Categories: Tennis parentsTennis training

The Parent Is the Key to the Tennis Success of a Kid

The Parent Is the Key to the Tennis Success of a Kid

The key to the tennis success of a kid, is the parent, and I can tell you most are doing a poor job. In the triangle (coach, kid, parent) two of the three parts know their job, but the parent does not, that is the weakest link in the path for a child.

Parents make the first mistake by hiring the wrong coach, problem is they don’t know he/she is bad and also don’t learn or spend the time to know if he/she is bad. (By the way the majority of you will hire bad coaches and waste time in the process).

Then the poor kid enters a cycle in which if lucky you get a great coach if not you get a coach who likes to win a lot or is pressured to win. In my opinion a good coach understands the basic path for a tennis kid. The athlete comes before the tennis player.

What this means is the good coach encourages the athlete to be to spend more time developing the athlete ( that means less tennis lessons) so he can be a better tennis player, the bad coaches encourage 5-6 day practices and only are selling hype. Parents don’t know they are being sold hype and buy more hype not helping the kid.

Then the parents also fail to understand this basic concept, kids love to compete, parents love to compare, so in this second huge error of the parents is they create the “compare” mentality which of course hurts the child. There is always someone better than you. The rule for tennis is “if its not fun, don’t play”. But, parents fail to understand this as well.

Then the errors continue as the parents never bother to explain to the kids that it is a horrible business and feed dreams that will not happen. I am not saying don’t encourage a dream, I am saying “stop feeding the idea that they will be winning an Oscar, and spending money as if were going to happen” because most likely they will not.

The worst mistake parents make is pay for everything, new racquets, new shoes, academy lessons, trips to Spain, etc. This failure to understand that the secret sauce in tennis is “hunger” and the parents do everything to make sure the kids never feel the need to be hungry(for something).

Then, another gigantic mistake parents make is take them out of school, thinking that’s the way to get more practice, big mistake, if I told you that none of your kids will be pros, you then hurt the child even more as he will be an uneducated 20 year old, with very little chance of becoming a high earning individual, which is what we all want for our kids happiness.

The last big mistake they make is then hire these big name academy coaches, shelling out $250-$400 hr. for learning a forehand. Are you serious? If your kid is any good you as a parent will have made the right choices for them, for his coach, and for your own money, and all those involve making tennis fun, that is it. How many of you reading this can say, you are not making those mistakes?