How To Regain Confidence After Losing a Tennis Match

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Do you have young junior tennis players that lose confidence when they give up a set or when they lose badly in a tennis match? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. In today's session I answer a question from a sports parent named Sandy. Sandy would like me to help her get her self confidence back after a tough loss. Here's the question I received from Sandy. I have a problem with my 14 year old daughter. She lost her confidence after losing badly in a tennis tournament. She just played another match and she was up in the first set, 5:3. Then it became 5:5 and she was up in the tie break 6:2 and eventually lost 10:8 and in the second set she just didn't fight and lost 6:2. What can I do to give her back her self confidence?

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Well, I've talked about this in previous podcasts obviously because it's very important that your kids have self confidence in sports and not allow that confidence to go up and down like a roller coaster where things are going well and they're feeling confident or they're losing a set or they're losing a game and they don't feel confident. That's not real confidence in sports. When it's going up and down rapidly. And that sounds like what's going on with your daughter a little bit is that depending on what's happening in the match, her confidence is reacting to that. In addition, the reason why we call it self confidence is because it has to come from within. Now I know parents and coaches can affect other athletes confidence either in a good way or in a bad way. So I know that athletes do rely on others for their confidence. However, it's not the best option. The best option is, like I said, it comes from within herself. It's called self confidence. That means really that you can't give her confidence back. As you stated in your question, she has to be able to earn that self confidence back and start believing in her skills and believing in her abilities. Now if she bases all her confidence on winning and losing, then certainly her confidence is going to go up and down during tournaments depending on how she's doing. But do you really want her to base it strictly on her win, loss record. And I would say no, there's where you can come in and start talking about where does she get confidence from? She gets confidence from her practice and from her training, maybe from her work ethic. Maybe she gets confidence from working on her strokes with her coach, for example. I want you to focus on those other things that can help her feel confident. Is she a quick player? Meaning does she have a lot of skills physically where she can run down balls? Is she a consistent player? How are her strokes, her serve, her return of serve? Instead, refocus her on those things which she feels like she possesses in the game rather than focusing so much on the outcome. Because as you know, there's a lot of good players in the junior tennis circuit and you can't really control ultimately whether you're going to win or lose. But she can control how hard she works, how much she works on her fitness, her service, her volleys, all those things that we put under the kind of the preparation category. So focusing more on her preparation, her practice, what strengths that she has as a player will allow her to have that more stable level of confidence that we talk about that we want athletes to have. Confidence is not based upon the last tournament or the last match she played. Confidence is based upon months and months of practice and training and experience, if not years and years of practice, training and experience. So you certainly want her to understand that lesson so she can be more on the steady train of confidence and not the roller coaster. Thanks for your question and good luck with her game.

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