I’m (Peter) now 66 and I’m still looking for the best way to coach. I’m not satisfied at the moment and I have a lot of knowledge, but I’m still looking for new ways.

For me a common misconception is practicing with no purpose. Probably a lot of coaches are practicing how they liked to practice in their own career or simply how their coach used to run the practices with them as players.

But the game has developed over the years and of course, the practice court has to be updated as well.

An example is that a Porsche from 1980 is different from the one in 2020. If you always do what you have always done, you always get the same results.

This article is supposed to give an overview of modern content of tennis practice. It’s a result of my (Peter) practical experience as a coach on a national and international level combined with the latest research available in sport science.

Why do we need a new priority on the tennis practice court?

The evolution of tennis players has been enormous. The high level of performance is the result of higher quality in training and in planning. Therefore, we as tennis coaches have to ask for modern input for practices. We have to be open for new ways. Continuous learning throughout our careers is a must for us as coaches to be successful.

The development of the service is a good example on the evolution of the performance in tennis. Objectively measurable characteristics for the 1st and 2^nd serve have improved during the last 20 years to beat the precision, number of aces, the ratio of winning points after the serve has increased a lot.

Following these findings there is another priority of practice.

So, what should the new priority look like?

1^st priority is the serve, the return and the following 2 shots, 3 and 4 (Happens 70% of the time)

2^nd priority is the rally, 5-8 strokes (Happens 20 % of the time)

3^rd priority is the “so called” long rallies, 9+ (Happens 10 % of the time)

How do we do that on the court?

In practices look for short but high intensity drills with a good quality. That is far more valuable than having 30 minutes cross court rallies.

To have serve and return as a first priority doesn’t mean that you stop the so-called rhythm training, but there has to be more emphasize on the first 4 strokes as well as the rally length 5-8.

What is examples from Peter’s practice?

My (Peter) practice sessions start like usual with a little bit of hitting, so they get that “feeling” that the players are often looking for. Then the next drill is important. That should be a drill with serve and return. In that way it becomes a mixture of finding rhythm and doing the right thing on the practice court. Very often in the past, serve and return was always at the end of practice sessions. By practicing the serve and return last we are signaling that it’s not that important, but that is wrong. We have to prioritize the serve and return +1 more so it’s either in the middle or even at the start of the practices where the players are fresher physically and mentally.

The amount of emphasize on the serve and return is determined by your purpose of the practice. If you are working with a beginner, it makes sense to put a little more emphasize on developing the strokes and do more repetitions. If you are working with performance players, the emphasize should be more towards the start of the rally and what goes on in matches. In a match you very rarely hit the same shot more than once and that has the be reflected on the practice court.

Doing more serve, return +1 practice also allows you as a coach to give more tactical feedback to the players compared to technical, which I (Peter) think is important if you want to develop what I (Peter) call functional tennis.

With more emphasize on the serve – what do we need to be aware of as tennis coaches?

At first you have to prepare the body. It’s not a good thing to from one day to another put a basket of 100 balls to the players and let them serve. You have to from a young age prepare their bodies to be able to handle the load. Especially the shoulder is important. It’s a combination of developing strength and flexibility. When you then do practice the serve you go for e.g. 6 serves out wide for precision, power or whatever your purpose of the drill is. In between each serve the player is supposed to do his/her normal routine.

If you have practice session of 90-120 minutes aim for 60-80 serves per player per session and be conscious of getting breaks in between so the body of the players will not break down.

We need to think about how far ahead the players can think. What the future is like for them and what they are thinking about.

If you’re a young kid, you’re not thinking about next month. If someone says your birthday’s next month, you have no idea how long that is or how many sleeps that is. You have no concept of that kind of time. As we get older, we have a greater concept of time and what it means. That also means that time has a reference to our goals. So, a smaller kid generally needs to experience success a bit faster than an older kid.

A 10-year-old child can maybe work on something for a week. A 12-year-old can work a month with the goal of trying to get to something. A 15-year-old kid might be able to work on something for several months.

