points as they pressure opponents and finish points at the net.

A typical battle cry from parents and coaches is, “Play Your Game!” Knowing your true tennis identity is your game. Practicing in the manner you’re expected to perform is “situational training.” Replace the typical grooving strokes with situational rehearsals that align with your game.

3.3 Developing Your Signature Shots and Strategies

Signature Shots and patterns are your go-to preferred plays. Exposing your strengths is a proactive approach. Everyone has signature shots; applying them on big points is a great strategic intention. Plan on spending a lot of time developing and strengthening your weapons.

3.4 Leveraging Innate Qualities

Identifying your strengths begins with reflecting on the four pillars of the game (strokes, athleticism, mental and emotional). Begin by deciding to capitalize on your strengths in the four pillars of the game. Addressing weaknesses starts with an honest assessment of the game’s four pillars. Work with your coaches to design targeted training programs to overcome those weaknesses.

3.5 The Impact of Mental and Emotional Alignment

Embracing the development of your software components is a key aspect of peak performance. Understanding strengths and weaknesses in your mental(thinking) and emotional (feeling) components is essential. Hire an experienced mental coach to help align your playing style with your personality leads to a more harmonious experience.

Chapter 3 has emphasized the significance of embracing individuality and tailoring a unique tennis style that aligns with your strengths, preferences, and personality traits. As you build your tennis identity, stay true to yourself. Nurture a style that brings joy and fulfillment to your game.

By combining individuality with strategic adaptability, you’ll create a distinctive playing style that sets you on the path to success in the world of high-performance tennis.

Tennis- Successful Parental Habits

Posted on July 30, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

The Psychology of Tennis Parenting
CLICK HERE to Order

Successful Parental Habits

Tennis parents rarely get the spotlight, but without their influence and leadership, most athletes wouldn’t even make their local high school squad. I chatted with the parents of my top nationally ranked juniors to find out what they had in common. These parents teach their children ownership of their tennis careers. Below are six commonalities found in the parents of top competitors.

Solutions:

  1. After each tennis lesson, these parents ask their athletes to teach them the concepts they’ve just learned. Learning by teaching solidifies their knowledge, which improves confidence. Communication skills enhance memorization.
  2. For each private lesson their athlete takes, they schedule a hitting session or a practice match utilizing those improvements. Solidifying stroke adjustments takes repetition. Memorizing new material in the form of plays and patterns takes time.
  3. Successful tennis parents have their athletes play sets with paid college hitters. The parent hires the hitter and instructs them to play the style their child has trouble with in competition.
  4. These parents ask them to rehearse their secondary tools, and contingency game plans in group training sessions. They know if their player doesn’t rehearse their plan B, it likely won’t hold up under pressure.
  5. If their child despises playing a retriever, they ask their coaches to stop simply grooving to each other in practice and develop the keep-away patterns used to pull retrievers out of their game.
  6. Successful tennis parents replace some of the hours of drilling with completing practice sets. Practicing in the manner, they’re expected to perform requires a different set of skills than most academy training. Software management stems from being judged, and that involves competition. Being a great competitor is different from being a great stationary ball striker.

Tennis Pattern Blocks

Posted on July 13, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

The Psychology of Tennis Parenting
CLICK HERE to Order

Frank Giampaolo

Pattern Blocks

Let’s go back in time. I was fresh out of School and wanted a career in coaching.

I drove to California as many do to seek the “Promised Land.” My goal was to track down Vic Braden, whom I watched on PBS television. The Vic Braden Tennis College was more of a tennis Mecca, a tennis Olympic village, than a typical tennis club. Inside the Coto De Caza gates were the state-of-the-art Research center, tennis classrooms, dedicated teaching courts, and the 18-lanes ball machines. I truly felt like I had found my tribe.

There were hundreds of tennis research projects, but I’ll review the Length of the Point Project for this piece. Juniors to adult recreation players to college and professional athletes took part in the study. Back in the 1980s, the average length of a singles point was 3.8 hits. Doubles was 2.9 hits.

In the 1990s, Computennis took it to the next level with very similar results. Today IBM Watson provides the statistics. Today’s stats also say that most points don’t last longer than four hits. So, what does that mean to you as a parent of an athlete desperately seeking an edge? If approximately 70% of all points end by the fourth hit, your athlete must drill in short, pattern play training blocks versus the typical endless grooving of groundstrokes. Now, I’m not saying consistency isn’t important. It is. But the question I’m posing is, “Consistency in what context?” Here are the pattern blocks I’ve been coaching since the 1980s.

Solution: Trade in grooving groundstrokes to pattern block repetition. You see, tennis points are won by inserting the correct protocols the millisecond demands.

I recommend modeling a private lesson in this format:

  • Take a two-hour lesson to replicate the length of a difficult match.
  • Arrive ten minutes early and do a quality dynamic stretching warm-up, mental rehearsals of top patterns, and upper body band work.
  • Thirty minutes -Rehearse the serve+2 quick stroke patterns. Typically- hunting forehands.
  • Thirty minutes – Rehearse the return of serve +1 patterns off both first and second serves. Typically- hunting forehands.
  • Twenty minutes – Rehearse, hitting deep groundstrokes receiving, and delivering on the run.
  • Twenty minutes– Rehearse short ball options (Approach, crush it, swing volley, drop shots and transition volleys).
  • Twenty minutes – While the athlete is doing their static stretching routines, do a lesson review. Ask the coach if it’s okay to record the review on your athlete’s cell phone dictation app so they can commit the lesson to memory.

This private lesson format trains situational awareness and protocols, not just the strokes. For instance, offensive, neutral/building shot, and defensive situations.

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
CLICK HERE to Order

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.

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.