Helping Young Tennis Players With Composure

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Do you have a young tennis player that gets emotionally upset during a tennis match and or can't make changes rapidly and then gets frustrated with the changes and ultimately blames her poor play on making new changes? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. In today's session I answer a question from Hendra about her daughter who plays junior tennis.

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Hendra says my daughter is 9 years old and she's playing against girls that are much older than her. She's been reading the emails for a couple months now and find them very helpful. Her daughter battles with this issue that she doesn't know how to control her emotions between points, but really she wants to learn. In addition, we've also recently changed her forehand grip and she seems to blame everything on this. When she plays badly, we just can't seem to get her positive about making necessary changes. Do you have any suggestions on how she can control her emotions between points and also accept these necessary changes? Hendra, there's really two separate questions here or issues that you're dealing with. One is the issue of the emotions between points and this is very common for tennis juniors at this age, obviously to get upset with themselves. The more perfectionist she is, the more perfectionism that she has, the tougher it will be for her to control her emotions. We find that the profile of the emotional player, the one that gets frustrated, easily, upset, down, angry, cries, is a player with very high expectations, wants to perform perfectly and maybe worries about what others think about her performance. In other words, she doesn't want to let you down or she doesn't want to let a coach down, for example. So there's a specific profile that we see that's very akin to the perfectionist that that tends to have trouble controlling their emotions. What can you do to help her between points? Well, really the instruction is going to come way before she gets on the court. In other words, you have to dig in and find out what are the most challenging mistakes or situations for her that cause her to be frustrated or upset with her game. Then find out, well, what are the expectations behind that Maybe she feels like she should never double fall. We call them the shoulds. Maybe she feels like she should never miss a short ball or she shouldn't hit the ball out two points in a row or whatever. So you have to dig down and find out what those expectations are. Because ultimately the anger and the frustration is due to the fact that she's not matching those expectations that she has for herself or feeling like she's letting someone down in the process. Maybe herself or maybe a parent, for example. So that's where I would start with the between points. It happens way before she gets out on the court because you got to give her some skills and some strategies to deal with the frustration and the anger before she gets in the match. Secondly, in relation to making changes, yeah, changes are always hard for tennis players. Once again, especially for perfectionists. It feels uncomfortable for them and so they're going to resist changes, maybe very necessary changes that they have to make to get better. I find when players switch coaches, for example, they tend to go backwards one step. The idea is to take two steps forward, of course, but they tend to go back one step with their consistency and their performance. It feels uncomfortable, it feels foreign. They start to spray shots all over the place and it takes a long time for those changes to solidify. So one option is taking her out for a month of competition and just working on the changes and getting to the point where she overlearns the changes. The changes become more consistent, she can perform more consistently with the new change and then put her back into competition. Then as for blaming the losing or bad play on the change, that's obviously not good. It certainly could be part of the reason why her game is inconsistent or she's playing badly. But it's not good to blame things and have excuses for why she's playing badly. So I would definitely want to discourage her from having to have excuses or blame things. If a player goes into a match and they already have built in excuses why they're not going to perform well, like my grip feels very foreign or very uncomfortable, then that's problematic. So you don't want her going into matches having built in excuses for why she's not going to perform well. That's really not looking in a positive light at her game. You want her thinking about reasons why she can play well in that match. Thanks for the questions and let me know how it goes.

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