There is a version of tennis parenting that looks like dedication. Early mornings, full weekends, year-round training, tournaments every other week. It looks like commitment. It looks like investment. What the research increasingly suggests is that it looks, from the outside, nothing like what it actually is.
A 2025 clinical review published in Sports Health, the journal of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine, examined the available evidence on early specialisation and intense training specifically in junior tennis. The findings are not ambiguous. Early specialisation leads to increased injury risk, decreased career longevity, and higher rates of burnout without producing any corresponding improvement in the likelihood of reaching elite play. Not some of the time. As a consistent pattern across the literature.
The injury numbers are specific. Highly specialised young athletes have more than 30% greater injury risk than multi-sport peers. In high school athletes, those with the highest specialisation levels had 85% more injuries than those with low specialisation. For tennis specifically, the players who specialised only in tennis had more career injuries and more medical withdrawals from tournaments than those who also played other sports during development.
None of this is theoretical. These are injuries that end seasons, shorten careers, and occasionally end athletic development altogether. In a large survey of tenth-grade athletes, one in five who quit their sport cited injury as the reason.
What makes this harder to act on is that the damage is slow and cumulative. A twelve-year-old playing twenty tournaments a year does not obviously look injured. They are showing up, competing, sometimes winning. The overuse pattern builds quietly in tendons and growth plates and shoulder joints that are not yet mature enough for the loads being placed on them. By the time the injury surfaces, the cause is months or years old.
The paper is careful to acknowledge that not all players are equally at risk. Some tolerate higher loads than others, depending on their developmental stage, their biomechanics, and their history. But without proper assessment, families and coaches are essentially guessing which category their player falls into. And the system provides no incentive to make that assessment. Tournaments do not ask how many matches a player has already played this month. Rankings do not adjust for a thirteen-year-old’s growth plate.
This is worth sitting with. The environment your child is developing in was not designed with their long-term health as its primary consideration. Understanding that is not a reason to stop playing tennis. It is a reason to make more deliberate decisions about how much, and when. If the anxiety behind those decisions feels familiar, Your Child Is Not Behind is worth reading alongside this.