Tag Archives: tennis

Practice Makes Perfect … Or Does It?

Posted on May 13, 2019 by in Preparing for Pressure

Coming soon- PREPARING FOR PRESSURE

 

Practice Makes Perfect … Or Does It?

Preparing for Pressure
“Practice Makes Permanent.”

The old school saying “Practice Makes Perfect” is not exactly true. Experience tells us that practice makes whatever you’re attempting permanent. Grooving flawed strokes only make the flaws permanent.

One of the differences that separate the good from the great is in how they practice. There is a world of difference between effective training and ineffective training. Deliberate, customized training focuses on improving strengths and re-routing weaknesses versus mindless grooving.

So, how do we customize training? I recommend starting by videotaping actual matches and quantifying the data. Researching why points, games, sets, and matches are won or lost.

Those who progress quickly don’t solely focus on repeating what they already know on the practice court.

Great coaches use match data to improve:

  • Opponent Profiling
  • Between Point & Changeover Rituals
  • Focus/Emotional Control
  • Athlete’s Top Patterns
  • Cause of their Errors
  • Cause of their Winners

Maximizing potential at the quickest rate is not typically found on the assembly-line practice court. It’s not just about how to hit a stroke, it includes when, where, and why.
Preparing for pressure stems from a custom built approach.

Snappy Solution To A Common Performance Anxieties: “I focus the whole match on perfect form. That’s Correct …right?”

“Athletes nurtured to focus on mechanics in match play seldom perform in the flow state.”

I recommend that athletes save most of the detailed analysis of strokes for the improvement phase which takes place on the practice court. Biomechanical analysis surely has its place; it’s just not in the midst of competition. Focusing too much on “bend your knees,” “close the racket face 30-degrees and brush up,” and  “tuck the left hand in on the serve to block the third link of the kinetic chain” pulls athletes out of the flow state and into their editing, analytical brain.

The week leading into an important event I recommend trading in the need for stroke perfection and replace it with practicing picking up relevant cues like proficient pattern play, score management, and opponent profiling. This prepares the athlete for pressure by allowing their judgmental ego to slip away. Performing in the zone requires relaxed contentment, which can’t be found if you’re focused on fixing every micro-flaw.

Preparing for pressure requires the athlete to focus on the art of competing.

For More Information On Match Charts:
The Match Chart Collection is a series of ten different charts that have been designed for easy implementation and maximum information gathering potential. The charts quantify match performance by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of a player’s performance under stress- match conditions.
The charts “user-friendly” format makes them attractive to the novice tennis parent as well as the advanced tennis coach. The goal is to encourage coaches, parents, family and/or friends to assist in the growth of the junior player. After charting a match, the charting notes should be shared with the player and the developmental team to organize future training sessions.

Additional Charting Advantages: 
Past Match Chart Review: Players often play the same opponents over and over again at the higher levels.  Reviewing past charts against the same opponent may reveal the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses.
Charting Opponents: You may also want to consider charting opponents and /or top seeds for a comparison study.
Self-Charting:  Recognizing and applying the match statistics (charting notes) during actual match play is a wonderful learned behavior that the top players have mastered. For example, it would prove meaningful if you knew the opponent’s forehand to backhand unforced error count heading into a tie-breaker.
To Order Match Chart Collection Click Here

Match-Charting Advantages

Posted on May 10, 2019 by in Preparing for Pressure

Advantages of Match-Charting Skill SetsPreparing for Pressure

Students who are charting and teaching (explaining their results) accept and retain more information than the athletes that do not chart and teach and just hit.

Why?

Because they’re focused on the details of the match, while the hitters are typically focused on the outcome. (Channel Capacity)

Game Day Emotional Train Wrecks?

Posted on May 8, 2019 by in Customized Organizational Plan, Maximizing Tennis Potential, The Second Edition of The Tennis Parent's Bible

The following post is an excerpt from the Second Edition of The Tennis Parent’s Bible NOW available through most online retailers!  Click Here to Order

QUESTION: What causes my son’s game day emotional train wrecks?Frank Giampaolo

Frank: All too often, it’s the little preparation failures such as a lack of routines and rituals that cause catastrophic game day failures. To understand preparation failures, let’s sneak a peek into my friend John’s world:

John needs to lose weight- but he can’t seem to find consistent success. His weight goes up and down and it’s a direct result of his of routines and rituals. One week he scheduled morning breakfast at IHOP with a “Grand Slam Breakfast” and then returned home and sat in front of the computer for four hours, then broke for a fast food lunch followed by four more hours of sitting behind a computer and then met friends for dinner…John preset weight loss failure with excessive calories and no physical activity. With those behaviors in place, weight gain was sure to follow.

