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In addition, I would not recommend this book for coaches, as most should already be well schooled on a "roadmap" for junior tennis stars.
Raising Big Smiling Tennis Kids, although not a true sports psychology book, did offer some excellent suggestions for parents in this area. I would consider this a general youth sports book for tennis parents. It cover many topics for junior tennis parents, such as how to get your child to have fun in tennis to where to start if you want to build a tennis court in your back yard and how much money tennis costs.
Tennis Kids begins with chapters on how to get kids interested in the first class, which I think would be very helpful for parents with kids who are beginning tennis. The author, Keith Kattan, not an expert in sports psychology nor a pro tennis player, but talks very keenly on the critical questions for sports parents. He has done his homework and often quotes Tim Gallwey, Vic Braden, Jim Taylor, and Jim Loehr, who are well known in the field of sports psychology and tennis.
He caught my attention immediately in the opening chapters when he talked about the right reasons to become involved in tennis, which we call intrinsic motivators or reasons. He states, "playing solely for external motivations takes the fun out of tennis and is a perfect recipe for burnout" (page 2). He said, "the best motivators are for the love of a challenge and the desire to do one's best." He goes on to say that a child should not play for parental approval. Good point. I see athletes all the time that are so distracted by trying to please a parent or gain approval that they can't focus on playing the game one point at a time.
The author says that the big keyword for raising happy tennis kids is "fun." Coaches and parents have to make classes and tennis fun by making it more game like than practice like. I recently started my 7-year-old daughter in tennis classes. She was a little apprehensive about her first class mostly because she was concerned about meeting other kids and also that it would be too practice like. The coach did an excellent job of making the class light, fun, and entertaining for the 6 kids in the class and she had a blast! She said this after the class: "I didn't know the tennis class was going to be so much fun!" Kids want to play games with other kids and laugh a lot. If you can combine a sport with this environment, presto! You have hooked a kid on sports!
I also liked the section titled: Learn to Handle Loss. This statement surprised me: "Play a lot of games with your kids and play so they lose." He says that kids need to learn how to handle loss because in tennis only one person wins when you have a tournament with 64 players and 63 are destined to lose. At face value, this seems like it goes against the grain of confidence development in that you want to breed success for greater confidence. The author goes on to talk about fear of losing, which is huge in my work. He says that you do not want kids to fear losing as this will get in the way of progress and he offers a three-step solution to this problem. One of these is to make sure you separate success (win/lose) from self-esteem, which I preach all the time to my students.
From a mental game/youth sports perspective, the author has several good suggestions about working on these areas including setting process goals instead of outcome goals, how kids sometimes feel conflicted about winning, learning life skills from matches, setting up a pre-match routine including mental preparation, and knowing the right time to start your junior star in tournaments. These are all very relevant and important areas in my work and the author did a nice overview of these areas.
Chapter 10 titled, "Mind Games," covers the basic mental skills for young tennis players. The author draws on the expertise sports psychology professionals and tennis starts to highlight the basic mental skills for tennis. He starts with a section on parents as mental coach and how parents can help instill mental toughness. However, I find that sometimes parents do not have the skills to work on this area or are conflicted with the role of parent. The author discusses three on-court mental skills including awareness, seeing the ball, and focus.
He quotes Phil Jackson that "awareness is everything." He discusses Tim Gallwey's (Inner Game of Tennis) awareness drills to help players focus on targets instead of mechanics. Second, he uses another Gallwey drill called bounce-hit for sighting the ball quickly and helping a player to track the ball all the way from the hitter to the racket. He calls a modified version of this drill, the toss-hit-bounce-hit drill in which is used by a player to return a serve from the opponent. Third, he talks about the importance of staying focused between points using a three R's approach including (1) Release negative emotions, (2) Review what's happened, and (3) Reset for the next point; all concepts that Vic Braden teaches at his camps.
I also enjoyed Chapter 11, "Pushing: How Much is Too Much." I loved the part on parental goals for the child. Instead of setting outcome goals such as my child must win on the professional circuit, which can lead to frustration when the child opts out of tennis, he suggest more controllable goals such as "I will provide financial help to pursue serious tennis development." He suggests that parents remind themselves that the child has different dreams than parents and parents must honor the child's dream instead of force their dream on the child. Good stuff!
Although not a pure sports psychology or youth sports book, the mental game concepts Kattan discusses are right on target to help kids enter and be successful in tennis. I would not recommend this book for coaches or parents with advanced tennis starts. However, this is an excellent read for parents that are just starting to introduce tennis to their child and want to learn more about youth sports and sports psychology concerns in tennis.
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