When you watch your child practice, what are you seeing?
Are you watching them grow as a competitor, or just hitting the same shot again and again? Are they learning to think, adapt, and solve problems, or simply becoming efficient at hitting balls fed the exact same way?
The truth is, much of what we call tennis training today does not look like tennis at all.
In too many programs, kids spend their time going through the motions with sterile drills and static patterns. Each feed is the same. Every shot is rehearsed. There is no chaos, no decisions to make, no real consequences. And when tournament day comes, they are lost. The technique might look sharp, but the game sense just is not there.
Tennis is not a collection of perfect strokes. It is a living, breathing game. It is a back and forth conversation between two players. What works one moment might fail the next. Winning depends on the ability to adapt, to see opportunities, and to make fast decisions under pressure. That does not come from repeating fifty forehands in a vacuum. It comes from practicing in a way that feels like the game itself.
So the next time you are watching your child practice, ask yourself: are they being trained to perform, or to compete? Are their coaches giving them room to figure things out, to make mistakes, and to learn from them? Or are they chasing clean execution at the cost of real understanding?
We should be raising our expectations, not just of the kids, but of the training environments we put them in.
If we want players who can compete, we need to insist on training that reflects the reality of competition. Not perfect. Not polished. But honest, unpredictable, and rooted in the game. Because tennis does not reward how well you drill. It rewards how well you solve problems when everything is on the line.
And the sooner we start building that into our programs, the better our players will be.
