The Professionals
It's well documented that growing up in junior tennis is a first-order stress event. What about the professional game?
Again, for all competitive tennis players, the journey is long, and the environment is stressful.
One would think that, with their maturation, global success, mad skills, and oodles of experience, professional players would easily handle the demands of the competitive tennis environment, but that just hasn't been the case.
Fans of professional tennis need look no further than the cases of Agassi, Capriati, Osaka, Fish, Anisimova, Barty, Raducanu, and countless others. These world-class players took extended breaks in their careers, the grind of the tour environment overwhelming their emotional coping skills.
On court, we've seen the stress of tennis repeatedly manifest in the head-scratching behavior of Tarango, Djokovic, McEnroe, Kyrgios, and none other than the greatest female player of all time, Serena Williams.
Who could forget the 2019 US Open Final between 23-time major champ Serena Williams and first-time major finalist Naomi Osaka?
Serena walked on the court, about to play one of the more consequential matches of her career. Chasing history, seeking to break the all-time majors record in the finals of the US Open, the stakes couldn't be higher. Compounding Serena's climactic moment was the setting. The match was to be played in the largest, loudest, craziest court in all of tennis, Arthur Ashe Stadium, Flushing Meadows NY, a court she's had historic success on, but also the court of several of her most challenging moments as a professional, badly losing her composure on more than one occasion.
So, how does one prepare for such a charged environment?
One crucial facet of my First Ball To Last program is preparing competitive tennis players of all levels for every imaginable situation they could encounter.
So let's play a game of worst-case scenario.
As a player, are you prepared for absolutely everything not to go your way out there?
Are you prepared for a slow start, a hot opponent, a crazy crowd, some bad calls, (maybe a foot fault at the worst of times), some equally bizarre calls that question your character, (your Coach gets warned for cheating), and every other scenario imaginable or not? Are you prepared for absolutely EVERYTHING not to go your way, yet you’ll refuse to panic, keep your cool, and keep fighting until the very last shot of the last point?
That no matter how badly things are going, you will not go away until you find a way.
That is how every competitive tennis player, from Serena Williams to ourselves, needs to prepare for the highly stressful environment of tennis competition.
For in spite of everything she's accomplished, you, Serena Williams, are about to enter the most stressful competitive environment in all of tennis. This environment is one you have a history in, some amazing, some not so amazing, with the entire sporting world watching.
How does one prepare for such an experience? We saw what can happen to Serena when a player is unprepared. She lost track of her primary purpose of competition (conduct herself from first ball to last in ways that allow her the best chance at success)
It was not Serena's first rodeo, so she should have known better, yet she was unprepared for the intense stress of the moment. This is a telling testament to how hard it can be to apply what we know in the heat of the moment, even for someone as accomplished as Serena Williams.
The Serena case may seem extreme, but think about yourself momentarily. Think about all the different competitive scenarios you may face. Playing a friend, playing a rival, playing the top seed, playing a pushover, playing in front of friends, playing in front of foes, playing with a struggling partner, playing cheaters, playing fist pumping rah rahs and so many more, where a tennis match all of a sudden becomes a test of emotional and stress management. Being unprepared for the moment's peculiarities can overwhelm us and will adversely affect our performance.
The Stress of the Environment. If not prepared, it can get the best of us..
To succeed at tennis, players must regularly make themselves perfectly vulnerable to highly uncertain outcomes under enormously stressful conditions. Players must be able to put every fiber of their being into an activity that frequently isn't going to go their way, week in and week out. Giving the best of yourself to an endeavor and having it not be good enough is a unique pain. It's not for everyone, but it can be for you if we apply the tenets of my program.
A running joke in our coaching industry. If parents are going to place their kid into such a stressful environment, they best have their act together... And if they really had their act together, they'd never subject their kid to so much stress.
But let's put a new spin on this. If they had their act together, they'd make sure right from the first ball that they fully understood the environment they were putting their child in and prepared them and themselves thoroughly for all that could transpire.
And that is what FBTL is all about. A proactive preventative program that prepares tennis players for what lies ahead. We've spent too long assuming players will figure all this out on their own when the historical record screams from the top court that's just not true.
Predicting the future is a losing game. With the recent ascent of AI, who knows what society will look like in 10,15,20 years
But after spending 50 years in the tennis industry, I know that tennis's emotional side hasn't changed.. Better yet, we at FBTL know precisely what's going to happen.
Knowing this, why do we continue to leave so much of a player’s emotional development to chance?
It no longer needs to be this way...