Understanding the Competitive Tennis Environment
Definition: An environment is a place where an organism makes its home. Otherwise known as a habitat, an environment meets all the conditions an organism needs to thrive. Its your environment. Once you enter, you become a part of it. Don't be a polluter. Preserve and conserve the tennis environment.
For the future of tennis, and any sport for that matter, depends on its ability to provide an environment that fosters healthy emotional development for all generations to come.
Understanding the Competitive Tennis Environment
There are no right or wrong answers here. We are simply trying to establish a baseline score from which to work from. Select the option that best describes you.
I Would Never Put My Kid Through That
It's the Environment...
During Easter break 2011 in sunny Southern California, a client and I were on a backcourt at Rancho Las Palmas Country Club in Rancho Mirage, CA, working on a teaching video with tennis videographer John Yandell for his seminal site Tennisplayer.net. Yet I'm struggling to keep my focus, for off in the distance, I hear the faint echoes of sounds once familiar, the crack of a well-struck ball of high-level junior tennis being played.
On a break, I venture off for a closer look, the hypnotic draw of elite ball striking guiding my way. It’s magnetic, in my DNA, the lure of a bounce, hit, bounce hit, cadence, the sound of squeaking shoes, more break pads than comfort, the guttural grunting exertions of a full-throttle swing. The rhythm, the cadence, it’s the soundtrack of my youth—a fully committed tennis rally. I know of few more beautiful sounds.
The players come into view, two identically clad teens head to toe in the latest Adidas kits. They're professional mini-mes, yet there's nothing mini about them. They're full-grown beasts tearing the cover off each ball. I'm in instant awe at their physical prowess and power. Then a strange thought. That used to be me some 30 years ago, (and pounds) moving like that, swinging like that. Now safely ensconced in adulthood, the mold of middle age well-hardened about me, and another thought appears from the ether. If I'm old enough to be their parents, maybe they're the offspring of peers from my playing days.
A quick perusal of the poster board-sized draws and only one surname rings a bell: Mac Styslinger, the son of old Junior Davis Cup teammate Mark Styslinger. Strong pedigree indeed, and little surprise his son was a favorite to capture the title. I continued scouring the draws, but to my surprise, Styslinger was the only familiar surname from my era. Something seemed amiss about this. I mean, who better to raise the next generation of American tennis talent than those who lived the life before?
Curious, I began reaching out to my tennis peers, asking them why so many chose not to raise their kids in the tennis life that gave us so much. And then I heard the answer that would change the following years of my life.
Talking to a gal friend from my playing days, I asked her why she never put her kids in tennis, and she stated
"I would never put my kids through that."
And her answer cut deep. What is the 'that' she spoke of? What was so traumatizing about the junior tennis experience for so many of my generation, so much so that they felt compelled to protect their kids from the sport that gave us so much?
I'd always known tennis was stressful, traumatizing even. Right on the cusp of breaking through, I succumbed to the pressure, quitting on my dreams with much meaningful tennis not getting played.
But I compartmentalized the experience, not giving it the proper thought it was due. As I continued to ask around, I found more and more of my peers sharing similar sentiments. The life we lived as aspiring young tennis players left some marks. And they'll be damned if they put their kids throught the same "that' they went through.
And so began my exploration of what was unhealthy about our collective tennis environment, whether we have made progress over the past generations, and what can be done to improve the quality of the tennis environment for all parties involved.
It is because the tennis environment is stressful!
In the posts to come, I will explore in detail what it was like growing up in tennis, showcase present-day situations of players succumbing to the stressors of the environment, discuss what improvements tennis has made in this regard, and discuss what we all can do as tennis players to improve the environment we all compete within.
The Junior Tennis Environment: What It Was Like.
An excerpt from my Memoir “You Can Get There From Here”
Each tournament week, the ritual was the same. My morning practices with Dad intensified. Whatever wasn't clicking had increasingly scarce time to get clicking. The night before the tournament, excitement filled the house, for tomorrow, I was going into battle again. I would bluff my way through a distracted half day at school until Dad picked me up, a quick shot home, pack up the car before hitting the interstate for a weekend of pressure-packed possibilities few other kids my age experienced. I was an eleven-year-old kid on a mission… to win a sectional tennis tournament and qualify for Nationals.
