My Coach - June 2011 issue

A SECTION DEDICATED TO TENNIS AUSTRALIA COACH MEMBERS Tennis Australia Coach Membership T: 03 9914 4191 F: 03 9650 1040 Email: coachmembership@tennis.com.au Website: www.tennis.com.au/membership

MyCoach

50 Time to move on: there may come a time when a coach has maximised their coaching relationship with an athlete.

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Education is key: John Playle has channelled his passion for tennis into a prospering coaching career.

53 What do you see? Feliciano Lopez demonstrates key aspects of his backhand slice.

54 Talking points: the link between volume, skill development and injury.

56 Coach corner 57 Coach talk

Australian Tennis Magazine | June 2011

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A SECTION DEDICATED TO TENNIS AUSTRALIA COACH MEMBERS Tennis Australia Coach Membership T: 03 9914 4191 F: 03 9650 1040 Email: coachmembership@tennis.com.au Website: www.tennis.com.au/membership

Time to move on

What happens when a coach has maximised their coaching relationship with an athlete? It may be difficult to recognise, but depending on the goals of an athlete there will come a point when you might have to let go. By Daniela Toleski Strong relationship

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n the early years, the player-coach relationship can be compared to a parentchild relationship in many ways. At times you could almost take the role of a second father or mother.

If the athlete has achieved some good results under your wing, they’ll probably find moving on as difficult as you find letting go, but the early coach has an important role to play within the development of a player.

“I always had a saying that it’s a disaster to cut the umbilical cord between the original coach and the player, because to me that was the person who did all the basic work,” Talent Development Coach Mentor Ian Barclay says.

“And we need those people, because we need them to produce another one next week. And then another one after that – wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

But for athletes who want to take their tennis one step further, sometimes the only way this can be achieved is through the expertise of another coach.

“I have a basic philosophy that coaching’s about player learning from every contact they have within the sport not just the one they share with you,” LifeTime Tennis founder and Talent Development Coach Mentor Gary Stickler says.

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Australian Tennis Magazine | June 2011

“So it’s giving them some mechanisms by which they can learn no matter who they’re interacting with, that’s my role as a coach, not just for me to be the person who teaches them and I think then I’ve done a good job if I’ve done that.”

Coaching qualifications limitations There will be a mixture of juniors who have had a few different coaches at their club or moved around, while others will have the same coach for the duration of their junior years.

However, there will be occasions

When an athlete moves into High Performance they require a coach with a different set of expertise.

Tennis Australia Club Professional coach Steve Storer teams up with mainstream Melbourne and Queensland based academies to assist his athletes with further development.

“Over the years I have exposed children I coach to High Performance coaches such as Kane Dewhurst and Vince Dattoli at the Vida Tennis Academy in Melbourne and Chris Steel at the Pat Cash International Tennis Academy in Queensland,” Storer says.

“These coaches set a high level of excellence in what they demand of their players. Once the children have experienced this, they realise I also am seeking the same professional approach to their tennis.”

Specialised strength and conditioning training is essential for transitioning athletes.

Away from home

there’s an exchange of ideas in how to keep improving that player.”

“Each coach has to know where they sit and what they want to do. Some guys like to live on the road out of a suitcase, others would rather be at home and not do that travel.”

Focus on High Performance Therefore usually the move away from a player’s junior coach is because the athlete is moving on to a more specific High Performance environment to further develop their skills.

MyCoach

when you may have taught them all that you can or you’re a club coach and not a travelling coach, so won’t be able to help them transition to the professional circuit.

“I’m probably a little bit different to the average coach in that I’ve got kids out playing Challengers and Futures at the moment and we go right across the spectrum,” Stickler says.

“I think even somebody like myself has to recognise that I operate a business that’s based here in Australia and I don’t travel internationally with players. Any coach has to recognise where they sit in the market place, what their role is in the marketplace.

And sometimes you can’t be all things to all people, so you have to recognise where you fit in the scheme of things and what contribution you make.”

“You have to work with the other people and make the contribution in the areas that you can.”