Now let’s look at the routines and rituals of a different week. In this week John woke up and drank a green veggie concoction for breakfast, hit the gym and ate a salad for lunch, followed by four hours of training on the tennis court and a healthy dinner. These are weight loss behaviors and these daily mini successes will result in consistent weight loss. It is not rocket science…it is just hard work.

 

The same type of scenario plays out with most junior athletes. Unfortunately, many juniors believe they’re doing everything right but under closer inspection, they’re almost always “way off” target.  In sports, match day failures stem from the dozens of smaller preparation failures.

NOTE: Keep in mind that losses are not necessarily failures.  If a player is performing in the manner in which they have been trained, they may have just been outplayed.

As an example of poor rituals and routines, let’s look at a comment from a tennis parent prior to our Customized Evaluation Session with her daughter Jenny.  Mrs. Clements complained, “My daughter, Jenny, can’t beat a top-level retriever. Those pushers drive her crazy!”

Now let’s look at what we discovered about Jenny’s actual training schedule and developmental plan:

  • She only grooves stationary fundamentals.
  • She perfects her primary strokes for 10 hours a week.
  • She doesn’t focus on the development of her secondary strokes.
  • She doesn’t focus on the aerobic fitness needed to play 15 tough sets in a singular event or a 3-hour moonball battle.
  • She doesn’t focus on developing the actual patterns needed to take a retriever out of their comfort zone.
  • She doesn’t focus on patience or the emotional demands required to withstand the emotional trauma that comes with playing someone who doesn’t miss.

 

After Jenny’s assessment, it was clear to her and her parents that she needs to re-vamps her deliberate, customized developmental plan. So, parents and coaches, if your talented athlete isn’t getting the results they’re capable of, it may prove wise to raise their preparation standards.

MOSESIMG_3885

Here’s a story about my dog Moses. He’s a gifted, highly intelligent English White Golden Retriever. He and I have spent hours upon hours in the yard playing catch. He’s talented and we’ve played catch A-LOT for 6 years. So, if talent and repetition make a champion, it’s safe to assume that Moses should win every United States Dog Agility Association National Event, right?

Well…no. Moses and I don’t practice in the manner he’s expected to perform. I enjoy the quality of time we spend playing together but we are not spending our time together applying deliberate, customized training.

Frank in Print

Posted on May 6, 2019 by in Frank Giampaolo Publications, Maximizing Tennis Potential, Neuro Priming for Peak Performance

Check out Frank’s latest tennis article in the upcoming May/June TennisPro Magazine, the official publication of PTRfrank

 

Check out the May edition of the TENNIS Magazine to hear about Frank’s Neuro Priming techniques. tennis mag

Control the Controllables

Posted on April 26, 2019 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

 

The following post is an excerpt from the Second Edition of The Tennis Parent’s Bible NOW available through most online retailers!
Click Here to Order 

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Control the Controllables

Another anxiety reducing emotional protocol is to encourage your athlete to focus on simply controlling that which is truly under their control and to ignore everything that is out of their control.  Understand that champions trim the fat and focus only on what they have control over versus outcome issues out of their control. Most performance anxieties stem from focusing on contaminating issues that have no place inside the head of an athlete during competition.

 

“The player’s performance anxieties lessen greatly when parents stop obsessing about the outcome and rankings and encourage belief, effort, and improvement.”

 

Ask your child to forget about the outcome of matches for a while. Instead, ask them to focus on being better than they were yesterday.  A long term goal to strive for is to be twice as good this year as you were last year.

Losing Versus Getting Beat

Posted on April 20, 2019 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential, The Second Edition of The Tennis Parent's Bible

The following post is an excerpt from the Second Edition of The Tennis Parent’s Bible NOW available through most online retailers!

