Helping Young Tennis Players Stay Composed

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Do you have a young tennis player that tends to implode after committing a couple double faults on the tennis court? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. Today I'm going to answer a question from a tennis parent. His name is Ramana. Here's the question I received. My son is 11 years old. He's been playing tennis since he was five. He's a top player in India in the 12 and unders. @ times he has a couple of double faults in a row. The body language gets really bad and he is in tears after a couple double faults. However, when his first serve is spot on, the rest of the game will pick up. I'm assuming that the state of mind determines whether you have a good serve or not.

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Well, Romana, yes, the state of mind is going to affect your entire tennis game, whether it's your serve or your ground strokes or your return or your volleys. The mindset that you take to the court and that you maintain on the court is going to be extremely important. The challenge that you're having with your son is he expects not to double fault, and maybe he gets a little irritated with one double fault, but if he has two in a row, he starts to get frustrated. So that tells me that there's a strict expectation about not double faulting in his case. And then when he does double fault, he loses emotional control a la the frustration. And that probably snowballs and goes downhill. So what can you do about when he's double faulting? First of all, let's talk about the general mindset that you want for the service. I'm all about starting the service routine by forgetting about the last serve or forgetting about the last point, trying to have a clean slate going into that next serve. What he really needs to do is have a positive intention on every serve. If your athlete or your tennis player is being what I call defensive, being tentative, just trying to get the ball in, that's not going to work, especially with if he's got like a kicker, a topspin kicker, it won't get there. So he really needs to be aggressive and swing out on it. But first things first is he needs to have a positive intention instead of thinking about double faulting, thinking about missing, thinking about someone's going to hit a winner on him on the second serve. None of that is positive intention. Positive intention on the serve is seeing the serve go to his target, is visualizing a good serve in his mind. Alright, with that said, once he's able to practice that, have a good positive intention on every serve, the next part is being able to let go of the double fault and not be more tentative or defensive. So he's got to remind himself after that first double fault that it's just one double fault and it doesn't mean it's going to continue to happen. Sometimes athletes talk themselves into, oh, here we go again. I'm going to start double faulting the game away. No, don't let him get into the mindset that it's going to continue to happen. He needs to blow off that double fault, say it's just one point. I only need to win two out of three points to win the game. Not every point. So now he's got to go into the next point with a clear mind. That's over, that's done. I'm going to go and I'm going to trust my serve motion. I'm not going to be tentative, I'm not going to dink it in. I'm going to go ahead and swing fully and trust what I've been doing in my practice. That's super important after committing that first double fault. Hey, thanks for the question. If you have any questions, jump over to sportspsychologytennis.com check out some of my articles and click on Contact Us and send over your question to me. We read them all. Can't promise we'll get into a podcast, but we do read the questions and respond.

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