Dad was in charge. Slicing through the suburbs of Boston, we were a team with a purpose: find the club, park the car, pop the trunk, grab the gear, find the entrance, enter the club, find the sign...
"Tournament Desk Upstairs".
Then the long, slow walk up the stairs to the lobby, the butterflies of competing replaced by the dread of a possible bad draw. Catch a tough draw, and the all-weekend junior tennis event would be over before it started.
Reaching the upstairs lobby, eyes dart to the walls where the draws hung. Find your age group, scroll down from the top, look for your name, hoping against hope not to draw the top seed in the first round. Parents and their kids huddled together, speaking in soft, hushed tones. I can't hear their conversations, but know exactly what they're saying. They're talking about their draw and their opponents and their pathway to the finals come tourney's end.
Sanctioned tourneys were single-elimination events. If 64 kids entered, 63 would lose, with only that weekend's winner escaping unscathed. To win a 64-draw tourney meant winning six straight matches, between Friday and Sunday, within 48 hours, all of them two out of three tie-break sets, precisely what the professionals played. Once the first ball was hit, the weekend cycle was set. Play, recover, wait to play. Play, recover, wait to play. Rinse repeat. Until you either lost or drove home a champion.
In professional tennis, the court is a busy place. Umpires, linesmen, security, cameramen, officials, broadcasters, ballboys and ballgirls, and thousands of boisterous fans. Not so in junior tennis. It’s just two kids and a can of balls, given basic match instructions and a court assignment, often quite far from the eyes of supervising adults.
I was eleven years old. If I got through Friday's first match, Saturday had three meaningful matches on the schedule. If a couple of those matches ran long (and they always did), I was looking at a 7-8 hour day of stressful tennis competition. Again, I was eleven years old, armed with only a basic understanding of tennis's rules and its traditions of sportsmanship. Yet, tennis's braintrust decided that 11-year-olds should go out there and compete all day entirely by themselves. For tennis has some strange traditions. During tournament play, players are not allowed to leave the court, nor are they allowed to talk to anyone, or to receive any coaching, instruction, or consoling. However, benign encouragement from the stands was permitted if your parents were into that kind of thing.
No, junior tennis was literally the purest form of one-on-one competition, with parents the supply chain, procuring, producing, and delivering products to sustain performance. Water and nutrition from the store, the emergency stringing of the favorite racket between matches. To say nothing of the transportation and clerical duties required for entry and attendance. And most importantly, the time invested. A successful tournament run meant being away from their lives and homes often for three straight days, sitting nervously, impatiently, hanging on every point like they were playing themselves. The investment was extraordinary for all parties involved, the only tangible return on that investment being victories.
With everyone clumped together for such long stretches, tournament sites could be toxic. They brought out the drama in people. Yelling, cheering, excuse making, arguing, backstabbing, gossiping, complaining, the harsh words of verbal abuse...and that was just the parents.
Us kids created our own drama, constantly carrying on, off the court, and on. There was the usual mean girls/bullying/Lord of the Flies/horse play/practical joking stuff kids do when unsupervised. But on the court was where the behavior really heated up—tantrums and breakdowns colored triumphs and defeats. Tennis was a test of skill tempered by a test of nerves. Expectations ran high here. Tennis was a high-ego sport. Alpha Dogs and roadkill. So much bravado, false and otherwise. Yet the historical numbers didn't lie. If you were a top junior in America in the 1970s, you were in the company of future greatness. Who among us would that be?
Hence the nerves. The week of, the night before, on the drive to. Match time, and a cautious, anxious excitement filled the air. Yet always some kid getting sick in the bathroom before a match, or the deer in the headlight freeze of the young and overwhelmed. The human body reacts to stress differently. Let's say some kids handled their shit better than others.
And that applied to the parents too, for they all had their coping skills. The pacer, the panther, the talker, the stalker, the chart keeper, the cheerleader. To watch your flesh and blood compete at tennis, where nothing was given, everything earned, knowing once they walked on that court, there was nothing you could do to affect the outcome. Not to say some didn't try. Parents would cheat. They gave signals. A smile meant approach. A touch of the hat meant move the feet. Not exactly the carrying-ons of a third base coach, but if you watched closely enough, the codes were not hard to break.