Click Here to Order

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LOSING VERSUS GETTING BEAT

For every 64 talented juniors that enter a six-round tournament draw- all 64 have the same outcome goal: “I want to win!” Unfortunately, 63 of those players go home losers. Although the nature of the draw format dictates only one champion, not all 63 lose- some of them get beat. There’s a big difference between getting beat and losing a match. Being defeated should be viewed from a new perspective.

“Attempting to never make a bad shot stops your athlete’s flow of great shots. Great winners and correct errors come from the same relaxed, free zone.”

Let’s look deeper into the cause of the loss:

In my book, being outplayed by someone is getting beat. It is absolutely fine to get beat by someone who is:

  • Executing their best style of play.
  • Performing their best strategies & tactics.
  • Working harder.
  • Controlling the mega points.
  • Choosing to utilize the rituals they’ve developed.

 

In the above situation, the opponent may actually deserved the victory. On the other side of getting beat, is losing. It is much more painful to lose a match when:

  • Your child is more talented but their opponent is a harder worker.
  • Your child chooses not to employ their best style of play or falls into their opponent’s style of play.
  • Your child makes too many reckless, unforced errors.

 

  • Your child is too passive to compete at crunch time.
  • Your child doesn’t bother to spot and attack the opponent’s weaknesses.

 

Making your opponent beat you while applying your best style of play is actually a win-win situation. It’s what I call a mental and emotional commitment. When your player is confident and committed to playing their patterns and tactics, they often beat even the top seeds. But even if they don’t win the match, they’ll have no regrets. They will have attempted their best systems and that is all that can be expected.

Parents, please promote that learning to win or getting beat by confidently playing their best style of play is learning to “compete” correctly.

“There is a difference between missing the actual shot the moment demands and missing random, reckless shots.”

“Parents and coaches must acknowledge that by taking the risk to compete, your child will likely lose in almost every high-level tennis tournament. Parents must reinforce that losing the correct way, playing the game systems they have been trained, is their best shot at beating the best players.”

 

Opponent Profiling

Posted on April 18, 2019 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential, The Second Edition of The Tennis Parent's Bible

The following post is an excerpt from the Second Edition of The Tennis Parent’s Bible NOW available through most online retailers!
Click Here to Order 

frank

OPPONENT PROFILING

 

Top competitors are continually seeking an advantage. One of the best strategic (mental) and calming (emotional) advantages comes from scouting an upcoming opponent. Casually observing is one thing, but profiling the opponent is a skill set. Each playing style has an inherent group of strengths and weaknesses. Opponent awareness is an important part of match day preparation. Player profiling involves looking past strokes.

NOTE:  Whenever possible, as I coach players from the 12’s to the ATP/WTA pros, I apply the below profiling topics.

 

Opponent Profiling Scouting:

  • Primary style of play.
  • Preferred serve patterns (especially on mega points).
  • Preferred return of serve position and shot selection on both first and second serve returns.
  • Favorite go-to rally pattern.
  • Dominant short-ball option.
  • Preferred net rushing pattern.
  • Stroke strengths and weaknesses (Advanced players should also consider the strengths and limitations of strike zones.)
  • Movement, agility and stamina efficiencies and deficiencies.
  • Frustration tolerance, focus, and emotional stability.

Opponent profiling should continue from the pre-match phase, all the way through the actual match and into the post-match. Intelligent athletes even jot down notes regarding the opponent’s game on their post-match match logs. This is used as a reminder for the next time the two meet.

 

Looking Past Strokes:

During the warm-up, the uneducated player/parents/coaches often think Player A has the match in the bag.  But what they do not realize is that Player B often wins because of their ability to identify and execute a game plan exposing their opponent’s weakness. Player A may have great looking fundamental strokes but “hidden” flawed mental and/or emotional components. Player B may have average looking strokes, but an incredible proficiency in their mental game. Hence, giving player B the edge due to his ability to isolate weaknesses or exert emotional intelligence at crunch time.


 

Positive Versus Negative Psychology

Posted on April 15, 2019 by in The Second Edition of The Tennis Parent's Bible

The following post is an excerpt from the Second Edition of The Tennis Parent’s Bible NOW available through most online retailers!

