Tennis Parents and Development of a Tennis Player
Allistair McCaw
The post by Allistair McCaw
Tennis parents, don’t tell me you’re all about ‘development’ for your child when your biggest concern is if little Johnny will be tired from training for his matches this weekend.
If you are development-minded and truly understand the journey, then you understand that learning new skills is the primary focus and not the matches or tournaments. That comes much later.
Sure, I won’t hold back to the fact that there are too many ‘over trained’ kids in academy and club programs. Coaches should realize that these are kids and NOT mini adults or athletes. Too many programs are logging senseless hours, thinking that’s the way forward. A lot of these hours are coming from instruction of the parent, thinking ‘the more the better’.
Also, tennis coaches and parents, if you are using the ‘tired’ line as an excuse to why your kid didn’t perform well at this past weekend’s tournament’, then that doesn’t do the kid’s mindset any good either.
Kids listen, they watch your example and they will use that to their advantage every time they under perform or lose.
Remember: The tennis matches are the exams to see what skills you’ve learnt in the ‘classroom’. Winning and losing are simply part of the lessons, not the desired result or goal.
Stay the path, stick to what matters, and please, these are not mini-adults on a serious athletes program.
Development of a tennis player should be fun, inspiring and challenging – not monotonous drills and trophy and points chasing.
Remember why your kid first started playing? It was for Fun, right?
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To make the parents wise about the right path, we should explain (not in detail) the windows of opportunity concerning the biological age of the player. For every window there are key concept of athletic and tennis specific factors that should be trained and the tournaments/trophy’s are secondary. The matches are only to evaluate the progressions made, to sharpen the skills needed in competition mode and for fun!
some parents only admits the current results of their Kid i mean they only looked at the result of the match he lose or won the match they didn’t care about what you said they didn’t care about the basic technique and how much it has been improved .
Yes those parents exists but you should not fuel their feelings, just acknowledge them and ask ‘what do you suggest we do about that?’ They will answer ‘ we pay you to know that’….and you answer ‘ yes, you do!’….