Tennis Players Who Worry About Mistakes

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Do you have a young junior tennis star that is not playing with full confidence and appears to be nervous in matches? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. In this video, you're going to learn about what you can do if you have a young athlete that's not playing to his or her potential in competition. You're watching sessions with Doc.

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Mary, who is a sports parent of a junior tennis player, says the My son who plays junior tennis has excessive nervousness caused by his lack of confidence. This lack of confidence prevents him from playing his best in matches. He trains very well. His strokes are pretty decent. He loses to opponents that he is capable of beating in practice. How can I help him gain confidence again? Well, let me start, Mary, and talk about I don't think it's the lack of confidence that is causing the nervousness, but certainly it can contribute to him feeling nervous. Often nervousness or nerves in matches can prevent players from performing their best because of often what we call fear of failure, worrying about the repercussions of losing. So kids tend to tighten up and play very cautiously or tentatively in matches because they don't want to let you down. They don't want to let a coach down. They don't want their opponent to have bragging rights over them where they're going to go. Tell all your son's friends that he got beat. So often it's not so much confidence if he has confidence in his game and put practice. He's struggling to take that confidence out in matches only because he's not playing aggressively and he's not trusting his skills. So the two things you need to get him to do is you need to get him to swing out on the ball and not care about if he loses or not. Certainly easier said than done, but he's got to get over this fear of worrying about what others think, fear of losing fear, fear of putting in all this time and not getting that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow which is ranking or winning matches. Now that's a complex issue and it's hard for me to explain in one short video, but simply he needs to start playing more aggressively with the same intensity and aggressively he has in his practice matches. He needs to bring that to his actual matches and start swinging fully, not short stroking it, not going to the safe stroke, not going to pushing, but going ahead and hitting him and not worrying about missing shots. Missing shots is a big source of anxiety for players because they know if they miss too many shots, they're going to lose games, they're going to lose sets, and eventually they're going to lose matches. He cannot be focused on missing shots. He has to visualize his target, visualize the shot and go ahead and trust his mechanics. Swing out on the ball and let it happen. Play freely as we talk about, just like he does in a practice match. Hope that helps. If you have a question about your mental game, please contact us@peaksports.com and we'll do our best to either answer it via email or in our video blog. Thanks for watching.

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