When it comes to planning your training week, whether you’re playing a tournament on the upcoming weekend or not should always be taken into account. It will affect how much you practice, how much strength & conditioning you do, how many sets you play, how much time you spend on technical work, and how much time you spend drilling.

If you can’t see these things in person, it’s hard to get inspired by them. It’s hard to feel the magic. It’s hard to feel the crowd come alive. It’s a completely different feeling to see a 145mph serve in person come off of Isner’s racquet. To hear the sound of Juan Martin Del Potro’s forehand as it connects with the center of his strings.

What are you willing to tolerate on your high performance junior tennis journey? Some people can't handle the emotional outbursts, bad line calls, frustrating parents, and the overall emotional roller coaster. They want a nice respectful game, with a nice relaxing atmosphere, and if goals aren't achieved, it's not a problem. Others can tolerate the roller coaster so long as progress is being made and the child is showing continuous signs of happiness.

Unfortunately you have to pick.

You can’t be mentally tough without handling the routines in-between points properly. Player’s spend more time in a match dealing with their internal dialogue, than actually hitting a ball.

Most families are stuck in a position where their child splits sets, they’re able to receive coaching, and they have no coach there.

So the parent is left as the de facto coach.

What should they do? They’re not a coach, but here they are, with their child about to go into a nerve wrecking third set tiebreak (or regular set depending on the tournament), and are looking for guidance.

“A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t” - Jack Dempsey

It’s a hard thing to explain to someone if they haven’t gone through something incredibly difficult and challenging, and refused to back down. It can also seem like an unfair thing to explain to a young athlete, but it’s a necessary thing for them to learn.

If you haven't listened to the Baseline Intelligence podcast, and you're a tennis coach, parent, or player, you need to! Stokke has an incredible wealth of knowledge, from his experience as a junior and collegiate player, playing in the US Open, coaching in college tennis, and now a private coach with an amazing podcast.

This blog was a difficult one to write, so I will be directing you to the podcast instead. Answering this question is straight forward, but finding that type of environment is difficult. There will always be a higher level training group so at some point, a coach has to say no, they can’t move you up. So here are the main points of the podcast, and I encourage you to watch or listen to the podcast to get all of the details behind my thoughts:

Some great lessons were learned, along with some painful ones, but that's how we grow. I'm looking forward to more training blocks, more tournament matches reviewed, and more conversations with parents. In the meantime, please enjoy the 3 things I learned as a coach, but also the 3 things that stayed the same in 2023.

No, this is not to paint pickleball in a negative way. I think it's awesome to see tennis courts that used to sit empty finally be occupied again. Unfortunately, I think the courts could have been occupied by tennis players if the sport had marketed the youth color balls and courts in a different way.

For those that haven’t heard of the invisible gorilla experiment, volunteers were told to keep track of how many times a few basketball players tossed a basketball. While they did this, someone in a gorilla suit walked across the basketball court, in plain view, yet many of the volunteers failed to notice the gorilla.

Many kids fail to maximize their potential because we put too much emphasis on developing weapons that have the ability to hit amazing winners that ohhh and ahhhh people, and not enough time on weapons that require ball control skills, patience, and strategy skills.

With the way things are in today’s society, we have to be careful working someone really hard for fear of complaints and lawsuits regarding negligence. That’s why I was thrilled to learn about Timothy Noakes research in the book The Comfort Crisis. There’s nothing better for a coach trying to gain the trust of kids and families to have real scientific research behind their methods to help build trust in their developmental process.

I do my best to coach by the idea that if I’m constantly asking my players to get better, I should do the same. Well SwingVision’s new feature helps me accomplish just that! Their recent upgrade now breaks down a player’s return of serve stats.

This is all just my personal preference. I’ve spent some time training at many different places. At the end of the day, I think this type of environment will best help a junior develop into a great tennis player, while having a great experience. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find our unicorn, but we can sure get close!

The food and liquids we consume have a direct affect on our energy and our mood. If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars a year on tennis training, the last thing you want is for your nutrition to ruin everything. Give this area the same attention you would any other part of your tennis training.

There are days where we wake up & our favorite forehand is no where to be found. When yesterday we needed to hit forehands cross-court because we were playing a lefty, today we need to hit down the line because our opponent has a great righty forehand. That’s the world tennis players live in. The world where everything is about percentages, not rules, & those percentages seesaw back and forth.

There’s been a growing frustration amongst players and parents in junior tennis for a while now, and it hurts my tennis loving soul. It hurts the tennis loving soul of all current coaches and former players.

Think about it. A parent tracks that their child hit twelve double faults. Ok. Great (not really though) But how? Why did they hit 12 double faults? Was it the toss? Was it the grip? Was it the head? There are so many possibilities.

As a tennis coach, the most important thing on my mind is how can I help my players achieve their goals. Over the last year, I’ve been spending a lot of time on A.I. generated tennis app called SwingVision to help my players get better. The following describes how I use SwingVision to help my players get better, and how you can use these tools as well.