The Balance Between Practice and Playing Tournaments
Many parents have approached me over the years with questions about how early to start having their kids play tournaments and how often they should compete in them. Naturally, there are different views on the subject. The answer depends on how old the child is and how advanced a level player they are. With kids beginning to play at the tender age of four- or five-years-old nowadays, this question comes pretty early on, especially if the child is talented and shows great potential at an early age.
In general, as soon as the child can hit a second serve in the court consistently, they can play a tournament. The mainstream thought is that it is always good to get their feet wet early on and get their competitive juices flowing because it would "make them tougher mentally.” Tournaments are fun and are "the real deal," but is it constructive to their long-term development to play many tournaments as eight- through 12-year-olds and get caught up with the ranking hunt? Yes … to a degree, but probably not if you look at the bigger picture.
The early years are all about shot development and creating good practice habits, winning is always fun and so are trophies, but the main goal should be to learn the game and to try to improve upon and learn from every match or practice. That is the correct message that should be sent to the kids from their parents and coaches.
Unfortunately, it is not often enough the case. Too many times, I see parents and coaches putting too much emphasis on winning and "rankings," which sends the wrong message and creates a scared player who will have a tougher time when it comes to making the transition from the 10-12 and under tennis to the more aggressive style of game that is required today.
We all know how naturally competitive most kids are which is not a bad thing at all. But many times when kids are young, they revert to playing "ugly" negative tennis in official matches, looping moon balls to the middle of the court, pushing like cowards and playing cynical defensive tennis that will win them matches, but in the long run, will not be very effective or useful. This happens because of the looming fear of losing.
The transition to a higher level tennis requires constantly adding things to your game and starting to take more risk, going for shots and taking the ball earlier, staying closer to the baseline, coming in to the net more. To work on those elements, a player needs to train and repeat shots correctly, thousands of times, without the fear of missing … the primary point behind “practice.” The problem starts when there are not enough periods of "no tournament play" and there is not enough time to relax and gain the confidence to implement it in a real tournament match situation.
What happens often is that the kids revert back to the old habits and become addicted to winning because they put too much importance on something that should be a low priority at the early ages. When I was a kid, my coaches kept pumping into my head that the goal is to be a complete player at the age of 18—that’s when the results will start to count. That approach helped me fulfill my potential as a player.
The job of the coach and parent is to educate the child and make them realize that this is a long-term process, the tournaments played while ages 10 through 14 should be approached casually and treated simply as a learning experience, the winning part should be minor.
The players should be complemented for the important stuff, such as having good footwork during the match, for keeping a positive attitude, or for playing smart and constructive points. Obviously, the kids are upset when they lose and happy when they win; however, both winning and losing should be downplayed, they need to know that there is a bigger picture, therefore before they go to celebrate a win or sulk over a loss, they should first try to figure out why they lost (or won) and how they can improve in the future. For me as a coach, the matches are merely a source of information on my students. I can learn a lot by watching them play real matches. I treat every one as just another match, one of many in their career. A tennis player should learn from each match, but also move on and forget about the last match because there is always the next match and the last one should be considered as ancient history five minutes after it ends (unless you win Wimbledon in which case you can celebrate a little).
Often when you make adjustments to your game as a junior, it can take weeks or even months until the shot becomes automatic in a match. And during that adjustment period, the player may lose a few practice sets or even a tournament. The kids who are mature enough to understand that will usually excel. When Pete Sampras changed from a two-handed backhand to a one-handed backhand, it probably cost him a few national junior titles in the short-term (he had zero national junior titles), but he did wind up with 14 major titles as an adult.
In some European countries, they have a different approach to junior tennis. The philosophy is that kids should not really compete in events until a later age when they are already technically sound and capable of playing “the right way.” The kids will do repetition drills for hours every day and play monitored practice matches among themselves as their coaches supervise. The volume of tournaments is much lower than the average USTA player, and in some cases, they don’t even play in a tournament until the age of 12.
Let’s ask ourselves the following question: Who is going to have more solid fundamentals and footwork?
►An eight- to 12-year-old who hits millions of balls the same way for hours a day and hardly played any tournaments; or
►The child who plays 20-30 tournaments a year (in more than 100 matches) and who cares more about their ranking than their form?