When we talk about time, the goal can change within those time frames and therefore the success or challenge also change. We start to reflect on how much risk the players are prepared to take, how much time they’re prepared to invest, how we position the environment in little increments or big chunks.

So, when we’re having practices with younger players, we might be trying to get them a little bit successful every day, whereas actually with older players, they don’t need to be successful every day. It’s actually quite good for them not to be successful and go through the process of working towards something. We need to understand how the player is perceiving time in order to pitch goals that are at the right level and that those goals relate to the level of success they might need to keep being motivated to push towards that goal.

When a player says: “I can’t do this”. That is not necessarily a bad thing. I can’t do this just means I can’t do it right now. If someone says I can’t do this at the moment or I can’t do this now, that implies that they’re ready to go a little bit further. If they didn’t say the “now”, in the end, maybe that implies that there is a judgment as to what do they want you to do.

Do they want you to make this easier or do they want you to give them more time? Do they want you to leave them alone? And do they want you just to be a lot less judgmental? What are they really saying in that?

More than anything, we as coaches need to listen. We need to understand where the players are at, and when you start understanding where they’re at and you are conscious of what you’re trying to say then you have the opportunity of getting on the same page.

It’s not the concept of someone who’s a high achiever and someone’s low achieving. Instead it’s about how prepared someone is accepting risks and failures. An example could be a group of players, you take to the court and you do an exercise. They try it three times. A player says, “I can’t do it” and then that’s it, and the wall comes down and then you have another player who comes on and they try 50 times and they fail 50 times. You then say, “Do you want to go for fifty-one?” and they go “Yes”.  There are a number of factors that come into this whole thing. It’s not just the parents and the siblings. It’s also how they are raised it’s the culture in terms of how success and failure are judged.

As a coach when you are on the court, we need to understand the concept of over- and under achievers. If you have a player that doesn’t like to fail, then you have to be careful how you progress the activities. If you do a simple how many out of 10 do you need to do to, to be successful? Most people say, “Oh, yeah, you need to do 7 or 8 out of 10 to be successful”

Well, if you’re an underachiever and you don’t like failing at all and you have these perfectionist tendencies, sometimes, then you might need to get 9 or 10 out of 10 before you move on. If the players are overachiever, they might only get 3 or 4 out of 10 and if you ask them: “Are you ready to move on?” they go “Yeah” and if you then challenge them and say “Well you only did 3 or 4 out of 10”, they will typically say “That means I did it”.

Therefore, as a coach, how you present the activities and how you communicate and phrase certain things when we present drills is very important. We’re not always careful enough with the words we use. If I e.g. say: “Count how many times you can do this?”. Then players will think it’s about counting 1,2,3,4. If you phrase it like: “No 7-year-old danish kid has ever done this more than twice.”. Now if a player gets 3, they think that they are the best kid in Denmark, and it can be the exact same exercise. So, explaining how difficult something is with a basis in our language is really important.

Tennis is a sport where you are supposed to like it when your opponent is good. You’re not supposed to like winning 6-0 6-0, you’re supposed to love the battle, you’re supposed to like the challenge. It’s like you get into an arm wrestle and that bit in the middle where your arm starts to shake. You’re supposed to like that. And if we want players to like that situation, we have to create the circumstances and an environment of not being judged. If a player understands an activity is really, really difficult and I as a coach explained it properly, now, I accept the fight. Simply because the coach said it was impossible or the coach said that the danish record is 2 and didn’t say go count how many you can get.

So, we have to be a bit careful because everyone wants to get better. There’s never been anyone who doesn’t want to get better or who wants to just lose, it’s in our nature as humans to move forwards. It’s the risk, the attention, the focus, the judgment, the causes problems. So, when we get to over and under achievers, it’s important to understand who the player is, because if you’ve got a player who’s that overachiever, you could be on level 3 and then throw him level 6 and say: “Go try this”, and it’s completely okay he can’t do it and just walk away. If you’ve got a kid who is an underachiever and you’re on level 3, you go: “OK, are you ready to try level 4 yet? – Are you ready to move to the next level? How are you feeling about that?”. You need to get their approval in that agreement to be able to move forward, because every time we try to learn something, we’re taking a risk that we might fail.

