The Most Common Problem for Junior Players

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Welcome to session number 69 of the Tennis Psychology Podcast. Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn, and in today's session, I help a parent whose child struggles when he loses a couple games in a row and gets upset and frustrated during the match, a very common problem for junior tennis players.

When my son is playing well but suddenly loses a game or two, he gets very upset, loses his focus and hurts his chance of winning the match. How do I help him? 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.

This is a very common challenge for junior tennis players, and I see it all the time. The first place you have to start to help your son is look at some of the expectations he has about playing a match, because expectations are really the root cause or what sabotages athletes to become upset and frustrated even before they go into the match. So it's kind of like the mindset they take into the match is going to dictate some of the reactions, emotional control, things that they have going on during the match. And in this case, he thinks, or I'm going to make an assumption that he thinks that when he's up in a match, he has to close it out and his opponent cannot make a run on him or cannot make, you know, score two games in a row on him. There's some type of expectation here that's driving his thinking. And when it happens, he's up maybe 4, 2, and his opponent makes a run and ties it 4, 4 or goes up 5, 4. He gets upset with that because it doesn't match in his mind what he expected or what his standards are for his play. And this emotional control issue, obviously, as you've seen, can really lead to some devastating problems with athletes because now they shut down mentally, they. They get frustrated, they change their game plan, they start over hitting the ball, they start being too aggressive, they start being too conservative with their game and start pushing it back. So there's a lot of things that can happen once an athlete gets in that frustrated state of mind, and most of them are not good things. So that's the first step, is to manage the expectations that are underlying some of the emotional control issues he's having. The next thing that you need to work on is you need to help him understand that that game is in the past. There's nothing he can do about that last game and there's no sense dwelling on it. Dwelling on that is only going to cause him to stay stuck in the past and to continue to be frustrated. So he has to move on. If it's 4 4, he still has a great chance of winning the set and he has to go on with confidence and composure. But the only way for him to go on with confidence and composure is to make that lost game alright in his mind temporarily. He needs to say, okay, it's done with. I didn't play a great game, but that's okay. I can adjust and I can come back and I can win the next game. So it always has to be focused on what's next, the next shot, the next game, the next set. Like for example, I tell my daughter, if you lose the first set, that's okay. Just try to win the second set and get it to a tie breaker. And then rely on your skills and rely on your confidence in the tiebreaker to win the match overall. Because they play a third set tiebreaker in Florida here in junior tennis. So manage the expectations. Help him release the frustration or the anger of the drop games by making it okay in his mind and then look forward to and move on to the next game with confidence. Hope that helps. Thanks for the question and good luck with your game.

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