Do You Choke When You're In The Lead During A Match?

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Do you have the confidence that you're a superior tennis player to most of the players you play against, but you become nervous and start choking in matches when you have the lead? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. In today's session, I answer a question from Sarah, who is 15 years old and has played tennis for nine years. Here's what Sarah had to say. I'm superior to all the players that I play against. They only have their high school experience and I have nine years worth of training every day. I usually get ahead significantly in the beginning of the match. I will be beating my opponents in a landslide. It won't be a question of whether or not I would win, because it seems so clear that I would. But then I start choking. I get nervous and start hitting my shot soft and inaccurately. I get stiff and my coach tells me what to do with my motion to make it better, like get the ball over or just get it in. But he clearly has no idea of what he's talking about. My motion isn't the problem, it's my choking. In practice, I could do 200 serves and miss only a couple, but when I choke in a game, I can barely manage to get it over the net. I've read all the tips that you sent to me, but I'm still struggling with this because I can't seem to shake it off. My top challenge is trying to get rid of this choking for good. Any advice you have would be appreciated.

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Sarah, we know it's not an issue of confidence or preparation or practice. In your case, if you're superior to these players and you have a lot more experience than them, then obviously you've got better strokes and better skills. Based upon your email, it seems to me this choking response is you getting nervous and then start hitting your shots soft and inaccurately. Well, we have a term for that. It's called lack of trust. You're absolutely not trusting your shots when you start pushing it and start making errors or uncharacteristic errors. Now, it could be from some different things, but I'm going to venture out and I'm going to guess that you're probably nervous about losing to players that you should beat easily. And I see this a lot in tennis, that a player will go out and play an inferior player, player that they've beaten before or that has no rhyme or reason that shouldn't beat them, and then they worry that, oh, if I lose to this player, I'm expected to beat this player. So I think a lot of your nervousness and your choking is you're obviously got more invested, more time, more training invested and you probably feel like that there's expectations that you need to beat these inferior players and, and probably you need to beat them easily. So I would imagine that you get nervous that that could possibly unravel and then you start protecting and over controlling. Thus the lack of trust comes out and you start pushing it. Like I said, this is very common in my work. So what you're going to have to do is get over the fact that or come to grips with the idea of these expectations you feel about beating these particular players. Most likely you're thinking ahead, you're thinking the outcome and you're worrying about what about if I fail and I don't get it done here. So the first thing you have to do is stay in the moment and stop thinking ahead and worrying about the outcome. I also think you have to start managing some of these expectations that you feel about beating these players that, that don't have the experience and don't have the level of training that you have. My recommendation, go out and focus on something very specific when you're in that situation, like hitting winners, like closing out the points early, like working on your volley game, your serve and volley game. In other words, shift the focus to parts of your game that you're currently working to improve in your practice. Maybe you're working on your drop shot or maybe you're working on your slice or something to shift the focus to playing the game and working on your shots rather than worrying about the outcome of the match and thus having that choking response. Thanks for your question. Let me know how it goes.

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