Tag Archives: parent tennis coach

Life Skills Through Tennis

Posted on March 30, 2023 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

The truth is, most often, sports don’t teach life skills; they expose them. Competition reveals underdeveloped life skills; the athlete has to be taught how to improve that individual skill set.

If you’re paying a technical coach to fix stroke mechanics, please don’t assume they’re teaching your kids life skills. The common misconception is that your child’s coaches are teaching those critical abilities. Most often, parents assume that the coaches are educating life skills, and the coaches assume that the parents are teaching them. Guess what? No one is.

Solution: Psychosocial competence or life skills are abilities and behaviors that enable athletes to deal with the demands and challenges of competition on and off the tennis court. Be mindful of who’s developing the character traits of your child daily. The type of individual your child becomes is dictated by who is nurturing them.

Tennis – The Psychology of Listening

Posted on March 3, 2023 by in The Psychology of Tennis Parenting

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The following post is an excerpt from The Psychology of Tennis Parenting.

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The Psychology of Listening

For a youngster to mentally process your message, the athlete must pay attention to the essence of the ideas. Most children never get past their parent’s tone of voice and nonverbal clues. Digesting the message isn’t easy for most junior athletes. Once the message is perceived as negative, they stop listening. So, use a bit of reverse psychology and apply optimistic solutions instead of the laundry list of their problems. This method detaches the athlete from their ego.

Young athletes are typically lost in their judgmental thoughts, so the listener often distorts the message.

 

“One who understands what to say has knowledge; one who understands when to say it has wisdom.”

Magnifying the negative and forgetting the positive is a typical communication obstruction. Every athlete, parent, and coach have a unique communication style. There are four basic communication styles (passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, and dominating). It’s important to understand that if your style isn’t working, change your communication system to fit your listener.

Solution: Understand your communication system. Try to downgrade your tone of voice to a calm, relaxed cadence to get your meaning heard. When choosing to discuss their failures, switch the problems with the solutions. Add player accountability to problem-solving using the “Ask, don’t tell.” teaching method. After all, top athletes are nurtured to solve their problems.

Try to focus on giving without expecting, argue less, stop comparing your child with their peers, avoid participating in gossip, eliminate judgment, and choose not to live vicariously through your child.