Why it’s Important for Tennis Players to Set Goals

Success in sports – or just about anything in life – starts with setting appropriate goals. Depending on what you’d like to accomplish as a tennis player, it’s essential to have goals that make sense for your specific situation.

Goals are important because it’s the best way to get the most out of your performance. It’s hard to know whether you’re successful or not if you don’t know where you want to go or what you’d like to achieve in any kind of endeavor. Maintaining the motivation necessary to reach these goals will remain deep inside you as long as you’re seeing legitimate progress on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

If you need more concrete reasons as to why goals are necessary for success, here are five that will probably help:

• Goals help provide perspective for what’s important to you. If you make a goal to improve your serve over a specific period of time, it’ll be important for you to work at it and actually get better.
• Goals also help sustain the motivation necessary to get to the desired result. If you’re not seeing the kind of growth in your serve that you hoped for, having that goal will motivate you to find different ways to make it a reality.
• Goals allow you to truly be the best you can be. Nobody is perfect, and that’s especially true on the tennis court – everyone makes mistakes. Working toward something will ensure that your effort level stays up.
• There’s a lot of physical work that goes into reaching athletic goals, but it also forces you to think in different ways and employ different strategies. If your pre-serve routine isn’t yielding the results you’ve been looking for, you’ll be motivated to try and tweak it or do something completely different to achieve your desired outcome.
• Finally, goals allow you to direct your attention and action – you have a purpose when you step on the court for practice. You can’t just say, “I want to get better today” and expect to do that. The questions you should be asking yourself include, “What do I want to get better at today?” and “How am I going to get better at it?”

Of course, there are a number of different kinds of goals a tennis player can set depending on what they want to accomplish. There are short- and long-term goals, but also goals based on performance, outcome, and effort. We go into more detail about what these specific types of goals entail and how to go about setting them in this previous blog post, so be sure to check it out!

All athletes – tennis players included – are motivated by something. Whether it’s to find a new passion, play the game at the next level, improve one aspect of their game, or something else, it’s always there. There’s nothing wrong with setting very specific goals if that helps you focus on what you’d like to achieve. It can be tough to stay focused on some long-term goals on a day-to-day basis, so it may also be a good idea to physically write out your goals and put it in an area where you’ll see it every day and be reminded exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing.