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.
