Jeff More Interview on Emotional Toughness in Tennis

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Hi.

This is Dr. Patrick Cohn with Peak Performance Sports. And today I have a special guest. His name is Jennifer Jeff Moore. He coached for 20 years at the University of Texas, the women's tennis team, and they won two NCAA championships and appeared in two NCAA finals, advanced to the Final Four three times, reached the Elite Eight three times, and won 18 conference titles in his 23 years. Quite a record. And Jeff was also named national coach of the year and was conference coach of the year ten times. Today Jeff is a leadership consultant and he helps leaders with high performance teams. His website is moreleadership.com.

Improve your mental game quickly by visiting sportspsychologytennis.com today and claim a free tennis psychology report titled 6 Unforced Mental Game Errors Tennis Players make between points.

Jeff, thanks for joining me today.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

So obviously it sounds like that you integrated a lot of the mental skills and the mental training as a coach with your players who influenced you in terms of the mental game and instilling a positive mental game in the players that you coached.

Well, two people, my high school basketball coach who is very much in really, what's the problem in all sports. And this has been the case forever. The conventional approach to coaching is to do drills, block drills, serial pattern drills, and then you just skip right ahead to playing sets or playing scrimmaging, whatever the sport may be. And what's lacking is any sort of point or game situation or point scenario, intensive would be point scenarios to actually create drills where you have to make decisions. And my college coach, Jim Verdict, who was a World War II veteran, actually a Stanford All American football player who took up tennis late and became the greatest college tennis coach ever, but took it up late, great competitor. He was probably the biggest influence on me because his practices were tougher than the games. He was a little bit big on technique, but I took it to the next level by creating connector drills between repetitive drilling and actually scrimmaging because basically my home. Well, my, what really bothers me today is that I don't think, and I think this is something cultural. I don't think we want to win badly enough anymore. I just don't think the desire to win is deep enough. And I think the desire to create a perception of winning, create a perception of greatness is stronger than the desire to actually work toward it. Because a great practice in any sport revolves around the mental dynamic, which to me is decision making and problem solving, not the physical dynamic, which is a lot of running and a lot of reps of technique. Because if you make someone think and make decisions, which is actually what happens in a competition, it's extremely frustrating. And that in turn creates emotional stress. By revolving your practice design around the mental dynamic, you create not only physical stress, but emotional stress. So you've got those three dynamics, physical, mental, and emotional, in operation at all times, just as you do when you're actually competing. And in that way, you're creating a positive transfer from training to competition. You cannot create an optimal positive transfer without a context, without, without designing your practices around the mental dynamic. It's just. It's not optimal.

Well, it's so key because so many players that will come in and say, God, I look like a star in practice, but then I get in competition and then I'm a different player altogether. I mean, sometimes it's fear of failure, sometimes it's perfectionism. But I believe it's what you're addressing here too is they're not practicing in a way that's going to transfer over to competition. I remember, you know, when my daughter started here in Florida, she's a top player in the 12s. She's going to be playing at the 14s now, but the coach would only drill them on mechanics all the time. Very little footwork, very little point strategy. So she would get in tournaments and she would be much better technically with her strokes than her opponent. However, she didn't know how to play tennis.

No, no. And they don't. And that's where we fall. And this is in all sports, almost all sports. This is why we're not number one. How many sports are we number one in the world in where the other countries actually play the sport? You know, rule out tackle football. I mean, it took an act of congress and Mike Krzyzewski's considerable team building skills to beat Spain in basketball. Come on. And it's because of what you just said. It's because the kids do not know how to play the game and they're not emotionally tough because they haven't been forced to make decisions in practice. It really comes down to that. It's a lot harder. And in that way, I think the way you set up practice can build what I call emotional toughness. Because really the mental to me is the thinking part and it creates frustration. So that was my big thing. Because I think coaching is way, way overplayed. The role of the coach is way overdone today because of that fact. Because not enough of the onus is put on the players. I would set up drills where the players had to figure it out themselves. You know, of course, in the old days, you didn't always have a coach. You kind of had to. And those players were better equipped to compete.

Yeah. The great Seve Ballesteris, who recently passed away in golf, he was said to have one of the greatest imaginations of all time. Well, look at how he learned. He would go out with three clubs and try to manufacture shots to get him around the golf course with just three clubs in his hand. Another kind of an example of what you're talking about.

That's a great example.

He just learned how to play, learn how to manufacture shots with great imagination. So let's talk about some of the things about emotional resilience. When you talk about emotional resilience. Let's define exactly for our what you mean by emotional resilience as it relates to tennis or other athletes.

