Helping Tennis Players Who Get Complacent During Matches

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Do you have an athlete that blows a big lead and later says that he was just bored in the match? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn, a mental performance coach at Penn Peak Performance Sports. In this video, you're going to learn about how to help your athletes stay focused when they're up in the match. You're listening to the Tennis Psychology Podcast.

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Here's the question I received from Peter My son played a semifinal match and he was up in the match 6252 and was playing amazing. Then according to him, he started to play safe to close the match. The match went to a set tiebreaker and he lost 911 in that third set tiebreaker. He told us afterward that he was bored during the third set, which we translated it is having too much pressure and not being able to perform. He said that he felt as if he doesn't know how to play tennis in that moment. What's your take on this? Well, Peter, a lot of mixed messages here, so I want to address that issue of being bored and being complacent. Certainly that can happen. I'm going to doubt that that's the real issue here, but let's talk about that. When athletes feel like they're not challenged enough, it's hard for them to raise to that level. A guy named Csiksa Malehy studied this concept of flow and flow would say to get into that flow channel, you need to have the challenge match your skill. Now, when the challenge is too high for your skills, that ensues anxiety when you're bored. Obviously, when the challenge isn't high enough for your skills, then you're going to feel too bored in that event. So Csiksmilehaly his book Flow would say that in order to get into the flow channel, your skills have to match the challenge and it has to be a challenging environment for you. Those are prerequisites for getting into the flow. So it could be that he is bored because he's winning easily in that moment and then he starts to space out, get complacent and go through the motion. But I doubt that's what's really going on. I have a feeling that's his so called excuse for what happened in the match. It's more like likely that he started to protect the lead and think ahead about how awesome it would be if he won that match. If he won that second set. 6:2 after leading 5:2 so often, what will happen in this case for juniors is they start to think ahead, oh, how great it would be to beat this opponent and then they start to protect and they start to slam on the break and then they give their opponent momentum. Once the opponent gets momentum, they start hitting winners and then it causes the your athlete to start getting frustrated with their performance and then that snowballs down and allows the the opponent to get into the match and thus go to that third set tiebreaker. So in my estimation that's probably more what's happening you interpreted as too much pressure and not being able to perform. Yes. If he felt like he doesn't know how to play tennis in that moment, that indicates to me anxiety, worry, tension. If he doesn't know how to play in that moment, athletes tend to blank out and feel like that they can't play to the best of their ability. When they're anxious, they basically start looking at all the wrong cues and focusing on all the wrong stuff out there, which doesn't allow them to obviously execute one point at a time. So I think you hit the nail on the head. It's probably more about the pressure he's feeling rather than this idea that he just got bored out there. But those are some ideas to explore with him. If you want more information, jump over to peaksports.com and check out our one on one mental training programs. We work with athletes from 12 years all the way up to professional athletes as well. I work with the professionals here at Peak Performance Sports and I have two other certified mental coaches with me that work with our younger athletes and collegiate athletes as well. All right, if you want more information about sports psychology for tennis, jump over to sportspsychologytennis.com and check out our free resources there as well. Thanks for listening.

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