For the Love of the Game

The truth is that players will seek your expertise as long as you are providing what they need at the time and will change training venues as soon as they believe someone will offer them a better training environment.

High performance coaches seem to have selective memories when recalling with whom they have worked. Over and over you hear coaches mention all the great players whom they trained, excuse me, not only trained but “made,” as if players were gingerbread men.

There are thousands of sport psychology books in the market dealing with this topic and offering advice to help athletes optimize performance, and any extended discussion about sport psychology techniques would be beyond the scope of the book. However, at the very least, a coach should constantly address these three areas to help players become better competitors:

Continually striving to improve as a player will make you a much better coach. You are a role model so being in shape and displaying good racquet skills will definitely improve your credibility and self-confidence.

If you are a competitive tennis player, sooner or later you will find yourself in a slump – a time period when nothing seems to work, when even the simplest shots become a problem, when confidence is nowhere to be found.

A few years back feeding drills came under attack as the industry shifted to a more tactical-based approach in which players learn to play tennis by playing with each other. The goal was to make learning more dynamic, fun and closer to the reality of the game.

High performance coaching is a very emotional endeavor with constant ups and downs. Just when you think everything is going well, and all your players are performing fine, disaster is only one tournament away.