Do You Have A Tennis Player Who Underperforms In Tournaments?

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Do you have a tennis player that tends to underperform in tournaments compared to what they show in practice? Hi, this is Dr. Patrick Cohn. Today I answer a question from Violet. Violet says the following about her 10 to 11 year old tennis player. My son performs great during practice, but he's not at his best during the tournament. What CD program would you recommend for a tennis player that's 10 to 11 years old?

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So I've talked about this a lot in the podcast themselves. About the number one sign that your athlete needs mental coaching or would benefit from mental coaching is the fact that they look like a different tennis player in practice compared to competition. What does that mean? That means they play a different style of game in practice versus they do in competition. And typically they tend to underperform in competition. Well, then you have to ask the question, why would athletes underperform when they go to competition? What's changing for them? Obviously they're going to say to you, well, it matters now there's rankings and there's points involved and then there's pride. So certainly they feel more pressure to perform well in tournaments. Typically when I work with tennis players and young tennis players, I find out that it's about some type of fear of failure that they have. And then when we start discussing that, it typically goes to fear of not playing up to their potential, fear of disappointing a parent, fear of embarrassment, fear of letting down a coach, etc. So those are the typical fears that we see. And ultimately what happens is the athlete tends to play more protective, more defensive, a more controlled style of tennis. In other words, they're not trusting their strokes in that situation. They're either bunting the ball or they're playing safe or the stroke is actually tight, or they tend to maybe try to get perf, be perfect and get too mechanical with it. So those are the things that are probably operating for your son here. Now, in terms of a CD program, we have two different routes that you can go and he's kind of right on the cusp. We have a series for young athletes. It's not just for tennis players, but we have a series for young athletes called the Confident Sports Kid series. There's one that helps you with confidence. It's called the Confidence Sports Kid one with focus. The focus Sports Kid. And then we also have the Compose Sports Kid which helps them let go of errors. None of them specifically addresses what you're talking about in terms of not being able to take the practice game to competition because we're not really addressing fear of failure in those. But those are great programs at that age range from say that 8 to 11, maybe 8 to 12 age range. Those were developed specifically for that group. The other option you have is the Tennis Confidence CD and Workbook Program. It's a premium program. It's a 4 CD program that covers the top eight mental skills or mental game lessons that I work with my personal coaching students. Can a 10 or 11 year old handle that? I think so. I mean, we try to write them so that a 12 year old can understand the material. We try to keep the mental skills instruction very simplistic really for all age ranges. We don't try to throw a lot of psychobabble into the material. So then athletes really aren't understanding what it is that we're trying to get across. So if you want more information about it, you can, you can go and contact me@peaksports.com and I'll be happy to direct you to a program that would be appropriate for your tennis player. Thanks for the question and good luck with your game.

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