I have oftentimes experienced as a Coach that the players I have been coaching has no clue about:

– How to utilize their strengths & weaknesses

– What they should work on in order to win more matches

– What being a good competitor means

When I swallow my pride I realize that I have to take a look in the mirror. That I have been making the mistake of being to focused on skill acquisition & perfecting the shots biomechanically, forgetting that tennis is a game.

A game where you face an opponent & ultimately it is about competing against that opponent & finding a way to eventually pull through using your weapons & disguising your weaknesses better than the opponent.

Despite that I have often times used to little time on actually letting the players simply compete against each other. I have way to often given the players answers to remember, rather than problems to solve.

Game understanding or Tennis IQ, as I have heard it talked about several times, is a crucial element of young tennis players development & I think that it is often neglected by

– To little emphasis on applying the acquired skills in both defensive, neutral & offensive game situations

– To few practice sets in the scheduled practice

– To little room in the players weekly schedule to go play practice matches themselves