It is my belief that in order to reach a high level in junior tennis, there are three areas to train. First is tennis skill and technique. Second is fitness. And third is mental toughness. 

The first one is where most kids start. They learn how to hit the ball. They learn the forehand, backhand, and serve. And as they progress, they start to add more complicated shots like different spin types and aiming the ball into different parts of the court to give them an advantage. Learning these skills is time consuming and laborious. It is hard. The ball moves fast, and predicting where (and how) it will bounce, and then timing your return shot is extremely difficult to learn and requires thousands of hours of practice to get good at it. However, it goes without saying that you will never be very competitive unless you master these skills. Kids will spend the majority of their lesson time refining these skills because they are so unique to tennis.

The second area comes a little later. Fitness is embedded in learning how to play, but once a kid reaches a certain level, it becomes more of a factor. The level of competition starts to rise and so the players start to look for advantages and ways to keep up with the increased intensity. Fitness can be a big separator. If skill levels are the same, but one kid is faster, stronger, and has better endurance, it’s pretty clear who the winner is going to be. Also, in order to master those tennis skills I just mentioned, the player needs to repeat the same movements over and over and over again – thereby risking injury. These injuries can be prevented, however, through fitness.

Fitness often gets overlooked because many parents think it is embedded in technique training. After all, when the kid is hitting those thousands of balls, isn’t he running all around the court? Isn’t that enough fitness? While it’s true, the kid is exercising, that is not the same thing as a focused effort to improve speed, power, endurance, and flexibility. These things need to be worked on off the court and then applied on the court. 

It’s the same reason football players spend time in the weight room. Bench pressing and power squatting are not football movements, but the strength translates to power and speed on the field. The same is true for tennis. It might not seem like it, especially if your child is young (under 12 years old or so), but as they get older, the points grow in intensity, and the physical elements start to become an important factor. 

Improving fitness at the junior level can be very tricky because you need to remember these are still kids and kids all develop at different rates. When my son was 14 years old, he was 5’8” tall but still weighed 115 pounds. At that age, some of his opponents were over 5’10” and looked close to 150 or 160. There was nothing wrong with either kid, but it was a clear sign how kids grow at different speeds over the course of the years when junior tennis is at its peak. These differences in growth rates play a big factor in how much fitness training can help. My son, for example, was NEVER going to over power some of the kids he was playing no matter how much time he spent in the gym. Moreover, you never want to overdo it on the fitness side because too much running and weight training can wear the kid down and start to impact refining technique. It is a tricky balance to be sure, but not emphasizing any fitness will make it difficult to win at a high level in juniors.

The third area is mental toughness. Of all the three areas, this is the one that gets neglected the most, but in my opinion, it’s the area that increases in importance as the player progresses. There are many ways people describe mental toughness, but my basic definitiion is: Can the kid stay positive when things get bad? Tennis is one of the most frustrating sports in the world. You can practice the same shot a million times, hit it perfectly 99.999% of the time, but the one time you need that exact same shot to accomplish something important, it falls down on you. Furthermore, you are playing by yourself. There is no one there to blame if the point doesn’t go as you expected. It can be a lot of pressure knowing that everything rides on your shoulders and you have no one else to rely on. And finally, you are playing against someone. Just as you are problem solving and trying to predict your opponent’s next move, so too is your opponent! It can be exceedingly frustrating to feel as if you have a match in the bag, only to have an opponent change strategies and start winning. 

The format of tennis also lends itself to making things hard mentally. No one is allowed to talk to the player during a match, so the inner voice of the player just gets louder and louder. And the scoring system is one that disproportionately favors big point success, which creates very high levels of tension in a match.

Mental toughness is the ability to stay positive in spite of all these structural challenges working against the player. It’s so easy to become frustrated in a match. This frustration quickly leads to despondency, which then takes away focus. There are so many books written and studies conducted that prove the power of positive thinking, so I won’t go into it here, but suffice it to say, that once a player becomes despondent on the court, it gets very hard to stay focused and concentrate on the match. Mental toughness training helps the kid maintain that positive mindset so they can stay focused no matter what is happening.

Now you know what I mean when I describe the “balanced” player. The issue I have seen, however, and one explanation for why a kid might not see the success they are looking for on the court, is often due to an imbalance in training. 

Most kids focus on technique. They spend the vast majority of their time hitting balls over and over again. Taking the same shots thousands of times. To some degree, there is no way to avoid this. But there will come a point when a kid’s tennis technique has become sound and the reason they might be losing is actually due to a lack of focus in the two other areas.