A few years back, I had a chance do my own little "Williams Sisters Experiment” on a young player that I coached. The kid was living in the Bronx, very close to my club and the parents could not take him to any tournaments at all (dad was working and mom had no car). For two years, all the child did was train in my program, working on tons of drills, hitting cross-courts and playing practice sets with my students and staff as I monitored. The child had a lot of talent and great a work ethic, but literally played zero tournaments for two years while other kids his age and level played at least one to two tournaments per month. All he did for two years was work on his game without worrying about ranking or winning … just playing the right way, stepping in, playing a form of freestyle and aggressive tennis.
When he reached the age of 12, I told his mother that it was time to get him to compete. In his first tournament (to which he had to take the public bus to) in the 12s Division, he came through the qualifying and won the whole tournament without losing a set, nobody knew him and he played without pressure.
That player, Andrew Adams, went on to become one of the top players in the East (ranked number one at one point in the East in the 14, 16 and 18 Divisions) and was top 15 in the nation in the 16 and 18 Divisions. He is currently playing on a full scholarship for the University of South Carolina and won Freshman of the Year in his first season, posting a record of 28-10 in singles. There is no doubt he is on his way to having a great college career at the very least even though he is the only kid I know that played zero tournaments from the ages of 10 to 12.
In the 12 years that I have been living and teaching in the U.S., I found that there is an overall general obsession with instant results and instant gratification … counter-productive to developing top players in my opinion. This is not to say that I am against competition, on the contrary, I encourage competition and a competitive nature. What Andrew Adams did was unique and quite extreme. He did well when he started competing at the age of 12, but still it took him a few years to develop the mental and strategic aspects of the game and to learn how to close out matches … that part takes experience which he didn’t have compared to the "veteran" players who competed since the day they could walk. I remember Andrew struggling against pushers and playing naive tennis at the 12 to 14 age level, having trouble closing out matches and losing confidence due to it. But after he got some matches under his belt, he figured it out, and by the time he was 18, he was one of the top players in the nation and as match tough as anyone, only less burned out than most others since he started competing late.
This is no small matter, I have often seen kids waste all of their mental strength on meaningless junior matches looking for ranking points and trophies and missing the big picture, only to reach the college ranks or the Pro Tour to realize that their best tennis and mental effort was left in the junior years. They had holes in their game, holes that did not quite allow them to reach their potential.
My approach is the fusion approach. I strongly believe in developing shots in the early ages and putting results as a low priority for the first few years. However, I am also a believer that children need to compete in order to be able to perform under pressure because it’s fun and ultimately the best way to learn. When I do send kids to participate in tournaments, I put it in perspective and make sure that they try to implement the things we work on in practice as much as they can and not revert to the bad habits. It can be a long process, and I certainly understand that sometimes the will to win will overcome the discipline to do the right thing (after all, I too was once a junior player).
I have been preaching this philosophy to my high performance students with sporadic success. Some parents listen to me and most just sign the kids up to as many tournament as they can thinking that getting a good ranking is insurance to being a great player. The pressure to get a good ranking or rating and to think constantly about results is making them blind to so many basic mistakes.
When I was a kid, we always had periods of no tournament play during which you took the time to add new elements to your game. It seems that it is harder to find periods like this anymore and it is often smart to cut down the match play for a while in order to take it to the next level.
The "Williams Sisters Approach," although quite extreme, certainly worked for Serena and Venus. They skipped their junior career and went straight to the Pro Tour. Now deep into their respective careers, both sisters, especially Serena, are still playing on the tour and are capable of beating anybody in the world on any given day. Their late start and the many breaks that they took during their career kept them relatively fresh compared to the other female players who may have burned out by their mid-20s.
A tennis career should be looked at as a marathon … you want to pace yourself and get to the last few miles in good shape and have enough energy for the finish which is basically the last four years of college when everything is supposed to click (or when you turn pro if you just so happen to make the cut). In order to make it click at the right time, there should be a long-term game plan and a realization that when it comes to tournament play, sometimes less is more, especially in the younger age groups.
