Fear of Losing To Less Talented Tennis Players

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Let's say you have a young little tennis star that's rising in the ranks. However, she's reluctant to play lower tournaments against people she knows she can beat. Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn and today I respond to a sports parent who's concerned about her daughter's fear of losing to players she's expected to beat.

Dr. Cohn, Allison, a parent has the following question about her daughter. My daughter is 8 years old and trains around 7 to 8 hours per week. But now she is reluctant to play lower graded tournaments against people she knows she will beat. She fears losing and is getting more and more anxious. She always expects to beat certain players. How can I help her deal with this?

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Hi Alison, the main issue here or the main word that I'd like to focus in on is expects. She has now an expectation or she's adopted an expectation from others that she should beat players at the local level or at the lower level tournaments. Now there's two ways that she can have those expectations. Number one, she can put her own expectations on it and say, well, I've beaten these girls in the past, I should be able to beat them again. Or she can adopt expectations from coaches or parents or other players as well, where she starts to perceive that you expect her to win all the time or win against players in these lower tournaments. And so she's now reluctant from my understanding to play in these lower level tournaments because she's getting more and more anxious about losing to players that maybe she's beaten before or that she's expected to beat. So I think, and this sounds pretty common to me, what I would recommend for you with your daughter is you have to focus on something other than winning and winning at these local tournaments or these lower level tournaments. I would reframe it for her and look at it as a great opportunity to expand her shots and to work on other areas of her game. For example, when my daughter competes and if she's competing against players that are much lower level than her, I always recommend that she try and work on other parts of her game that that she doesn't put into play that much in Other words, they practice volleying a lot, but hardly do they put that into matches, or they don't have the confidence yet to put it into matches. Or maybe they work on hitting winners from the half court, but they're a little bit tentative in matches to be able to do that. So I recommend to her to work on other parts of your game, change up the tactics a little bit. Maybe go more cross court or go more down the line or hit more volleys, or do some serve and volley or work on your serve. So it's a great opportunity for her when she's playing in the lower level tournaments to take what she's been working on in practice that she doesn't normally do in tournaments, but now put it into play in tournaments. And then she has that experience where she's never volleyed before in tournaments, but now she has the experience where she's starting to volley in tournaments. Try to get her to look at it a little bit differently than she has to go out there and win. I think there's a lot less pressure if she goes out there and works on a specific area on her game. I don't mean work on it in the technical sense. I mean just put it into play, put a part of her game into play that she practices a lot. Maybe it's a second serve, a different second serve that she's working on in practice, for example, and then put it into play. That way she's out there really working on certain aspects of her game, certain tactics, and not feeling the pressure that she has to win with her a game. Thanks for the question and good luck with her game.

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