The Importance of ‘Competing’

With our Club Championships upcoming and within my role as Coach and District Competition Coordinator for Tayside I have heard a lot of the following things over the last few months:

‘I don’t know if I am good enough to play in that event…’

‘Will my child be okay playing in that event…’

‘The thought of entering stresses me out…’

‘Oh no I won’t enter that, you know I am not competitive…’

The result of this is that a lot of people avoid entering events and competitions at a massive detriment to their tennis development. Let me spend the next 5 minutes of your life disproving these thoughts.

Tennis is the sport and not coaching. Coaching if done well allows us to play the sport better but it is not the sport itself. The sport itself is playing matches, fun sets and ‘competing’. Competition in its many forms is what fundamentally drives tennis development and continued participation. Therefore, whatever your level, as soon as we as coaches give you the tools to get a ball over the net (whether that be once or twenty times in a row) we as players should be looking to ‘compete’ in some form.

The second thing is to work out why Jack keeps putting ‘compete’ in quotation marks. Well for me it is really important to change the definition of competing. Competing encompasses a broad range of situations. If you are playing a casual set or team game with a friend and you put a score on it, you are competing. You may not feel like it because it was relaxed you were smiling and friendly with each other, but you were competing… I know you were competing because you come to coaching sessions and you say to me ‘oh I had a really close set with Glenda the other day, it went to a tiebreak’. You enjoyed the competition and you want to tell me about it. In the same way as you were competing in that set, your league players are competing on a Monday night, your juniors are competing at county events, and your pros are competing at Wimbledon. I realise as soon as we make something an official event, we think this changes but it really does not. Only when we see all of these things on the same scale and treat them with equal value can we really understand and get over the anxiety of ‘competing’. No matter how casual or serious something is, it is competition… we make it as casual or serious as we choose and the event format should not really change that. Turn up to an ‘official’ event and smile your way through it!

Now another point I wish to touch upon is the fear of losing. Lots of people do not enter events (social or official), because of a fear of losing or of people watching them. I have two points on this. Number one, losing is part of the learning process. There is always a bigger fish. The more tennis matches you play the more matches you will lose, it’s a fact. At the professional level of the game if you have a 50% win ratio (win a match, lose a match and so on) you are a very good player. At any event half of the draw will lose their first match… that’s a 50% chance of not winning a match. Most players touring actually go through long periods without match wins, just look at Sir Andy Murray on his comeback. But does that mean it was pointless to enter? Absolutely not, if you do not put yourself out there you cannot learn the key skills needed to win these matches, how to deal with all that match anxiety and still perform. In the Wimbledon Museum lies a quote from the great Rafael Nadal and it says ‘If we don’t lose, we don’t enjoy the victories’. Easy for a 20-time grand slam champion to say I am sure, but the point still stands for us club and parks players. This becomes even more prevalent for kids who often live and die by their results as if it is the end of the world. I hate seeing the kids I coach go through that, as a parent it must be heart-breaking, but the point still remains that they must be exposed to this to learn, to come back stronger and to go again. After all is it not a competitive world we live in when applying for jobs and running businesses etc, this is a key life skill.

Point number two here is an anecdote. I played a couple of weeks ago and my partner came to watch me play. I suffer all the same nerves as everyone else when it comes to competing, everyone does, but I would be a hypocrite to write this but not expose myself to competitions. Anyway, I missed an absolute sitter of a volley, I went all flushed and hot on the court at the embarrassment of missing in front of the 20 or so people watching around the club. ‘Jesus christ, I am a Coach and everyone has just watched me miss that…’ I thought to myself, the internal talking starts. At the end of the match I sat down next to my partner (having lost of course) and immediately started recounting that missed easy volley berating myself and feeling embarrassed. My partner turned to me and said ‘What volley, I did not see that’. And here lies my point, she was the one person who had come to this event to specifically watch me play and even she had missed that moment as her attention was elsewhere. So, if that was the case for her then it was even more likely the case for everyone else as they stand around socialising barely aware of the tennis going on. On court we feel exposed as if we are on display and everyone is watching, this is rarely actually the case. Even if it is those moments we fixate on as players at the time, any viewing spectators will likely forget minutes after the event has happened. A fear of losing and being on display should not be a reason not to compete and hinder your tennis progress.

And finally, I want to talk about Emma Raducanu. She is an 18 year old British player currently in the 4th round of Wimbledon. Emma at the time of writing this is 338 in the world, well outside the level to qualify for Wimbledon, she is there by virtue of accepting a wildcard. When Raducanu was offered a wildcard for Wimbledon having only played one WTA tour level event previously, I’m sure there were doubts in her mind about her ability on the world stage with millions of eyes on her around the world. Despite this I’m sure any one of us would say she would be mad to turn down a wildcard at Wimbledon in terms of helping her tennis development and testing herself against the best players in the world. Even if she had gone down 6-0, 6-0 in the first round we would have said what an experience for someone so young to get and that she now has a great platform to develop herself further. And next thing you know she is in the second week of Wimbledon… so next time you go to turn down a chance to compete, why not think about Emma’s achievements and how different it would be if she had turned down the wildcard and think about what you could be missing out on by not competing.