Interview with Mili Veljkovic, tennis technique expert coach in Partizan Tennis Club. Part 2

Q.: You are tennis coach and the same time you are a Sports professor. What is your major in Science? How it helps you with your coaching work?

A.: Firstly, I am not university professor otherwise I would have to be doctor (PhD). But I am adviser to few sport university professors – that’s something means too.
Few years ago I took post graduated studies and I am doing researches and with that data I may one day go for PhD if I discover something more than I have so far, because what I did so far is maybe “a knock on the door for PhD theses” . Maybe … it is enough for tennis PhD, but not enough for sport science yet. Anyhow I promised to myself that I would go for the academic title after I receive some world tennis recognition – you see how modest I am.

One thing I am sure of – I would never be able to understand the essence of tennis i.e. sport the way I do without diving deep into scientific laws. Five years ago, my twenty years of international teaching made me grow up into experienced coach but the turning point and the “switch” that had happened to me, in the beginning of my post graduated studies in 2006, twenty years after my university graduation (Why so late? Why not and what is late for learning? OK, also the dean was my tennis student, he loved my way of teaching and he offered me half scholarship fee since I was in veteran national selection and people say that only Roger Federer plays more elegant than me … As if! : )

Anyhow, when we had to write an essay for the psychology class, we were supposed to choose a subject and to use any kind of survey’s methods. Since I was already experienced tennis pro who had thought thousands of people of all levels around the globe, I decided to use that and I picked the subject that was in my mind for many years:

Why people don’t – or don’t want to play nicer and why are tennis not more massive, since it is as popular and healthy as a recreation?

Of course, I asked only those people who were somehow involved with tennis and those who answered that they liked it but never tried. We contacted 300 people in seven countries where I coached (Serbia, US, Croatia, France, Greece, England, Swiss) and some of the main questions were:

1. What made you stop play tennis?
2. Why did you stop taking lessons?
3. Why you never started with lessons since you play active recreational?
4. So, you say you like it, but why you never started and tried to play tennis?

The answers were so educational, inspiring and intriguing that made me say hmmm : )
That was when it ‘hits” me for the first time while the most important facts are:

• majority of tennis players are inpatient with seriously short “fuse” when they are working on their improvement (we all know – old habits are difficult to correct),
• they don’t know how long it will take to fix mistakes and how much it will cost them – but they want to know,
• they don’t know how will they look like when they finish with lessons and what is the first satisfactory goal supposed to look like – but they want to know,
• after every played lesson they doubt more and more if they are capable of getting it,
• if they have already changed few teacher – they expect disappointment and the next teacher one is getting less time to show some concrete results,
• they expect that learning / correcting can take to long time and they are not sure whose fault is this – theirs or teachers,
• what if they simply can’t do it – if they are no talented enough – the famous self esteem issue!