How To Deal With An Arrogant Opponent

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Do you tend to get distracted and put all your mental energy into what your opponent's doing or how your opponent's acting and that ultimately causes you to become frustrated and not perform up to your ability? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn for the Tennis Psychology Podcast. In today's session, I answer a question from Jay who wants to know how to deal with a cocky or arrogant opponent. Here's the question that I received from Jay. He says he's got a couple of issues that he struggles with to perform against opponents that he doesn't like. He says if I come across someone who is cocky or arrogant or if they think they are better than me or don't respect me, I tend to waste more of my mental energy getting frustrated with them rather than focusing on my game. Do you have any tips on how I can approach and deal with this? I'm playing one of these type of players coming up and so your help would be used instantly.

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Jay, it's not uncommon. I mean, you're one of the many players that I see, especially in the junior ranks, that get rattled with who is across the net, whether they don't like the person or the person is acting in a certain way or yelling too many come ons or just the tone of their voice of the opponent across the net can irritate and irk some players. I've seen this over and over again. Now some players, I feel like they don't do it on purpose. They're not trying to rattle your cage. However, there are players that will play mind games and try and rattle your cage on purpose. So. But in either case, what it says is you're placing too much of your focus on who's across the net and how that person is reacting to you or how that person is reacting to maybe winners that they hit. And so you really have a split focus. What is that split focus? Well, part of your focus is on playing the point, but then the other part of your focus is on your opponent across the net that you don't like that opponent or that opponent doesn't respect you in some way or they think they're better than you, then that's a problem. When you have that split focus, when you step out onto the court, you need to be completely focused on your abilities, your talents, your strengths, and then your game plan. I think the fact that they're rattling you and getting inside your head even before you step out on the court, that's a problem. So when you approach that type of an opponent, you essentially got to go out there and be more objective in terms of who's across the net and not get sucked into the emotionality of that. Just because they're acting cocky or arrogant doesn't mean that they don't respect you. And, you know, and that that's a whole nother issue too, is, you know, you worrying about them respecting you. That, that's a long story. But the bottom line is if you respect yourself and you respect your own game, then you don't need it from other people. So we'll have to leave that for a separate podcast in and of itself. But once you step on the court, it's all about one thing. What are the tactics and what are the strategies that are going to play into your hand in terms of the match, what's going to help you succeed in that match? So you need to do a much better job of defining what it is that you're going to focus on. You said, I need to be focusing on my game, and that's exactly right. You just haven't taken the next step to define what that means to focus on your game. So, for example, when you're serving, it's really about understanding your strengths and understanding your opponents and being able to hit the serve that you feel is going to serve you best, whether it's the serve location or whether it's a type of serve that's going to serve you best. That's really the only thing that's important there other than the execution of that serve. You have to have a game plan that is going to benefit you. If you're on the service line thinking about, oh, that arrogant or that cocky son of a gun, that's not going to help you focus on what you need to focus on. So a lot of times what you're going to need to do do in that situation is to refocus. When you start thinking about your opponent or your opponent's demeanor or your opponent's attitude, essentially tell yourself that's not important to executing this next point or executing this next serve or executing this next return. Whatever the scenario is, you have to continue to refocus back on your tactics your game, plan your strategy for the match and not get sucked into focusing so much on your opponent's demeanor. Thanks for the question, and good luck with your tennis game.

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