Why all the tension, you might ask? As stated, the rankings didn't lie. To win one of these events vaulted a player into the Nationals conversation. Once there, you're among the best in the nation. And being the best in the USA in the mid-1970s meant you were among the best in the world. And though the pathway to professional tennis was a long shot for even the most successful and talented juniors, you were in tournaments with future champions and world number ones. And though it bordered on delusional to start preparing for a professional career at such a young age, to come of age with professional-level skill and athleticism and not be prepared to make the jump would have been downright criminally irresponsible.
So tennis was stressful—stressful to watch and even more stressful to play. With the outcome always unknown, the player who managed the stress best often prevailed. More matches were lost than won, with players often succumbing to the pressure. And it made sense. Human emotions in the extreme can only be experienced in short bursts. One can only swim in stress for so long.
So when tennis matches got stressful, part of every player just wanted the match over, win, lose, or draw, mainly to cease the stress, for competitive tennis often wasn't fun. It was nothing but prolonged anxiety. The whole experience was intense, with the pressure and expectations weighing upon young junior tennis players.
I always felt if a parent was to subject their child to such a challenging environment regularly, they best really have their shit together. Yet if parents really had their shit together, they would never subject their kids to such an environment.
Of course, nobody tells you any of this when you enter your first event. If junior tennis got Yelp reviews, there would be many one-star reviews.
With no manual, everyone's expected to know how to behave. A seat of your pants experiment in growing up. Everybody grab a vine and swing on into the great unknown. A bunch of perfectionist parents grooming perfectionist kids, all trying to play a game perfectly that is impossible to perfect, all the while being expected to behave perfectly.
And it was in this environment I would spend seemingly every weekend of my childhood, going in to battle, junior tennis style. Dad and I. Yet even with my Dad at my side, I often felt outnumbered, like Dad was a double agent, even a traitor at times. He developed this habit at my matches. One thing he despised about the junior tennis scene was parents rooting avidly for their child. He thought it so uncool. So not wanting to look uncool, he made a conscious decision to never clap for me. And I mean never.
He would stare down upon me, arms crossed, head tilted down, expressionless, motionless, his eyes hidden behind his thick glasses, never showing his hand if he approved of what he saw. My focus was supposed to be on beating the kid across the net, yet my far more formidable opponent was vying for my Dad's approval against his absurdly unrealistic expectations. And his just staring down at me stone-faced just magnified how alone I could feel on a tennis court. All I was looking for was a little support, a little approval, a wink or a nod, give me a little hint that I'm doing alright and I'm not going to get yelled at and maybe I could relax and play a little better.
But it would never come. So I developed some bad habits on the tennis court.
Feeling I had to win or else, I started cheating. My fierce desire to win no matter what crossed a line to no matter how. Because losing came with consequences. It put me on the wrong side of my Father's temper, on the wrong side of conditional love. Losing was failing and failure was not acceptable; only success was, and success was not celebrated, but expected.
Even before my matches were completed, I dreaded the long walk back to the clubhouse. The whole process of the last point—shaking hands, gathering my belongings back toward the tournament desk, where all the congregating parents watched—became a breeding ground for my already-developing anxiety. I would never know how I was to be treated; if there was a crowd, I knew I was safe for a bit. If there was a long drive home, it was just a matter of time.
The drive's home were always just the two of us with his verbal lashings often brutal, demeaning, hyper critical, relentless. I would learn in time how to disassociate from them. It became a physiological response. I could feel a force field lower around me, trying to protect me from what I knew was coming. Eventually, he would run out of asshole things to say, leaving me to wallow in silence the remainder of the drive home.
At first, I liked the silences better, for they lacked the sharp-edged words of his rants. But I learned over time that the anger and yelling would eventually end. But the silences? They could last the whole drive home, into the evening, the following day, the entire next week ahead, with no end in sight.
In time, I sought some control over how I was punished. I would scream out in unhinged anger in hopes he'd just spank me and get it over with. So I learned how to misbehave, on the court and off the court, so he would get angry at me, yell at me, threaten to hit me, for anything was better than the invisible silences. I learned early if I broke a racket in a match, I would get spanked with that broken racket when we got home and the punishment would be over. So I started breaking lots of rackets back then, so I could get yelled at, and spanked, and spanked hard, just to get it over with, anything to avoid the silences, all because I lost a fucking tennis match.