Bowrey echoes Stickler’s comments and believes that a coach’s support of an athlete’s move is in essence where you see yourself as a coach and where you would like to see your business go.

“What Gary says is absolutely true. You can’t be a travelling coach if you’ve got a big coaching business at home because if you put all your eggs in one basket and that player doesn’t make it, and you just drift away from them or whatever, then you’ve got no business to come back to,” Bowrey says.

“So we have to have federation coaches that will travel, be travelling coaches, but there’s got to be teamwork between who takes them away and the coach that has them full-time so that

At the end of the day, tennis is a travelling sport and if an athlete wants to participate on the professional tour, sooner or later they’re going to have to move from their local coach (if they’re coach isn’t a travelling coach), and in most instances move from Australia, with many athletes requiring overseas bases.

“One of the real truisms in tennis is that the better you become the further away from home you get. There’s only one tournament played in your home city each year, so you’re on the road. The better you get the more you’re away and then you live overseas,” Barclay says.

The connection with the original coach though is a powerful one and depending on the amount of years an athlete has been under your trusted guidance, you have the opportunity to maintain a mentor role within an athlete’s sport and personal life.

State-of-the-art coaches and facilities are on hand at the Australian Institute of Sport.

Australian Tennis Magazine | June 2011

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education is key

MyCoach

increased expectations placed upon both athlete and coach.

It enhanced my passion to develop better athletes here in Australia. The main differences ia layle stral I found were the increased P u A n h s nni ), e: Jo s: Te 2009 t competition and diversity in n Nam ( n o i e h t c lopm ifica l coa Qual Deve playing styles and coaching siona r s o e i f n o Pr ia Ju l a Club r techniques.” t s nia is Au asma T ) f Tenn 5 o Playle is at the forefront 0 y h (20 Universit coac : of Tasmanian tennis, t a hes Coac ts r coaching members of the u o is c tenn Tasmanian State team and Optus Junior tournament players.

Some of the players under his wing include Charlotte Ingram, Kate Bohmer, James Giannis, Sanyukta Singh, Jamie BakerJensz, Fraser McDade, Olivia Hazell, Joshua Haselgrove and Indi Watchorn.

At the tender age of seven “I hope that through my athletes I can John Playle picked up his first achieve growth in the sport and in turn help them all to grow in life,” he says. “It’s racquet to play tennis and developing and enhancing individual life skills he’s taken his passion of the through the game of tennis.” sport to a prospering coaching There are three synthetic grass and two hard courts available for use at the University career. of Tasmania and Playle has been coaching “My most memorable moment was playing in tournaments overseas. It was a real eye opener but the experience is something that will last with me forever,” he says.

Growing up in New Zealand and moving to Australia at the age of 12 Playle began coaching at 17 years of age while attending the Hutchins School. He settled in the picturesque Sandy Bay in Tasmania having recently attained more than 12 years of coaching experience and a Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Tasmania.

Over this time he has coached players of all levels and ages, with coaching roles in the US, United Kingdom and Australia, completing a Tennis Australia Junior Development coaching qualification in 2005 and a Tennis Australia Club Professional coaching qualification in 2009.

“To have a career in the sport I love, whilst also passing on the knowledge and experience I have gained as a player was the reason I decided to become a coach,” he says.

“Coaching overseas opened my eyes to the 52

Australian Tennis Magazine | June 2011

Playle sees the coach/player interaction as the cornerstone of an effective working relationship, with its effectiveness having the potential to alter a player’s engagement.

“Constant communication between the players and myself helps me to have effective relationships, with positive reinforcement and feedback helping to maintain the relationships.”

Having been a player himself Playle understands the pressures of unrealistic demands and tries to provide a positive environment for his athletes.

“I set realistic short-term and long-term goals and use role models in the game of tennis to demonstrate work ethic,” he says.

Playle is also quick to acknowledge the valuable knowledge he has learnt from National Coach for Tennis Tasmania Simon Youl and the support he’s received from Tennis Tasmania.