Click Here to Order

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POSITIVE VERSUS NEGATIVE PSYCHOLOGY

 

“Guidance from a coach or parent with a negative mindset is extremely toxic to a child.”

Exposing and destroying pessimistic beliefs and attitudes is an integral part of my daily mission, both personally and professionally. It’s your job as the tennis parent to eliminate these poisons from your athlete’s world.

Sadly, it’s often a parent, sibling, friend or coach that’s feeding the negative beliefs and pessimistic attitudes. It is in your best interest to remedy this issue or remove the negative source(s) from the child’s tennis entourage.

Parents, just as it is your duty to remove negative psychology, it is your responsibility to teach positive psychology. Teach belief and confidence, find their motivational buttons, develop their desire and hunger for mastering the game and teach them to embrace the challenge. These positive life lessons are part of raising athletic royalty.  If you teach the love of the game and the benefits of commitment, your athlete will progress seamlessly through the losses, technical difficulties, injuries and bad luck that come with athletics.

Allow the tennis teachers to teach, the coaches to coach and the trainers to train because as you know now, the tennis parent’s job description is far too comprehensive to micromanage each entourage’s role.

Mind-Sets: Fixed versus Growth

Similar to the two sides of psychology, there are also two mindsets. Coaches often see students with either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. While the athlete’s genetic predisposition is undoubtedly present, it’s most often the nurtured opinions of their parents, siblings, and coaches that set their outlook.

  • A person with a debilitating fixed mindset truly believes that they cannot change. They are extremely rigid, view the world as black or white and are uninterested in change. Their unwillingness to accept new challenges often results in remaining average at best.
  • A person with a growth mindset believes that their opinions, outlooks, attitudes, and abilities can and will change throughout their lives. Growth mindset individuals are more willing and open to accept change in the name of progress/improvement.

“Raising athletic royalty is a direction, not a destination. What you choose to teach your children now will live on for generations to come.”

I find that parents who encourage both positive psychology and a growth mindset are developing much more than a future athlete, they are developing future leaders.

 

COMMON PERFORMANCE ANXIETIES – Part Three

Posted on April 10, 2019 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential, Preparing for Pressure

Continuation of Common Performance Anxieties Posts.

 

SAMPLE COVER PRESSURE

7) Common Anxiety: “It’s Losing To The Weaker Players That Kills Me…I Self-Destruct!”

“Self-destruction unknowingly begins in the preparation phase.”

The worst part about the feelings of self-destruction in competition is that the athlete is fully aware it’s happening but can’t do anything to stop it. Their muscles begin to tighten, they shank every other ball, and their brain is fixated on contaminating outcome thoughts. We’ve all been there. You’re choking, and you know it, the opponent knows it, even the spectators know it, but you weren’t taught any self-destruction solutions, so the match feels like a slow death.

Rehearsing self-destruction solutions on the practice court provide the athlete with a practical “go to solution.” The following are a few proactive solutions to employ during match play to aid in regaining focus:

  • Focus on Hitting 3 Balls Deep Down the Middle
  • Apply the Old School Bounce-Hit Method of Vision Control
  • Return to your Script of Top Patterns of Play
  • Reboot your Between Point Rituals

I recommend the player choose two of the above solutions and play a few practice sets while focusing exclusively on employing the solutions to stop the imploding.

Preparing for pressure requires pre-set solutions to common problems.

 

8) Common Anxiety: “I used to beat these toads…now I’m losing to them.”

“Revitalizing begins by assessing the athlete’s
efficiencies and deficiencies.”

When athletes aren’t getting the results they believe they’re capable of getting, I recommend conducting an honest assessment of their current training and match preparation. With few exceptions, I find that the athlete has changed their developmental routines…and not for the better.

I’m a bit more detailed than the average coach. When I’m hired to revive a stalled career, I begin with a 300 Point Assessment of the athlete’s life skills, weekly developmental routines, primary & secondary strokes, mental skills, emotional skills, and incorporate match video analysis. Together, the athlete and I assess their confidence level, under pressure in each category. By doing so, we relaunch their progression
with a new plan.

Preparing for pressure often requires rebooting training modalities.

 

 

9)  Common Anxiety: “In real matches, I’m so stressed. All I think about is don’t lose …then I lose!”