And I was 11 years old.
So I cheated a lot in my early junior tennis days, even in matches that were not close. I just wanted them over with as quickly as possible and as convincingly as possible, for winning ugly came with consequences, too. I was playing more than one opponent. I was also playing against my Dad's expectations And if he didn't expect perfection, he expected something damn near close. To be perfect was the goal, every time out, every match a win, every set won at love, every game won without loss of a point, every point won on a winner. I learned early the pathway toward approval in my house was to be perfect.
So, in matches when I was ahead convincingly and my opponents would start to make a comeback, I would cheat them. Blatantly too. If the cheating didn't work completely, and my opponent was able to get some games off me unfair and square, I always had my ace in the hole. In tennis, he who wins picks up the balls, and he who picks up the balls reports the score. And sometimes my matches would be on distant courts where Dad may not have seen my play that clearly. So I got good at coming up with a final score that was far different from the real score, but a score that would keep me out of trouble, from being yelled at, criticized, belittled, or silenced.
Sadly, I was too young to understand then that my opponents might have been getting treated like I was getting treated; that they, too, had consequences for losing, for not being perfect. That when we cracked a can of balls to play a match, we were all fighting much bigger battles than the ones on our assigned courts.
Yet I knew my cheating ways were wrong, my youthful ethics still a work in progress. But cheating seemed to be the lesser of my evil choices, for the battle I was fighting was so much bigger than the match I was playing.
And I was only 11 years old, already making hopelessly doomed choices for my self-preservation.
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...
What The Experts Say
Summarizing Current Scholarship On The Stress of the Tennis Environment
Adolescent Athletes experience a great number of stressors during competitions and otherwise, including constant social evaluation and criticism, family and peer influences, and unrelenting academic commitments.
One stress and coping model found that a stressor's appraisal consists of numerous judgments regarding its threat or challenge to the athlete, its potential benefit or harm and the athlete's perceived control. This, in turn, influences the choice of which coping strategy to select.
Under the unrelenting stress of competition, athletes have been found to use various coping strategies to manage said stress.
The three most common are...
1) A problem-focused strategy: involving directly addressing the source of stress to nullify it (opponent is serving bombs, we try guessing or changing returning positions or returning styles (block instead of swing)
2) An emotion-focused strategy: regulating one's own emotions in response to a stressor. (Guy is serving bombs, I talk to myself about weathering the storm, to be patient, that he'll cool off soon and not get deflated, my opponent is allowed to play well too, just hang in there and don't panic)
3) An avoidance-focused strategy: aiming to physically or psychologically disengage or distance oneself from the source of stress and one's emotional response. (Guy is serving bombs. Player wants out, tanking or whining. Or starts blaming, the balls, the surface, swearing off fast court events forever, committing only to clay)
Succumbing to the environment
Being unable to adapt to the stress of tennis competition can lead to athletes experiencing highly unpleasant and counter-productive emotions during play (e.g., fear, anxiety, anger, shame), reducing the enjoyment of tennis and competition.
Most importantly, the inability to manage stressors has been cited as a significant cause of both athletic burnout and dropout. (Never make important decisions when upset.) At FBTL, one of our first lessons learned is we learn to pause when agitated. Feel the feelings, cycle through the feelings, return to baseline, and THEN plot a course of action.
Not all stress is bad. Healthy responses to stress help us build much-needed resiliency to adversity as we go through life. Maladaptive responses to stress raise our concerns, not just for the individual athlete but for the long-term health of tennis overall.
The future of tennis, or any sport for that matter, depends on its ability to provide a safe environment that fosters healthy emotional development for all participants.
When feeling threatened, our bodies prepare us to respond by increasing our heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormones, particularly cortisol. When a young child’s stress response systems are activated within an environment of supportive adults, these physiological effects are buffered and brought back down to a safe baseline. The result is the development of a healthy stress response system. However, suppose the stress response is extreme and long-lasting, and healthy parental buffering relationships are unavailable to the child. In that case, the result can be damaged, weakened systems and brain architecture with lifelong repercussions.
This is often referred to as toxic stress. Toxic stress and competitive tennis are a dangerous and volatile mix that rarely ends well for the susceptible player.
