Last December, I wrote a series of posts that identified the “12 Habits of Highly Successful Tennis Players.” Throughout 2023, I am taking a more in-depth look at one of those habits over the first weekend of each month. The deep dive theme for May is “Training Sessions have Purpose.” The very best players in Adult Senior tennis curate an intentional personal schedule that sets aside court time for working on specific skills.
In my experience, most recreational players have a playing calendar that is jam-packed with league play and recurring fun social tennis. Those are important things that avid tennis players should want to engage in. However, competitive levels stagnate when casual tennis consumes so much time that there is no room left for player development.
A few years ago, one of my Ft. Worth USTA League captains decided that she was tired of going to Sectionals and getting thrashed by the team from Dallas every year. We brainstormed together on how to raise the collective performance of our team. A plan with a three-pronged program of skill improvement, learning new tactics, and arranging higher-quality practice matches resulted.
It didn’t work.
I am convinced that the plan could have been transformative for the individual players as well as the team. It failed because we simply couldn’t find time in the calendar to pull players together for purely developmental activities. Very few people were willing to adjust their calendars to forgo their casual recreational tennis.
The very best players in Adult Senior tennis have a vastly different mindset. Fundamentally, these players love tennis and certainly engage in forms of the sport for purely recreational purposes. However, they also carve out time in their calendar to work on specific aspects of their games. These players have a competitive drive that makes continuous improvement imperative.
Consequently, the very best players in tennis have mastered two specific things when it comes to their personal player development. First, they have a commitment to improvement in their games. The second, and much more elusive thing, is that these players are willing to bend the calendar to support their training objectives. In my experience, time is the reason why the majority of adult player development stagnates.
The quote “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” is frequently misattributed to Albert Einstein. In the case of my Fort Worth League team of yore, there were players who sincerely wanted to compete at a higher level. What was lacking was the fortitude to set aside the time to actually work on it.
To be clear, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with playing recreational tennis. The tennis ecosystem thrives when there are a lot of players that engage with the sport strictly for fun. However, the players who aspire to achieve the highest competitive levels have a completely different mindset.
The most competitive players in tennis aren’t just committed to being better. They ruthlessly set aside the time to make it happen. Conducting training sessions with purpose requires prioritizing personal player development and locking it into a schedule. The very best players in adult senior tennis do exactly that.
Throughout 2023 I am exploring the 12 Habits of Highly Successful Tennis Players. A complete summary of all posts to date on that topic as well as what is coming up for the remainder of this year can be found on the 12 Habits of Highly Successful Tennis Players homepage.
