Player Recommendations to Parents

Top 9 Recommendations Players made to Junior Tennis Parents:

1. Make Sure Other Things Going On in Life; Parents Shouldn’t Let Tennis Become Child’s Life

2. Listen to the Player and Don’t Just Come Up with Your Own Ideas

3. Give the Right Direction, But Don’t Push Over the Edge

4. Focus on Developing the Person Rather than the Athlete and Getting Results

5. Don’t Have Your Child Specialize Too Early (doing other sports facilitates athletic ability and teaches how to compete)

6. Be Patient

7. Don’t Live Through Your Child’s Tennis Experiences (“We won, he lost.”)

8. Allow Your Child to Dream, Don’t Limit It, and Give Every Opportunity to Achieve the Dream

9. Be Emotionally Stable and Even-Keeled

Simple Guidelines for Tennis Parents

Tennis should be fun for kids. Treat tennis as a game—It’s not a business for kids. Parents can get too wrapped up in their child’s ranking, the next tournament or the possibility of a college scholarship. With all the money in professional sports today, it is hard for parents to understand that it should be just good fun for most tennis players.

Your own agenda is not your child’s. Young tennis athletes compete for many reasons. They enjoy the competition, like the social aspect, engage with being part of a team, and enjoy the challenge of setting goals. You might have a different agenda than your child and you need to recognize that tennis is your child’s sport, not yours. Young tennis athletes need to compete for their own reasons, not to satisfy a parent.

Emphasize the process of playing one point at a time instead of results, scores, or trophies. We live in a society that focuses on results and winning, but winning comes from working the process and enjoying the ride. Teach your child to focus on the process of of playing one shot at a time instead of the number of wins or trophies.

You are a role model for your child athlete. As such, you should model composure and poise courtside. When you’re watching matches, your child mimics your behavior. You become a role model in how you react to a close match or the questionable behavior of a competitor. Stay calm, composed, and in control during matches so your tennis player can copy those positive behaviors.

Refrain from match-time coaching. During tournaments, it’s time to just let your kids play. Most junior tennis tournament organizers do not allow parents to coach their young athletes anyway. All the practice should be set aside during matches because this is the time that athletes need to trust in the training and react on the court. “Just do it” as the saying goes. Too much coaching (or over-coaching) can cause kids to make mistakes and play cautiously. Save the coaching for practice and use encouragement at matches instead.

Help your tennis players separate self-esteem from achievement. Too many athletes base their self-worth on their performance or the outcome of the match. Help your children understand that they are people FIRST who happen to be athletes. Success or number of wins should not determine a person’s self-esteem. Help your child find other activities or roles that are different from sport, such as music, theater or being a student or sibling.

Ask your child athlete the right questions. Asking the right questions after matches will tell your child what you think is important in tennis. If you ask, “Did you win?” your child will think winning is important. If you ask, “Did you have fun?” he or she will assume having fun is important.

Book Review: The Talent Code

Another aspect of the book’s goodness is it’s unique take on the subject of expertise. The underlying thread that ties the book together is microscopic physically but has a heft that belies its size. Coyle introduces us to brain science and the discovery of myelin and the role it plays in how the brain processes signals. In a nutshell, myelin is an insulator that allows neurons to fire more efficiently with better timing, allowing signals to be sent either faster or slower, depending on what’s needed. And myelin is grown through focused effort. You know that feeling when you’re totally focused on something and trying to figure it out? You might feel confused and even frustrated, but you persist, you break the task down into its component parts and do those until you get it, then you put the parts together. You’re building myelin around the neurons needed to perform that task.

Turns out that myelin, part of what scientists call white matter in the brain is much more important to brain function than anyone thought. Einstein’s brain had a significantly larger proportion of myelin to neurons than other brains. The number of neurons were the same, but Einstein’s brain had a lot more myelin (Diamond, et al, 1988). Myelin is one of the common denominators of high ability in any field, and it’s the struggle to understand or to do that creates it.

Coyle breaks the book into 3 parts. Part I: Deep Practice gives an overview of what kind of practice seems to build myelin and gives examples from sources as diverse as skateboarders, the Bronte sisters, and Renaissance artists. Coyle’s term Deep Practice is in most ways similar to Ericsson’s Deliberate Practice and my own notion of Intentional Practice. He culls three rules of Deep Practice:

1. Chunk it up: Basically this consists of breaking things into pieces that are more easily done or thought about. It also includes listening to and/or absorbing the whole before breaking the skill down and includes changing the material to make it easier, for example, slowing down a difficult musical passage.

