Why is it so hard to change your tennis pro?
I’d feel bad if I didn’t see Charlie, anymore. He made me the great player I sometimes think I am.
The rain prevented me from playing tennis in the morning and only made me waste my time going around the courts. Back home, I was thinking about the possibility of quitting training tennis with Charlie, my coach of more than ten years ago. In addition to being a good pro, the closeness of so many years of acquaintance has transofrmed our training sessions into meeting between friends, but I never felt he gave me the mental support I desperately needed.
I remember the last time I trained with Charlie. I played with him and got very angry. That day I really came to the court with the best attitude, but talking about the tournament match I had lost yesterday made me lose my temper and distracted me throughout the whole training session. My mind got stuck in the analysis of a past game, an analysis made by someone who didn’t even see me play. In my opinion it’s better to talk about past games at the end of class, but my coach puts them at the beginning, with the purpose of inmediately start making corrections.
We analysed my mistakes and clinged to a match that I had already lost.
His pep-talk changed my positive mentality for a negative one. I kept thinking about all my previous mistakes during the start of the class and naturally, my shots wouldn’t stop bouncing off the court.
While seeing my off-court shots, my coach didn’t give me any positive feedback or any words of encouragement, instead he made me run more and more and I was struggling even harder to be able to keep up with his instructions.
In order to continue, I first had to get my mind out of that fatal state of mind. I had to anticipate and visualize each stroke, so I took a deep breath, went against the far wall of the court and leaned my back, fixed my gaze on the court and from there the shots began bouncing on-court all by themselves as if by magic.
It was at that moment that I discovered that on my own I had reached the optimal state of concentration to play tennis. My coach thought the radical change was a consequence of his training routines, not realizing that he had taken my positivity away from me at first and that I was able to regain it despite his heavy training drills.
Sometimes I think I’m a great player, but my coach never helped me feel like one. At every training session there was a technical advance, but there was no psychological work to help me become a better player. I’ve played many tournaments this year, with bad results, I’ve lost in the first rounds, but I’ve come to realize it’s time for a pro change.