Most first girls, have a lot of family characteristics from their father, but also, they’re born into an environment where we’re all looking at who’s our role model. So, we’re born into an environment where basically the people ahead of us are the people we’re looking towards. So, if you’re the first child, you’re looking towards your parents and we normally have a cross gender relationship which is also why there is a phrase “mommy’s boy” or “daddy’s girl” there’s not really a phrase called “daddy’s boy” or “mummy’s girl.

First children
First, children tend to have more perfectionist tendencies because they didn’t see their parents publicly making mistakes. They did make them, but they tend to hide them to their kids. Then the second child comes along. What people forget is the second child is born into a different environment. There’s already another child there. If it’s a boy, if it’s two brothers, normally that brother wants to compete with the older brother. You’ve just given me a finish line, now I’m going to go for it. That also happens if the first child is a boy and the second child is a girl, because society generally traditionally wrongly doesn’t expect the girl to outdo the boy. Most of the time, they absolutely do academically and otherwise, as a girl with an older brother, and that’s a profile that comes also from most of the girls in the top 100 WTA.

The WTA top 100
We did a study in 2017. 74 of the top 100 women were the first girl in the family. Some had an older brother, but they were the first girl in the family. So, they either drew characteristics from their father or drew characteristics from their older brother.

2^nd children
If you have an older sister society is doing this comparative thing for girls. If you have an older sister, in general, the number one thing you don’t want to be is your older sister. She’s the first girl, she’s the original, you don’t want to be a copy of the original, you want to be your own person. So very often that person takes a very different path. So, you have the first child taking this really kind of linear, straightforward path, copying their parents being a little more serious, a little more studious. Then the second one comes along and they need to find a different way to get attention. Because especially if I’m a second girl so often, they’ll try and do things in a very different way

If you take the most famous sisters in tennis Venus and Serena. Serena is much more vocal about things. They have older sisters from previous marriages but it’s a first girl and second girl situation really. Venus the first one more serious and studious. The second one comes along and she’s like, I have to find a way. Traditionally in most families, what would have happened is the second girl would have gone right, I’m not going to do tennis because my older sister is really good of tennis, but probably because of the nurturing triangle that was in that family and also the way the father pushed they end up with both playing tennis. Of course, you have two very different girls because they don’t want to be the same. They love each other, but they don’t want to be the same deep down.

So, as coaches, we need to understand those drivers. We need to understand the motivation. We need to understand it will be a lot easier to teach that first child who’s very linear, very studious, used to listening and being told what to do. Then there is the second one who wants to voice their opinion, because that’s how they get the attention and that’s how they step up.

3^rd or 4^th children
If you get the third or fourth kid in a family, they’re born into chaos. I always joke. When I was the third boy in my family, when my parents brought me home, they just went, “Oh, yeah, just put him over there in the corner. We’ve had two of them already. It’ll be fine, don’t worry.” Whereas with the first one, they were probably listening to every noise the child made. And because they’re more relaxed, the child realizes that they better learn to negotiate. I better learn to be able to express myself. I need to learn what battles I can win and which ones I can’t. I have to blend into the background sometimes. 3^rd children are not normally the natural born leaders. They are usually top salespeople. By their very nature, they have to communicate, they have to negotiate, it’s who they are. Most American presidents are first children.

We think we’re talking about tennis and then we realize we’re talking about people; we have to start diving into the psychology of the why? Why did somebody say that? What are they trying to get from that? What’s their reason?

We always talk about creating autonomy and ownership in our players. I remember a tutor Mandy Frank that said our job is to create independent critical thinkers. Well, are we doing the same with our coaches always telling our coaches what to do, or are we giving our coaches, the principals and the road map to follow?

It depends a lot on what the initial education process is. If coaches are on a different page, you can’t create rigid train tracks where everybody’s going for your players or for your coaches. What you have to do is create principles.

These are the destinations along the route. You give them the map and you tell them; this is where we’re going. We’re going to here, here, and here. Now we have to work out how we get there and we have to applaud ingenuity. We have to applaud people taking their own initiative to try and get there and try different things as opposed to now you have to follow these train track and do it exactly this way. Because as tennis coaches, we’re not like that.

