Does Your Junior Tennis Player Have A Fear Of Losing?

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You have a junior tennis player that appears as if they're playing more tentatively or safer in tournaments today. Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. Today I'm going to answer a question from Dave about his 14 year old son that looks as if he's afraid of losing.

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Here's what Dave had to say. My son is 14 years old and he's one of the top tennis players in his age group in Australia. He seems to play safer than ever before today, as if he has lack of confidence or he's afraid of losing or he's simply overthinking in the matches, especially when against the same age players and the same level or a lower level than his level. What do you think his main problem is? Is it confidence, focus or something else? Can you give me some advice on how to help him cope with this situation? Dave, thanks for your question. Yeah, I think the fear of losing is right on target here. I see a lot of junior tennis players that have quite a bit of fear or they're quite anxious about matches that they're supposed to win. Meaning if he plays a younger player or a lower level player, lower ranked player, whatever it may be, he's probably expecting to beat that opponent and thus he's getting anxious about that outcome. A lot of times players place undue expectations on themselves based upon what they think others expect of them and based on their own expectations. So playing a younger player, maybe someone at the same level as well, can be stress producing for a lot of tennis players. So this is a really common issue and I talked about it in my last podcast, number 165 with Nathan's question. But here I want to talk a little about what are you going to see as a result of that fear of losing? When players have fear of losing, what happens is they lose trust in their game. Well, I shouldn't say they out of thin air they lose trust in their game, but the fear makes them play safer because now they're trying not to miss. So if he's hitting a lot more balls down the middle or if he's short stroking it, what I call kind of a semi push out there, he's not swinging freely at it. That's a good sign that he's just waiting for the opponent to miss. So fear of losing causes fear of missing. I don't want to miss. I don't want to make mistakes. I want to allow my opponent to make mistakes. And I'm just going to go out and play a solid match. And that's how players lose, because they're not playing their normal game. They're not going for shots, they're not going for the short balls. Maybe they're not going into the net. Maybe they're playing more indecisively. So what do you do in this situation? Well, as I talked about in my previous podcast, you've got to get your son to stop paying attention to to who's across the net, what his history is, what his age group is, what his ranking is, what his seeding is, what his skill level is. You have to get your son to go out there and focus on his game plan, his strategy, his tactics for the match, no matter who's across the net. So you got to ask him one important question. How are you going to win points against this particular player? What are his weaknesses? That's it. What are your tactics for this match? Not feeling intimidated with who's across the net from him, and that's what's really going on. So you got to encourage him to go out and swing freely from the start of the match, which means let it go. Go ahead and go for your shots. Know that you're gonna make mistakes, and that's part of playing tennis. If you can get him to swing freely from the start of the match and that starts to snowball for him, he starts to get some confidence with that, that's going to go a long way. But what often happens is players will go out and play really tentative at the start of the match. Then maybe they'll drop a game or two because of that and then start to get frustrated and it snowballs in the wrong direction. Hope that was helpful. Good luck with your son's game. Hey, if you want more information about mental training or sports psychology for tennis, jump over to sportspsychologytennis.com and check out our coaching programs and our free resources.

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