Being a junior tennis parent can feel overwhelming at times, especially when your child is navigating the ups and downs of their teen years. It’s easy to second-guess yourself—wondering if you’re saying the right things or offering enough support. But here's the good news: you're not alone, and there are simple ways to make this journey smoother for both you and your child.

Bad line calls in junior tennis are an unfortunate but common occurrence. Whether it’s an intentional bad line call or an honest mistake, dealing with it can be frustrating for players and parents. In this blog, we’ll cover strategies for addressing cheating in a way that fosters fairness, personal growth, sportsmanship, and a healthier experience.

In sports, results takes center stage, and highlights focus on flashy moments. Sportsmanship is usualy mentioned when rules are broken or fights occur. If winning and controversy get all the attention, how can we teach kids that character matters most? Yosuke Watanuki recently gave us a prime example of sportsmanship that every young athlete should see.

Recovery has become one of the hottest topics in junior tennis talk over the last few years. With the implementation of doubles at so many events, kids are finding themselves consistently playing 3-4 matches a day. Hopefully this blog can help players avoid that same fate, and instead play their best tennis when it really counts.

You can work on your technique all you want, but if you can't get to the right position, with the right footwork, and have the appropriate strength to accelerate, you'll have trouble succeeding.

Every tournament I go to, I look around to see if there are any other coaches, and unfortunately, a consistent theme is present. The work starts at the bottom, and some coaches seem to be forgetting that.

With each one having its own advantages and disadvantages, which one is the right one to use as often as possible?

When it comes to planning your training week, whether you’re playing a tournament on the upcoming weekend or not should always be taken into account. It will affect how much you practice, how much strength & conditioning you do, how many sets you play, how much time you spend on technical work, and how much time you spend drilling.

If you can’t see these things in person, it’s hard to get inspired by them. It’s hard to feel the magic. It’s hard to feel the crowd come alive. It’s a completely different feeling to see a 145mph serve in person come off of Isner’s racquet. To hear the sound of Juan Martin Del Potro’s forehand as it connects with the center of his strings.

What are you willing to tolerate on your high performance junior tennis journey? Some people can't handle the emotional outbursts, bad line calls, frustrating parents, and the overall emotional roller coaster. They want a nice respectful game, with a nice relaxing atmosphere, and if goals aren't achieved, it's not a problem. Others can tolerate the roller coaster so long as progress is being made and the child is showing continuous signs of happiness.

Unfortunately you have to pick.

You can’t be mentally tough without handling the routines in-between points properly. Player’s spend more time in a match dealing with their internal dialogue, than actually hitting a ball.

Most families are stuck in a position where their child splits sets, they’re able to receive coaching, and they have no coach there.

So the parent is left as the de facto coach.

What should they do? They’re not a coach, but here they are, with their child about to go into a nerve wrecking third set tiebreak (or regular set depending on the tournament), and are looking for guidance.

“A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t” - Jack Dempsey

It’s a hard thing to explain to someone if they haven’t gone through something incredibly difficult and challenging, and refused to back down. It can also seem like an unfair thing to explain to a young athlete, but it’s a necessary thing for them to learn.

If you haven't listened to the Baseline Intelligence podcast, and you're a tennis coach, parent, or player, you need to! Stokke has an incredible wealth of knowledge, from his experience as a junior and collegiate player, playing in the US Open, coaching in college tennis, and now a private coach with an amazing podcast.

This blog was a difficult one to write, so I will be directing you to the podcast instead. Answering this question is straight forward, but finding that type of environment is difficult. There will always be a higher level training group so at some point, a coach has to say no, they can’t move you up. So here are the main points of the podcast, and I encourage you to watch or listen to the podcast to get all of the details behind my thoughts:

Some great lessons were learned, along with some painful ones, but that's how we grow. I'm looking forward to more training blocks, more tournament matches reviewed, and more conversations with parents. In the meantime, please enjoy the 3 things I learned as a coach, but also the 3 things that stayed the same in 2023.

No, this is not to paint pickleball in a negative way. I think it's awesome to see tennis courts that used to sit empty finally be occupied again. Unfortunately, I think the courts could have been occupied by tennis players if the sport had marketed the youth color balls and courts in a different way.

For those that haven’t heard of the invisible gorilla experiment, volunteers were told to keep track of how many times a few basketball players tossed a basketball. While they did this, someone in a gorilla suit walked across the basketball court, in plain view, yet many of the volunteers failed to notice the gorilla.

Many kids fail to maximize their potential because we put too much emphasis on developing weapons that have the ability to hit amazing winners that ohhh and ahhhh people, and not enough time on weapons that require ball control skills, patience, and strategy skills.

With the way things are in today’s society, we have to be careful working someone really hard for fear of complaints and lawsuits regarding negligence. That’s why I was thrilled to learn about Timothy Noakes research in the book The Comfort Crisis. There’s nothing better for a coach trying to gain the trust of kids and families to have real scientific research behind their methods to help build trust in their developmental process.