(Inspired by the podcast episode #2: “Former British № 1 Doubles Player, Father of 3 and Academy Owner” w. Dan Kiernan on The Adam Blicher Show — Dissecting High Performance in Tennis)
Developing realistic expectations
Theoretically we can talk about things but to bring it to life practically is not quite so simple. One of the techniques that we have used is to get the players to understand and have more of an awareness of what they are signing up to as a tennis player. I believe that understanding the realities of the sport will also help them understand that they’re not on their own when they go through these difficult emotions.
What we can learn from Paul- Henri Mathieu
An example that we give to our players is that we get them to look into the history of players that are 60 or 50 in the world and track their career path. I would e.g. give Paul-Henri Mathieu to one of the players and they studied him and found out he had been as high as 12 in the world. He’d spent 12 years in the top 100 in the world, give or take the odd injury. His story was quite nice because he’s come back from three major injury setbacks, which is important. Understanding that you can come back from these setbacks helps a lot in those dark times. His career win loss record is 246 wins and 261 losses. For them to see that he’s actually on the ATP Tour lost more matches than he’s won and still made a great career out of it is super important. I think it’s great for them to have that awareness and understanding.
The reality of how much a Grand Slam winner is loosing
I also had players choose a Grand Slam winner and work out how many points they won which is easy to do in the world of Google. How many points they’d won in the tournament and how many points they had lost. We did this for about 25 different Grand Slam winners to be sure that we were right. We worked out that even when you win a Grand Slam you lose on average 46 percent of points. So you’re winning 54 percent on average and your you’re losing 46 percent on average and that’s when you’re winning a Grand Slam. So the reality of our sport is we lose a lot.
If we’re not able to deal with losing it’s very difficult then to learn to deal with winning because the emotions become too much. Once the players have an awareness and understanding of what they have signed up to as a tennis player we find it easier to manage their expectation level and thereby also their emotions on and off the court.
