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My mom is a tennis coach, and here is her take on coaching tennis...My name is Leone Montgomery and I have been coaching tennis in South Africa for more than 20 years. I was also a decent tennis player as a junior, and played provincial tennis and represented the South African Universities team. During my 20 years as a professional tennis coach, I have helped more than 20 players to the top 10 ranked positions in their age groups, as well as 4 junior players to the number 1 position in singles. The very last player I helped, went on to play Davis cup tennis for South Africa, and most of these players continued to play college tennis or pro tennis. When I started coaching tennis in 1978, there were very few full-time coaches, whereas today, you will find someone coaching tennis on just about every private, municipal or club court anywhere in the world! To my mind, tennis coaching is grossly overrated and in the bigger scheme of things, most often does more damage to the player than doing any good. To prove this, I can tell you about many talented young players who started off in the top 4 ranked positions in their under 10 and under 12 age groups. Somewhere along the line, an ambitious tennis coach got hold of them and 90% of the time that young talented player will not be in the top ranked positions when they reach the age of 16 or 17 years old anymore. My personal mentor has been Jaroslav Houba, a Czech Davis Cup coach for many years, who also helped a Wimbledon champion, Jaroslav Drobny, in the 1950’s. He has been very instrumental in my success as a pro tennis coach. He opened my eyes to the fact that every player is unique and special in his own way and that you cannot treat any two players the same. Their playing style mostly resembles their innermost feelings, that is their personality. A tennis player is really an artist, expressing themselves on the tennis court. You could say the tennis court is the blank canvas, and the tennis racquet would be the paint brush, and that is how I would encourage these amazingly gifted youngsters each time. What they felt inside, would be expressed by them daily on the tennis court! I would mostly encourage, support and above all, protect them. Yes, of course they had to be able to play a decent first serve, good solid topspin second serve with enough depth, etc. I would build their game around 3 simple concepts - I call it the 3 point plan. Number one - do win your own service game every time, number two - keep your groundstrokes deep, in other words, as close as possible to the baseline, so as to keep your opponent from advancing to the net and number three - when you get the first short ball, move in to the net area immediately and attack , so that you could finish off the point at the net. I firmly believe coaching tennis should be kept very simple. The more complicated the game becomes, the less spontaneous a player’s reactions. Tennis is a simple game. If you follow the 3 point plan, you cannot go wrong! Any competitive player should have a good first serve, solid topspin second serve, a powerful topspin forehand and backhand that he can drive deep to the corners of his opponent’s side and a solid volley and smash, that he can play from anywhere in the fore-court – being able to put it out of reach of his opponent, even under pressure. To my experience, any good tennis coach should really be there as a support for their players, helping them believe in themselves and together, they should have the end picture in mind as to how this player’s game will look at 16 years of age. Everything that they work and trains for, should be in line with this picture. Of course, by far the most important times, is when a player has lost a match. Coaches normally criticize and react in a very disappointed and angry way to their player. A player is most vulnerable when they have lost a match, and I have seen many aspiring talents lose it, because of how they were being treated after such losses. So - those are in a nutshell, some of the beliefs that I hold regarding the success of coaching tennis to young children.
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