We need to be able to solve problems on the court. It’s the whole give a man a fish vs teaching him how to fish. We have to make sure that we are in a position where we’re giving coaches the skills to improve and develop because only if we can get coaches to work that way, we can get our players to work that way as well.

Motivation

Why would the kid want to learn this thing?

Opportunity

Have you built the environment where the kids are able to learn what you are trying to teach them?

Capacity

Have you understood the child’s physical and mental capacity?

Very often, if you get to a point where the kids are not learning and you’ve hit a block, it’s one of those three learning principles. It’s like actually you have created a good why and they are motivated, but you haven’t built the necessary environment.

If you think tennis coaching is about what you know about tennis, well, you’re, what, 30-40 % there. We all know tennis coaches out there who have studied tennis to the nth degree. They know, everything there is to know about tennis, but somehow, they’re not a people person which then means that they are not as successful as a coach as they could have been.

Coaches are very practical people and we need to understand our role in what we do. So, for a lot of us, we got into tennis coaching because we love tennis and that was our driver.

Then we suddenly realized after a number of years that our knowledge of tennis is one thing, but our ability to be able to communicate with people, build relationships and interact that’s a skill that maybe we hadn’t thought of. In that way, we end up with this situation where we suddenly have to accumulate a whole lot of new skills and a whole lot of self-reflective things around what we’re actually doing. Sometimes we all experience that we know what the player should do, but somehow, they are not learning it, or we think that everyone should want to take a lesson from us, because we’re so knowledgeable, but that’s not always the case.

The idea of the police, the doctor and the bartender came up as we were trying to explain what different roles a tennis coach has to do.

The police
What’s the role of a policeman? Organize, keep structure and keep order. If you create order, then you can start to do other things. I love the analogy about the sides of the bridge. It goes that the reason that there are sides to a bridge then the person can drive over more confidently and faster than if there are no sides to it. So, it’s that kind of concept. If you create an environment with structure, order and everybody knows where they are, then you can start to express yourself and relax a little bit. It’s a little bit like the other one I love when teachers say “I can’t smile until November” because they get a new class in September and it’s like, well, I’m going to create order and structure and then by November I can relax and be me again. Everyone knows where they stand, and kids need that. They really need order and structure. So, the first one’s.

The doctor
What does the doctor do? He tries to keep you improving, moving forward and tries to make you better. So that’s what the role of the coach traditionally is. It’s about identifying flaws and errors. The idea of a doctor is not just repairing or fixing things, it’s preventative as well.

The bartender
Perhaps we shouldn’t talk about bartending when we are talking about kids’ tennis, but I experience that coaches can relate. If you’re a good bartender, you are building relationships. It’s the person across the board that makes you feel at home and is very friendly to you.

So, what we’ve done is we said at different times you have to apply different roles. As a coach, if you drew a big circle and you estimated how much of today you spent being police, doctor and bartender – what would you end up with?  need to be a doctor?

Think about whether the percentages change? So, the school environment, for example, if you got 30 children on a playground, I taught 13 schools a week at one point in my career and it was a lot about being a policeman to start with and then I could gradually relax.

Whereas if you were, for example, working with a 15-year-old girl, perhaps the relationship side of things (being a bartender) is more important. That you build trust and you build empathy and enhance autonomy in that kind of situation.

So, there’s crossovers between the three, but it’s just helped coaches to actually go, oh yeah, maybe I’m really good at this role and I need to practice this role. We’ve had the coach finish the lesson that was observed by other coaches and draw the graph for themselves and then come back to, well, this is what everybody else thought you did and it’s quite different. It’s a reflective tool meant to very simply explain slightly complicated psychology, but in a way that everyone can grab and use.

We all need to know our roles in the team.

Everybody is super important.

Mom, dad, player, physio, coach, fitness coach, agent etc.

We all have our roles and we need to know our goals and our responsibilities.

Once we really know our roles and goals, then we can be honest with each other.

We can communicate back and forth, and we can take responsibility for the things that are in our control.