This is an article ‘Insights Every Tennis Coach Should Ponder’ by Marc Pulisci
One of tennis coaches' most challenging tasks is reconciling conflicting advice. Most players under their wing will want to follow every coach's lesson. Still, for those who have worked with multiple coaches, there's a big chance that different recommendations can be a struggle. The best thing a tennis coach can do for a player is to give them something fresh and focus on another aspect of their game. However, players can sometimes receive contradicting observations from coaches regarding the same issue about their performance. And usually, the confusion in the player's head will persist and bother them.
Put your player’s mental game in the proper perspective
Imagine programming a computer to believe that one command will delete a file. Later, another programmer adds another line of code, indicating that the same command will also copy the file to a different drive. That's what most players who have been under multiple coaches can feel about opposing instructions.
Players in training need to nurture confidence in who is presently coaching them and must start from scratch despite mastering old strategies and footwork. Overcoming players' anxiety about how they play the game should always be a coach's top priority. If players enter a match worried and confused, their performance may fail unless they trust their coach's strategy completely.
Based on a professional study, there are numerous factors on how a coach can earn the confidence of their players and train them to be confident warriors on the court. Any coach who has played the sport or mastered coaching methods through experience has the authority to teach a novice player.
An individual's personal development as a tennis coach does not have anything to do with what college or master's degree they have acquired academically. Instead, what mattered to most representatives was the informal learning opportunities of being a tennis player or an experienced tennis coach. This finding tells us that experience builds character and credibility more than anything else.
Having played the sport competitively allows coaches to have a better grasp on how to mold their players' shot techniques and on-court behavior. They can optimize how their students play and efficiently handle the mental stress on the court aside from skills development. The study shows that former professional players turned coaches build better relationships with their young students.
However, this does not disqualify the capabilities of coaches who have not played professionally but know tennis by heart.
The study shows that coaches who learned from trial and error developed keener insights on learning opportunities that they can share with their students. By gaining ample experience through coach-to-coach discussions and a review of the social norms within the tennis community, they can nurture knowledge, beliefs, and practice designs according to which specific tournaments their players will be competing in or the opponents that they will be facing during matches. Every coach who has made the sport his 'way of life' has better potential to influence his players and develop localized practice designs.
Developing 'repeatable' players
Most coaches aspire to train their students to be 'repeatable' players, which means developing them into players who can execute the same plays and shots over and over without flaw. As a coach, failing to establish 'repeatable' players should mean you are not cut out to be part of any elite tournament.
Being 'repeatable' means training players to develop technical wisdom on the court and rally tolerance when stress arises. After all, the same stress levels and on-court threats tend to repeat game after game. To develop your players, drills within the training that focus on blocked and repeated tasks plus hitting many high-volume shots in a series are necessary.
Doing repetitive and high-volume training achieves multiple goals for the coach, including practice designs, physical and psychological development, evaluation, and technical and tactical progress.
Therefore, a good coach should seek to reinforce players' stored technical models of skill through high repetition rates by introducing and repeating drills during training. Focusing on the quantity of practice when taking player development into account will give you a better understanding of a player's skills as internal, cognitive, and separated from perceptual information while developing them to be physically fit and strong.
Training your players to perform under pressure
Most tennis coaches believe players should be taught how to handle pressure to optimize their performance in each match. Coaches emphasize how competitive a match is by contextualizing it as a combat mission, just as how boxers are trained to fight or how gladiators go inside the arena– every blow (point) matters.
This coaching strategy entails developing the right mindset that can quickly shift stress and pressure when it matters during the match, and always regain momentum in every set. Coaches train their players by simulating pressure and uncomfortable situations in practice sessions and measure the outcome in terms of the player's focus. Such simulated events can come in the form of consequences for every lost point or manipulating task constraints to draw out the player's mental capacity during such situations.
A repetitive practice design will work best for such a training model, which shapes how the player can handle pressure through the knowledge of consequence. During match-specific practice sessions, set goals for your players, such as setting the next point that decides the match or pushing them to win by at least two points at the end of a set.
Such match-specific sessions will increase your player's intuition, develop their match principles to devise tactics, and learn proper behavior on the court. It enhances their overall performance, including shot technique improvement, eye-to-ball coordination, and point executions.
However, this is not to say that all tennis coaches should always play by the book. Depending on your player's level of competitiveness and mental capacity, combined with your expertise and ability to create tailor-fit practice designs, you can make the proper adjustments during practice sessions to encourage the player in both intuitive and skill applications. Once your players know how to handle pressure in all its forms on the court, the more confident they will perform in matches.
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