2. Repeat it. This is pretty self-explanatory, but also not as simple as it sounds.

3. Learn to Feel it. This includes sensing (and remembering!) how something feels when it is done right, but also developing awareness of how it feels to struggle.

Part II: Ignition handles some of the general information about motivation and inspiration. Coyle calls this ignition and points to circumstances that help to motivate people to strive for greatness. He gives many examples from sport. He also cites some important research that indicates attitude prior to starting a task (in this case, music) has a significant impact on how good you get. Also a factor in his observations was that the more gritty and spare the surroundings, the more it can inspire one towards greatness. Places soft and warm and inviting don’t inspire the “hungriness” that a rougher setting might.

Part III: Master Coaching is all about how teachers, coaches, and mentors approach the task of nurturing and helping their tutors to grow “talent” (aka myelin, in Coyle’s belief). He is quick to point out (and correct) that coaching/teaching/mentoring is a skill in itself that takes a long time to build and he presents some fantastic examples of coaches, music teachers, and school teachers who have put in many thousands of hours of deep practice as teachers

http://intentionalpractice.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/book-review-the-talent-code/

College Park Junior Model

But Ponkka, Salazar and the other coaches at the Junior Tennis Champions Center believe what has been lacking is a model for the patient, thorough and systematic development of native talent from an early age. Drawing on training methods used in the former Soviet bloc, their own experience as players and coaches, and trial and error, they believe they've developed that model in College Park, and that their results prove it works.

In the past five years, 11 boys and girls training at the tennis center have either won national championship tournaments or been ranked No. 1 in the nation in their age groups. The Junior Tennis Champions Center has had 51 graduates: 41 have attended Division 1 universities -- 38 of them on scholarships. Seven have attended Division III and Ivy league schools, and three have turned pro.

With rare exceptions, these are not gems discovered elsewhere, then imported for polishing, as is the rule at places such as Nick Bollettieri's famed tennis academy in Florida. Instead, the tennis center has identified local kids with above-average potential, then transformed them from "above average" into some of the nation's and the world's most elite junior athletes.

In the end, what's been happening in College Park may be less interesting because of what it says about the hopes for American tennis than because of what it suggests about how people become exceptional. Even as the program at the tennis center was starting to obtain its remarkable results, a raft of new research seemed to offer an explanation. Recent books such as "The Talent Code" by Daniel Coyle and "Talent Is Overrated" by Geoff Colvin have summarized discoveries in neuroscience that have shown how sophisticated abilities arise through the development of neural pathways built and refined over time through constant repetition. In other words, practice makes perfect.

The thrust of the new research is this: Geniuses aren't born; they are created. This is true not only for tennis but also for any complex activity, such as playing an instrument or learning languages. Regardless of the activity, this theory goes, if you take children who can focus obsessively and follow direction, add expert instruction and thousands of hours of drills -- then, abracadabra: You've got talent.

This is precisely the program that the tennis center seems to have anticipated by a decade, a program that has proved so successful that the U.S. Tennis Association has used it as a model for its plan to create eight regional tennis centers around the country. It has also become a proving ground for a revolutionary idea: Almost anyone with some basic ability who is willing to put in the effort and the hours can become exceptional.

*****

Through the changes, Brody's founding idea of making the program more about human development than stroke development persists. "You can take a kid from basically nothing and maximize them tennis-wise and have such an impact in their life psychologically," Salazar says. "What tennis teaches you, it teaches you so much about discipline. It teaches you how to deal with adversity... When you play tennis, you're not always going to win every time. You may step on the court and play great; you may step on the court and play not so great. The only thing that really you have control over when you step on the court is your mind, how you deal with the pressure, how you deal with the moment -- you have control over that."

That outlines an idea echoed frequently at the tennis center: The skills that enable a kid to play high-level tennis might just also create a high-level human being. When the coaches are asked if a lopsided regimen of so much tennis training couldn't create a miserable child instead, they say that's highly unlikely. A child who didn't love the game, even love the process of training, would never be able to make it far enough to get into the champions program. In the 10-year history, they say, they've had very few dropouts.