Research on the biology of healthy adolescent development can be derailed by excessive or prolonged activation of stress response systems in the body and brain. Such exposure to toxic stress can have damaging effects on learning, behavior, and health across a person's lifespan.
Academic research underscores the significant psychological risks associated with unhealthy competitive environments in tennis, particularly for junior and professional players. Key findings include:
1. Burnout and Emotional Exhaustion
Intense training schedules and constant pressure to perform can lead to burnout among tennis players. This condition is characterized by emotional and physical exhaustion, diminished sense of achievement, and a devaluation of the sport. Burnout hampers performance and can result in players withdrawing from the sport entirely.
2. Elevated Stress and Anxiety Levels
Competitive tennis environments often emphasize winning as the sole indicator of success, fostering a "winning is everything" mentality. Such an atmosphere can heighten stress and anxiety, particularly during high-pressure situations. This stress can impair performance and negatively affect one's emotional well-being.
3. Emotional Health Challenges in Professional Tennis
Professional tennis players face unique challenges, including rigorous travel schedules, financial pressures, and the demands of constant competition. The nomadic lifestyle and structural instabilities within the professional circuit exacerbate these challenges.
4. Impact on Adolescent Development
Adolescent tennis players are particularly vulnerable, as the pressures of competition coincide with critical developmental stages. The combination of high expectations, identity formation, and academic responsibilities can create a perfect storm for emotional health struggles.
5. Importance of Emotional Health
Integrating emotional intelligence support into tennis training programs is crucial. Practices such as mindfulness have been shown to reduce burnout symptoms among all players. Providing access to sports psychologists and fostering open discussions about emotional well-being and health can help players develop resilience and cope with the pressures of competition.
Q and A Session
What You Can Do To Improve Tennis' Environment
Improving environments are common in society today. Schools have anti-bullying campaigns, smoking in public has been eliminated (remember when planes had smoking sections? Yuk!!), corporal punishment at school and home is now seriously frowned upon, over-the-top Coaching behavior like Woody Hayes and Bobby Knight is no longer tolerated, and the noise pollution of leaf blowers is on a tight leash, with the clank of Pickleball hopefully not far behind.
So, it should come as little surprise that tennis has made strides to improve its environment. Parents must be on their best behavior; the consequences for poor line calling have risen dramatically. Competition formats have eased, with more team events to foster community while shortening matches to enhance players’ overall experience.
As a tennis lifer, I'm constantly hearing about improving the overall competitive tennis environment. I've compiled a short list of things I think every player could do themselves to improve the tennis environment.
Here are ten things a tennis player or parent can do to help improve the competitive tennis environment, making it healthier, more respectful, and growth-oriented for everyone involved:
1. Model Respectful Behavior
Always show respect to opponents, officials, coaches, and other parents—win or lose. This sets a positive tone and teaches good sportsmanship.
2. Emphasize Process Over Outcome
Focus on effort, improvement, and personal growth rather than just winning. Celebrate small victories in attitude, discipline, and consistency.
3. Promote Positive Self-Talk
Encourage players to speak kindly and constructively to themselves, especially during adversity. Parents can model this by how they react to challenging moments.
4. Cheer for Great Play on Both Sides
Applauding strong effort or shot-making from an opponent can normalize mutual respect and reduce hostility.
5. Create a Calm Post-Match Routine
Avoid emotionally charged conversations immediately after matches. Let the player decompress before offering feedback or asking questions.
6. Keep Perspective in Check
Remind each other often that tennis is a long journey—one match doesn’t define a career. This reduces pressure and anxiety in competition.
7. Build Community, Not Rivalry
Encourage friendships with other players and families. Treat competitors as teammates in the broader tennis experience, not enemies.
8. Work on Emotional Intelligence
Help players name and regulate their emotions. Emotional control supports better performance and reduces toxic behaviors on the court.
9. Prioritize Mental Health and Well-Being
Sleep, nutrition, rest, and life balance are critical. Encouraging these creates a culture of care over burnout.
10. Be a Role Model, Not a Coach (Unless You Are One)
Parents should support, not instruct from the sidelines. Trust the coaching process, and make sure your presence reduces stress, not increases it.
RETEST
Understanding the Competitive Tennis Environment
There are no right or wrong answers here. We are simply trying to establish a baseline score from which to work from. Select the option that best describes you.