How Can Athletes Bounce Back From Missed Points?

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Do you have an athlete that gets upset with losing a point and sometimes gives up in the match? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn and in this session of the Tennis Psychology Podcast I'm going to answer a question from Paulina who has an 11 year old tennis player.

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Here's the question that I received from Paulina. She says, my son's 11 years old and he's a good player and very good technique. He's agile and passionate about tennis. The problem is that he gets upset when he loses a point and if he starts losing games he tends to give up. What can I do to help him improve this behavior? Paulina, thanks for submitting your question to me. I really appreciate it. This is super common with young tennis juniors who are super competitive in the sport and have high expectations for their performance. I know you also communicated with me the fact that he feels some pressure to maintain a high ranking or to get a high ranking in tennis. So that tells me that he's very focused on the outcome. He's focused on his ranking, he's focused on winning, and he's having trouble just playing one point at a time and playing in the moment. So the first thing that you need to do with these kids that get upset easy and often tank in matches is ask them a few questions about their expectations about how they need to play the match. In other words, you might find that losing is unacceptable for them, that they can't be in a losing position. You might find that they always expect to win. You might get the answer that they expect to hit the ball cleanly every time or not make any unforced errors or double faults. In other words, they might have some unrealistic expectations about their performance that cause them to get upset when they don't perform up to their expectations. I call these strict expectations in my work, and expectations are often the root of athletes feeling dissatisfied or athletes feeling frustrated with their performance because their performance missing an easy short ball doesn't match the expectation of I should always be able to handle the short ball and hit the short ball in. So when there's that discrepancy they tend to unravel because they feel like they're not playing to their expectations. In addition, they feel like they're not playing to others expectations. So once you find out from your athlete what those expectations are for him or her, then the next step is to try and help them manage those expectations. By managing the expectations, you're trying to get them to replace those expectations with something that's going to be more helpful for them to focus on. So you might say things like, well, just, you know, let's focus on good footwork or early preparation. But they have to understand why those expectations are causing them so much heartache and so much pain and eventually tanking in the match. So find some smaller things in their game that they can focus on that are more process oriented, like good footwork or setting up early or, you know, good margin over the net or hitting the ball deep, whatever it may be. Make those more important than those outcome expectations that your athlete has. Hope that's helpful. Hey, if you have any questions on the mental game of tennis, please contact me at my main site, peaksports.com and click on Contact Us and send over your question. And also, we've got lots of articles and videos and podcasts@sportspsychologytennis.com and I'll see you there.

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