Growing as a coach is one of his goals and he hopes to achieve this through further coaching education.

“But my main aim is to develop each player to their full potential and develop more state and national players.”

“To have a career in the sport I love, whilst also passing on the knowledge and experience I have gained as a player was the reason I decided to become a coach.” here for two years where he established his own tennis coaching business in 2010, ‘John Playle Tennis Coaching’.

“Coaching at the University of Tasmania has helped develop my business in a relaxed and friendly environment. As a coach it has allowed me to focus on the athletes’ needs first.”

Playle sets realistic short and long-term goals for his athletes.

What do you see?

By the Stroke Master

As a big serving left-hander, Feliciano Lopez possesses a comprehensive all court game. With a current singles ranking of 42, Lopez is a formidable opponent for any player in the top 50. Below he shows some of the key aspects to his backhand slice.

Shoulders are aligned to the oncoming ball while the trunk remains sideways.

Body weight has transferred from back to front foot (linear momentum).

The elbow is slightly bent to ensure the swing is from the shoulder (too much elbow movement will produce a chopping motion).

MyCoach

Elbows are spaced away from the body to enable the arms to separate in the forward swing (left arm forward and right arm backward).

Australian Tennis Magazine | June 2011

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Talking Points:

the link between volume, skill development and injury Damian Farrow – Senior Skill Acquisition Specialist at the AIS and Professor of Sport Science at Victoria University and Bruce Elliott – Professor of Biomechanics at the University of Western Australia share their insights with Dr Machar Reid.

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R: Damian, in other professional sports, a perception exists that the physical preparation staff seem to control the total volume and intensity of training undertaken by players. Last year this was topical in football circles and attracted quite a bit of media attention as a result.

Commentators lamented the amount of skill-based work that players were ‘allowed’ to complete because of injury concerns and attributed this to a general lack of improvement in goal-kicking. Does the same prevailing issue exist in tennis? Is there the potential for this sort of dynamic to stall the technical development of players?

DF: I guess in a tennis sense, maybe because the sport is more skill based, I haven’t seen the same at times maniacal ethos (of the physio or strength and conditioning staff dictating load) apply.

Fortunately, in a sport like tennis, I think you can integrate technical development, tactical development, physiological development, as well as psychological development all within the same practice structure. This doesn’t mean that you can do one drill to answer all of those component parts but it does mean that the same drill may have different focus from time to time. It’s a really complicated question, but I think we are a little better off than some of the other sports, partly because our coaches come from a skill base rather than physiological base.

MR: From an injury point of view though, why would the concern exist in football but not in tennis?

BE: Well, tennis is less stressful than football quite simply because there is no body contact. My view is that overuse injuries and injuries more generally 54

Australian Tennis Magazine | June 2011

A player’s body is conditioned to withstand the rigors of tennis from a young age.

shouldn’t be part of the learning experience up to puberty. Variety, coordination, technical development should all be prominent so there should be enough change in the training structure to not overload the system. As players move through the 11–14 age group,

the physical preparation and medical teams play an increasingly important role in ensuring that the players’ bodies are prepared to withstand the rigors of tennis. With the forces that we are now asking our players to generate, to me, players of these ages need to establish a

from a pure learning perspective, I think we need to place more demands on the players in terms of their skill development within a practice session.

That doesn’t mean it has to be physically harder; just that we present more of a challenge in terms of stroke production, decision-making, expectations on quality and so forth.

really strong and sound base of strength and endurance.

Injuries will happen in tennis – that is a given. However, the strength and conditioning coaches, physiotherapists and doctors operate with the athlete’s best interests in mind and try to balance the need for skill/physical development and injury prevention. Finding the right balance can be tricky and it’s for this reason that most professionals attempt to monitor training load. They’re trying to make more informed and better decisions about the health or training status of players and then manipulate that to elicit a positive performance outcome. You can argue or lament the methodology but the intent is sound.

DF: I think Bruce has summed it up well.

