Mental Tennis: Watch Your Emotions!

In light of Denis Shapovalov's actions in Canada's Davis Cup tie against Great Britain (and if you haven't seen it, take a look here), I thought I would share some stories from the good ol' days. My goal: to help younger players avoid emotions becoming detrimental to their game.

My senior year of high school I was living in England and attending an American school. My school didn't have a tennis program, but the track coach there arranged with the other American schools around the country to allow me to compete against their top singles players as an independent. I couldn't have been more grateful for the opportunity and began traveling (thanks, Mom and Dad) around the UK for the occasional match.

During one such match, I found myself down to an opponent I believed I shouldn't ever lose to (I'll save a discussion on that poor mentality for another day). As was often the case for me at this stage in my playing career, I lost my temper. For me, this involved a lot of yelling at myself, slapping my racket against the net cord, the occasional throwing of the racket (off-hand and open face so I wouldn't break it), and much like Denis Shapovalov, I sometimes found myself taking my anger out on a tennis ball.

My sportsmanship in that loss was bad enough that my parents "encouraged" me to apologize to my victor and his parents. Honestly, it was embarrassing.

But the next week, while competing against another school, a coach I had never met before pulled me aside to offer me some advice. He said he had watched me the week before and that he thought I was a talented player. But he asked me if I understood how my emotional tirades were really affecting the outcomes of my matches.

Nope, hadn't even thought about it.

I simply thought it was a momentary expression of frustration that would allow me to get out my anger and help me start focusing on playing better. This coach, however, made one main point: my emotional outbursts gave my opponents confidence because they knew they had me on the ropes.

That was quite literally a game-changer.

Here I am picking up my first singles win, but that's
a story for another day.

It wasn't that I looked silly (though I did), it wasn't that it was poor sportsmanship (though it most certainly was), it wasn't even that it was making me play worse (though it probably did that, too). What clicked with me and caused me to instantly change was that I was helping my opponent play better, which ultimately led me to lose many, many matches.

I hate losing. Always have, and always will. And as soon as the dots were connected and the correlation between my emotions and my losing was made, I changed. That day I won my first "official" singles match, and I give a lot of credit to this mental change.

Here is the lesson I learned: very few of us in this world are like John McEnroe. He used his temper to propel him to be one of the greatest players this sport has ever seen. More of us are like me, where our tempers get in the way of our success. It's bad sportsmanship, it harms us, and it helps our opponents.

Hopefully we can all learn this lesson before we're forced to learn it the hard way.

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