Well, ideally in competition you want to have a balance between intensity and poise. And to maintain that, you need to have the ability to cope with the ups and downs, with the things that you cannot control, the weather, your opponent. And you need to be absolutely focused on the things you can control. And again, we would focus on problem solving in practice. For instance, you are familiar with tennis, I guess. Sounds like very familiar with it. I would construct a second serve return drill where you're hitting all second serves and I'm obviously returning all second serves in the game. But I don't win the game until I win five points outright. Like you can't touch the ball. So what does a player begin doing? Player begins by trying to put the return away. Well, you've got a pretty decent second serve. That's not going to work. You're going to at least get a racket on it. See, I've got to get five clean winners. So what? And I sit back as the coach and I wait for the player, which typically was a freshman, as she tries to figure this out. And pretty soon she figures out, you know, maybe I hit my return in one corner, ball comes back a little shorter, hit the next shot in the other corner and come to the net and then put the volley away. Then they figure out you're going to go corner to corner. So maybe now I need to go behind on my second shot or pin her. So there's a mental dynamic there. And There's a frustration level that I force the players to figure out on their own. Not that you don't have to give them guidelines or parameters because they're the ones that are going to have to go out and play. So we would put pressure on players and then we would begin rating them on games like that. I didn't go into all the details of the game, but there was both. Players can score in that game. And you know, if you're the second server and you get to five before I do, that's embarrassing because you're the one hitting the shot. You see what I'm saying? So we would have games like that and I would rate the players based on how they did in these different games. And that would be part of the way of picking a lineup because I needed to see how they would operate not just in a set, but in these different scenarios combined. And it would build emotional resilience because they were ready to go out and play and to play to win and to play a certain pattern without worrying about how they were hitting the ball or what their opponent was doing and so on and so forth.

Well, and you might be defining play to win differently than I do, but I see a lot of kids today that they care too much about. So invested in winning that that's all they can focus on and they get distracted and sidetracked. So when you say play to win, do you mean just focusing on success?

No, actually I think kids today, I think youth sports. Don't get me started because the real, it's just so sad because athletes in large numbers no longer take life lessons into the workplace. And whether they won Super Bowls or were last on the bench, that's something that used to happen and it used to make for great leaders in the workplace. But athletes aren't leading anymore. The geeks, but not enough about that. And the problem is in sports, because of the youth sports culture and the self esteem movement, is that again, it's more important to appear to be successful. So if a player loses, it doesn't hurt. It doesn't really hurt. It's embarrassing. So it's kind of a fear of losing, but it's more an embarrassment. It's a status and players are fearful. There's not a deep seated desire to win because if you really, really want to win, you'll do what it takes. You'll suffer to win. And players don't suffer in practice. They may suffer physically. They may run all day or hit it. You know, if your practice is centered around hitting 100 balls and running 17 sprints. Does that make you tougher? Sure. But what it makes you tougher to do is come back the next day and hit 101 and run 18. It doesn't prepare you to play. And the problem is so many coaches and so many sports are coaching that way, you know, and some are successful because their players believe in some and other coaches aren't believed in. That's kind of the big difference. But very few coaches are coaching in this country, are coaching properly. So we're not getting the most out of our players. We're not challenging them mentally. Every shot is precious. Every shot should be had, should have a purpose. There's not enough of that. Try to get off on a tangent.

No, this is great. Why not just have players do practice sets versus some of the drills that you're talking about? Because that's what they're going to do in competition. You would think you would want them to play, play a lot of practice games and a lot of practice sets. Is there something beyond that?

Well, yeah, I think basically, let's take the example in tennis of a forehand or you could say jump shot in basketball. Pick a skill. There's no such thing as a generic forehand. So you have to start out if you're going to practice cross court forehands. There's no such thing as a generic. There's no such thing as a cross court forehand. And this gets into my training system. But there's either a point building forehand where I'm pushing you back because I'm neutral, I'm back in the court, or there's a capitalizing forehand where I'm up in the court and I'm pulling you wide. Or there's an attacking forehand when I'm coming to the net. So what you do is you create a mindset. Again, back to the mental where what's the purpose of this shot? So you kind of get away from after they've learned the basics of the stroke, you get away from this repetition of generic, bland stroking which never happens in a match. And then you go into game situations. So you break it down into what I call point building, capitalizing attack and finish those different areas and you just create scenarios and then you play a set where you kind of put it all together.

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