If you disperse the volume appropriately, it is advantageous from a learning point of view, and it also seems logical that it would reduce the likelihood of overuse injury. So that holistic view of how you go about it is the key, and interestingly I don’t know of a great deal of empirical work in the area, obviously because it is such a difficult issue to tackle experimentally. I think we all see it intuitively but it’s certainly an area that science could step up to show its advantages of it to coaches.

BE: What I would add from an injury perspective is that tennis, again unlike other sports, is played across multiple surfaces – each of which take a different physical toll on the body. To this end, even at younger ages (less than 12), there is likely a link between training volume on hard courts and lower limb injuries. This being the case, variety of surface is a must.

If you are going to do some footwork drills

or some introductory plyometric drills, then get off the hard court.

MR: Coaches are often craving guidelines or some information to help them better plan or put together their training. We’ve talked about skill development, we’ve talked about variety, and so the next question really is ... ‘how much is really enough’? Whether it be from a skill development point of view or in eliciting a technical change, how much time is really required?

BE: I don’t think we have any idea at all exactly how much is enough, I mean there have been some studies done in sports like cricket for fast bowling, where it’s been shown that if you don’t bowl enough then certainly injury is more likely to occur.

However, I don’t see this in tennis. In cricket we were talking about bowling twice a week/three time a week. In tennis, as a high performance player they may hit five, six, seven days a week. So I don’t think that not doing enough is an injury risk in tennis.

DF: And from a skill development view, there is no magic number as such.

We covered this off previously in the discussion around the 10,000 hours – it is nothing more than a guide. The only point that I would make though is that I think we’ve got the tendency to be overly conservative in skill development sessions, whereas it’s often a case of the more difficult and challenging practice, the better the practice can be. I say that, however, without us considering the psychological perspective, which might emphasise player motivation and confidence issues related to overly challenging practice. Nevertheless,

MR: I take your point Damian. However, is there a tendency then to go the other way: to make it so diverse, so challenging that you don’t get enough repetition? From the outside looking in, it would appear that certain countries (or coaches) have fallen in to that trap.

DF: Yes, I think it’s like anything when you don’t have specific evidence to guide you. It points to a continuum and a happy medium, a common sense type of approach. I guess what I’m highlighting is that some coaches have the tendency to ease off a bit earlier than they need to; to make it a little bit easier than they need to. A typical example is when a coach feeds in a few extra balls or repetitions of a particular shot (i.e. not wanting the last shot to be an error or to have missed a target) when they could have moved on and got more benefit from a learning point of view. So I think our tendency is conservatism and we just need to ramp it up a little bit in some of the practice that we do, and this is purely, as I’ve said, from my skill acquisition perspective not that of conditioning, psychology or any other discipline.

BE: My one and only physiological comment is that I don’t think that sweat is a dirty word and kids have to understand that.

MyCoach

Professional players often suffer overuse injuries – as Juan Martin del Potro did with his wrist.

Each surface takes a different toll on the body.

Australian Tennis Magazine | June 2011

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Coaches’ corner LOCAL AREA MARKETING

– one click away

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t’s a reality in the current marketing landscape that traditional advertising is becoming less effective.

Effective marketing comes from having a well known brand and creating strong loyal relationships and word of mouth at a local level.

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Tennis Australia Coach Membership aims to ensure that prospects for tennis in Australia are nurtured and substantially advanced by providing information and initiatives that are easy to implement.

Qualified coach members can access the Tennis brand with locked logo upgrades, personalised coach websites, Tennis branded merchandise, local area marketing and other effective marketing services, which can all be purchased through tennis.com.au/coaches/membership/updateprofile with your My Tennis ID and password.

For more information on a range of benefits offered through Tennis Australia Coach Membership for 2011–2012, please visit tennis.com.au/coaches/memberhsip/benefits.

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Locked logo upgrade For $99 per annum, Qualified members can upgrade to a locked logo package, including the design and use of a locked logo, featuring your business logo and the Tennis Australia logo.

The locked logo can be used on all your business resources and marketing collateral.

