Player/Coach Relationships Require These Traits (Part 1)
When it comes to developing as a player, you want to do more than just play and practice. You want to truly develop as a player. But to do that, you need to find a good coach that is going to guide you towards success.
A good relationship requires things from both the coach and the player.
6 Things Every Coach-Player Needs
Today we are going to go over the first six of the 12 important things you need to have a good coach to player relationship.
- Trust
You need to be able to trust your coach if you want to develop a good relationship. Maybe at some point he or she will tell you to do something that you do not understand or want to do. However, if you have a good relationship with them, then you are going to trust that they know what they are talking about.
If you have chosen a coach that you trust, then you believe they know what they are talking about. So even if you don’t understand why, you are going to listen. You might not see it now, but in time you will figure out exactly why you did what you did.
- Faith
If you want to have a good relationship with your coach, you need a coach that has faith in you. You need to have confidence in yourself and your abilities. However, you also need to have a coach who believes in you just as much or even more.
This is true for a few reasons.
• Having people believe in you will make you start to believe in yourself. And the more you believe in yourself, the better you will be as a player.
• A coach that believes in you will push your harder in order to get you to the level he or she knows you can reach.
• A coach that believes in you will work to get you into the places and in front of the people you need to be in to get to the places you need to be.
- Boundaries
Your coach is not your friend or your family. Even if off the court they actually are, during practice, games, or coaching sessions, they are not there to go easy on you or give you special treatment.
A good coach/player relationship will take this into account. There has to be boundaries when you are out on the court. Play-positive suggests that coaches should not coach players who are in their social circle. They have to always remember what coaching is: a job.
If they can keep the fact that they are performing a job, not out there playing around with a good player, then they will do a much better job being a professional and getting you to the places you have the potential to go.
- Perspective
Coaches need to be able to keep everything in perspective if they really want to help out their players. No matter how far the player has the talent to go, they need to keep up in other areas of their life as well.
A good coach will not only think about tennis. The life of a tennis player is more than just this practice or that match. If a player starts slipping in school, a good coach will figure out why. If they start behaving in ways out of character, a coach will get to the bottom of the behavior change.
When a good coach is out there coaching, they think about the big picture. How does it fit into the rest of the player’s life? How does it fit into the player’s goals?
- Toughness
Sometimes, you are going to get mad at your coach because they want you to work harder than you want to work. But that is how a good coach-player relationship should go.
A coach that really wants to push you to the highest point you can reach is not going to do it by being easy on you. They are going to make you practice hard when you do not want to practice at all. They are going to make you get out on the tennis court when you want to sit down and give up.
You might have heard something along the lines of ‘a coach only yells at the player’s they believe in.’ It is when they stop yelling that you have to start worrying.
- Knowledge
The final point for today is that a good coach needs to be knowledgeable.
Now obviously, they need to be very knowledgeable about tennis. How else could they teach you? However, that is not all they need to know.
You are going to go to your coach for advice.
• What school has the best tennis program?
• Which tournaments should you be going to in order to get in front of the right eyes?
• How should you condition?
Your coach should be knowledgeable in many different ways in order to make sure you have the best chances of success. A highly tuned knowledge of tennis and coaching is only part of it.
Getting Started
You can find coaches everywhere, from schools to lesson to tennis camps, but make sure you don’t just settle for any coach. If you want to really improve your skills and make it far, you want a good coach/player relationship. While there are a lot more, go ahead and get started developing these six skills. Next, we’ll cover six more things every good coach to player relationship.
