The Psychology of Tennis Parenting
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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.