“Internal dialogue refers to the unspoken conversations
we all have …”

Athletes are often unaware of the inner conversation they have through the course of a tennis match. Internal dialog is the conversation our ego is having with ourselves. The old Henry Ford saying is “Whether you think you can…or think you can’t…you’re usually right,” refers to one’s inner dialog. In match play, inner dialog takes place in-between points and during changeovers. This is when athletes are encouraged to program themselves towards a more constructive mindset. With practice, athletes will learn to focus on what they want versus what they don’t want.

It’s true that society programs a negative bias day in and day out. Athletes would benefit from committing to replacing the typical negative statement, “The problem is …” with “The solution is …”

Positive self-coaching revolves around a reoccurring theme of this book: Gratitude. It shifts our mentality from pessimistic to optimistic. I encourage my athletes to apply the mantra: There’s nowhere I’d rather be than right here, right now!

Preparing for pressure demands the athlete control their mindset because energy flows wherever their
internal dialog goes.

COMMON PERFORMANCE ANXIETIES – Part Two

Posted on April 7, 2019 by in Maximizing Tennis Potential

Common Performance Anxieties- Continued.

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4) Common Anxiety: “It’s not my strokes that fail me; it’s my mental toughness.
I just freak out!” 

“Mental toughness is often confused with emotional toughness.”

Mental toughness is often confused with emotional toughness. My definition of mental toughness in the tennis world is the understanding of strategies, tactics, and patterns. It also includes opponent profiling and problem-solving skills. My definition of emotional toughness is the ability to overcome the onslaught of performance anxieties and outcome-oriented emotional thoughts.

Solutions to match issues begin with understanding the actual cause of the problem. Is the athlete’s above statement: “I just freak-out!” A mental issue or an emotional issue? I would say it is an emotional issue. Because the correct solution is customized to the issue, I recommend digging deeper into why this particular athlete “freaks out.”  Does it involve the above mental categories, emotional categories, or a combination of the two?

It’s important to note that a seemingly unrelated component may be the root of the athletes break down. For example, if an athlete is physically unfit for serious competition, that lack of fitness can cause stroke mechanics to break down, reckless choices in shot selection, and manifest negative emotional outbursts.

Preparing for pressure involves knowing the difference between mental and emotional components.

 

 

5) Common Anxiety: “Johnny screams and throws his racket, why can’t I… ?”

“Attitude and emotions are highly contagious.”

Remember the old saying, Monkey See Monkey Do? It’s human nature for people to subconsciously model themselves after their sphere of influences. Preparing athletes for pressure include carefully navigating athletes away from bad influences. Negative parents, coaches or other athletes in their peer group can and will sabotage the strong character traits you seek.

Behavior modeling is a form of social learning. It states that most behaviors are picked up through imitating who and what they see.

Parents who are over anxious, prone to excess worry, stress, and fear are inadvertently conditioning their athletes to be a pessimistic emotional train wreck under pressure. Coaches who lack self-esteem because they couldn’t “make it” on the tour may project a deep-seated doubt in their student’s chances. Their passive-aggressive underlining message is “If I couldn’t succeed neither will you.”

Supreme confidence is essential in preparing athletes for pressure. Be aware of the behavior of those influencing your athlete.

 

 

6) Common Anxiety: “I’ve lost confidence. How do I get it back?”

“Your positive performances are imprinted in your memory, so choose to re-live them.”

A re-occurring defining characteristic of champions is their strong software skills. There are many times in an athlete’s career when they’ve lost their confidence and had to reboot their motivation.

One solution lies in choosing to focus on past successes more than past failures. Failure is no doubt part of the learning process but revisiting past successes via- match video analysis is one method used to rekindle self-esteem. If your athletes don’t already videotape tournament play and analyze (along with an experienced coach) their performance, now’s a great time to start.

Past successes leave a footprint in the brain.

Ask the athletes to remind you of previous pressure-packed situations when they performed spectacularly. Go into detail. Where did it happen? What event? What round? How did they overcome the challenges? Why were they determined to fight? What was their inner dialog? This process stops the discouragement and replaces it with the realization that they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again.

Preparing for pressure comes from realizing that you have come through under pressure before.