2023 Review: 3 things I learned & 3 things that stayed the same

One of my favorite things to do at the end of the year is to take some time to reflect. Days can quickly turn into months, and just like that, the year is over. It’s hard to stop, slow down, and evaluate things, yet it’s something I try to do as much as possible. It’s during these moments that we can fine tune our process, and redirect our coaching energies to the most important places.

Here are the 3 things I learned in 2023, as well as 3 things that stayed the same.

3 Things I learned

1. We can’t be afraid to talk about winning

At the end of the day, if you’re in the high performance space, you’re in the competition space. Our job is to help kids achieve their tennis goals, and that usually involves winning more matches than they are now. It’s not to show them a happy and fun time with lots of laughs and giggles everyday. High performance tennis is not just an after school activity. It’s a way to help kids grow as human beings while striving for success. And that striving for success part is important. That’s when kids go through adversity, and are forced to grow as human beings.

If we remove the striving for success, striving for improvement, and trying to win more matches part, we remove the dealing with adversity. And there will be a time when all these kids are adults, and they’ll have to face real adversity. Job loss. Failing to get into certain universities. Relationships failing. Etc..

If they went through a great high performance program as kids, they’ll be ready to deal with life as an adult. Whether they achieved their tennis goals or not won’t actually matter. They’ll have developed the life skills required to be an adult.

I’m trying my best to communicate this message more and more: we can fail at reaching our competitive goals, but still be a successful human being.

2. Things take longer to improve than we’d like

I spent a lot of time working in the professional tennis space and I was spoiled. If we wanted to change or improve something, it could happen in a matter of weeks. What I’ve realized is it wasn’t just their effort and dedication to the improvement. It was because they were world class athletes. They had incredible body control, and the vision to understand everything that was happening on a court. Once they put their mind to something, improvements could happen fast.

Junior tennis players are not world class athletes. They don’t have great body control. They don’t know half the stuff going on in a match because they don’t have the experience, and haven’t received enough coaching feedback to appropriately interpret what is going on. To make matters worse, they’re teenagers. They’re emotional. Emotions get in the way of our ability to interpret and execute.

Because of all of this, what might take a pro a few weeks to improve, a junior can take up to 6 months or longer. For the coaches and parents involved, it can be painful. It’s hard to see the same mistake for so long when what needs to be changed is constantly being communicated. But if we can understand how hard it is for the player, we’ll have an easier time being more patient.

3. No more 1-day a week private lessons

This one was a frustrating lesson to learn. When I joined the tennis coaching scene, this was the way things were. Kids would do their clinics a few days a week and then work with a coach once a week, sometimes twice on specific things regarding their game. The problem with this scenario was, if the private lesson coach isn’t also working with the player during the clinics, that player isn’t receiving consistent feedback regarding what they worked on in the private lesson. They’ll instead work on whatever the clinic coach wants, which might be different. This would delay the child’s development.

So I decided that it would be better for me to see someone multiple days in a row, once a month, than to see them once a week, every week. The player would get more focused repetitions in a short amount of time, making it easier to improve something.

If I couldn’t do that, I would make sure the clinic coach was aware of what we were working on, and ask them to reinforce things.

3 things that stayed the same

1. The desire to improve has to come from the player

The best coach in the world can’t help an undisciplined and unmotivated player. They can have all the information and motivational tactics ever created, but if the player doesn’t have a burning desire to leave it all out there on the court, there’s nothing the coach can do. Before parents desperately search for the best training program in the world, they need to take a good look at their own child. Are they failing to reach their goals because maybe they don’t love tennis in that type of way, and they simply like tennis?

2. Parents need to be coached as well

Parents don’t know this, but when they signed their child up for high performance tennis, they signed themselves up as well. Parents have a tremendous impact on their child’s tennis development.

Tennis is unique in that parents have a lot of control over their child’s tennis. They have full control over what tournaments their child can play, where they train, and are usually (and unfortunately) at tournaments by themselves with the child.

Parents need to be coached on how to handle all these scenarios, what words to use, what tone of voice to talk with at certain times, when to not talk about tennis at all, and when they need to actually push their child to get out and train more.

If parents aren’t coached, they’ll do what THEY think is best, but most parents don’t have any tennis experience. How are they supposed to know what to do? In those scenarios, coaches can’t blame parents for the child’s failures if the coach didn’t help the parent.

3. Coaches need to watch kids compete

The valuable information a coach receives from watching a player compete is too much, and it’s not being taken advantage of. Too many players are competing without their coaches watching and it’s a shame. The truth comes out under pressure. The tournament player is the one the coach needs to see in order to come up with an appropriate development plan.

Practice is practice. There’s no stress. Even if we add in the stress by providing rewards or punishment during set play, there’s nothing like getting a fresh can of balls from the tournament desk, warming up with your opponent, and having a referee say time is up, let’s play. Us coaches need to watch our players in live competition scenarios as much as possible, so that we can come up with the most efficient development plan for the player.