Head of Coaching operations at the Old Parliament House Gardens Tennis Centre and

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Australian Tennis Magazine | June 2011

Tennis Australia Club Professional coach Brett Lennard has been operating a professional tennis coaching business since 1998.

The inaugural winner of the ‘Australian Tennis Awards Coaching Excellence – Club’ in 2010, Lennard understands the value of brand identity and local area marketing when trying to create a profitable and sustainable coaching business.

Lennard has made use of the ‘locked logo’ member benefit in a range of marketing materials for his business, Rising Star Tennis Academy.

“We are very conscious of our brand and what that brand means to our company. We approach all marketing activities, promotions and program delivery with our business vision and image in mind. An alliance with a brand of Tennis Australia’s quality, reputation and reach through the Coach Membership locked logo can only strengthen the public’s perception of the professionalism and integrity of our organisation.”

Want to take advantage of the locked logo upgrade? Join online by June 30 and save up to $66. Simply visit tennis.com.au/ membership.

Brett Lennard understands the importance of a professional approach.

Business Cards Tennis Australia qualified coach members can order tennis branded business cards for only $70 per 250 cards. Business cards featuring your locked logo are available for purchase at $99 per 250 cards or $129 for 500 cards.

Prices include GST and postage and handling. Visit tennis. com.au/coaches/membership/ benefits/marketing to download the order form.

Coach Talk Tennis Australia education calendar

T Location

Course dates

Applications close

Intro to MLC Tennis Hot Shots

Adelaide

10/7/11

5pm, 24 June

Intro to MLC Tennis Hot Shots

Adelaide

9/10/11

5pm, 23 Sept

Intro to MLC Tennis Hot Shots

Adelaide

18/12/11

5pm, 2 Dec

Trainee

Brisbane

27/6/11

5pm, 14 June

Trainee

Melbourne

11/07/11

5pm, 18 Jun

Junior Development

Sydney

03/09/11

5pm, 12 August

Junior Development

Melbourne

26/09/11

5pm, 26 Aug

Junior Development

Bendigo

4/10/11

5pm, 2 Sept

Club Professional

Sydney

07/05/11

5pm, 21 Apr

Club Professional

Albury/Wodonga

08/07/11

5pm, 17 June

Tennis Australia Coach Membership: quality services for quality coaches of all levels

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egister online by 30 June to maintain your insurance cover and save up to $66.

This year Tennis Australia is offering more benefits than ever before, aiming to provide members with more options, more flexibility and more services.

Visit www.tennis.com.au/coaches/membership

ennis Australia qualified coach members can order customised Tennis Australia branded outdoor signage to help promote their coaching business. The sign is made from a quality colourbond steel to ensure longevity.

Measurements are 900cm wide by 600cm height. Only $89 each including GST, postage and handling. The coaching sign is designed for use with or without a locked logo. If a locked logo is not provided the tennis logo will appear in the upper right corner.

Customised Tennis Australia branded outdoor coaching banners are also available. The banner is two metres x one metre in size and can be purchased for $149 including GST and freight. All banners printed on premium coated vinyl and produced as one piece, this ensures strength and durability.

The inks used are 3M UV 2700 series, the 3M product is durable, conformable and hard wearing UV ink designed for longevity.

The banner is designed for use with or without a locked logo. If a locked logo is not provided, the tennis logo will appear in the lower right corner of the banner. Download the order forms online via tennis.com.au/ coaches/membership/benefits/marketing.

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Your Coach

t’s vital that coaches and clubs work together for the benefit of their club.

Successful tennis facilities are those where there is a strong mutual respect between club and coach with the coach being at the heart of club activities.

In Your Coach, you will find information on how to: ■■ recruit a coach ■■ appoint a coach ■■ build relationships between club and coach.

Visit tennis.com.au/coaches/your-coach to access these fact sheets and templates or contact your local Member Association to obtain a Your Tennis Toolkit USB. Australian Tennis Magazine | June 2011

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lease contact your local Coach Development Coordinator or call +61 3 9914 4191 for more information.

Course

order BRANDED SIGNAGE FOR YOUR BUSINESS

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