Tennis Confidence When Competition Gets Tougher

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Welcome to session number 98 of the Tennis Psychology Podcast. I'm your mental coach, Dr. Patrick Cohn. Do you have any young junior tennis players that are aging up into a new age division or group and they're struggling with their confidence or ability to play in that new group? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. I recently received a question from Randy about competitive junior tennis and he said in junior tennis, confidence in yourself is the most important ingredient to have. How do young players who are just aging into a new division? For example, my son is about to turn 11 and will be playing in the 12 and under for the next two years. How do you help him transition into that new age group and play with confidence?

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Well, it's always a challenge for young juniors to age up into a higher division, especially when when they go from the 10 and unders or now we have 11 unders in Florida to 12 and unders and then even from 12 and under to the 14 and under age group because often there's a big difference in maturation and size at that age. I know my daughter was playing girls when she aged up to the 14s, was playing girls that were probably 12 inches taller than her, a lot bigger than her. She was a small 12 year old and she's playing against 14 year olds. So it is very, very difficult for athletes to do that. The key is to not allow your athlete to become intimidated by the competition or by the size or the power of the girls. And instead you want to make sure that your young athlete is not making comparisons and putting other kids on a pedestal. What I mean by that is often kids will look at other girls or boys and see what they have or what they've done or their ranking and they really compare their skills to kids who they think are better than them, thereby putting them on a pedestal. And then immediately they're behind the eight ball mentally because they feel like that they can't win or that they're going to lose or my recommendation is that instead of going out there and focusing on winning matches that you have your young athlete focus on going out there and doing more manageable tasks that they can do. Maybe you want them to hit more backhand cross courts, for example, or you want them to hit more winners, for example, and be more aggressive. Or maybe you want them to work on their first serve or second serve. My thing is asking athletes to compare themselves to themselves. In other words, the idea is just to get better and better. The other concept that I have is when you're playing against bigger and stronger players, that's going to push you to excel as well. So there's an advantage to that. So you want to turn it around for your young athlete. Instead of them having losing confidence, you want to look at as a way is those bigger players or those stronger players or more experienced players, they're going to push you harder and and it's going to allow you to learn and grow as a player. At least that's my philosophy in terms of aging up in a group, is that you can be able to play at a higher level just because your opponent's at a higher level. So I hope that helps. Thanks for the question and good luck with your game.

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