I’ve spent years on the court playing and coaching tennis. Over the years I’ve worked with all kinds of players. I’ve coached children who could barely hit the ball over the net, right through to some of the best in the country. Some learned quickly, others took years. Some loved competing, others simply enjoyed being on court.
And then I recently became a parent.
What surprised me wasn’t how hard parenting was. I expected that. What surprised me was how familiar it all felt. Because almost everything I’d learned about coaching, I now needed as a dad. The court had already given me the manual. I just hadn’t realised it yet.
Here’s what tennis taught me about raising a child.
You Can Guide, But You Can’t Play For Them
The hardest thing I ever had to learn as a coach was when to step back.
In the early days, I wanted to fix everything. Every grip, every footwork pattern, every tactical decision. And I quickly learned that over-coaching doesn’t help, it suffocates. When players feel micromanaged, they stop thinking for themselves. They wait to be told what to do rather than developing their own instincts.
Research backs this up. Studies on the coach-athlete relationship show that autonomy-supportive coaching, where players are given a say in what they do and how they develop, leads to significantly higher levels of intrinsic motivation than controlling approaches (Ryan & Deci, 2020). In other words, when you give people ownership over their own journey, they engage more deeply and last longer.
Parenting is exactly the same. You can set the stage. You can point the way. But you cannot live their life for them. And the sooner you accept that, the more effectively you can actually help.
Progress Is Never a Straight Line
One of the things that trips up new tennis players and their parents is the expectation of steady, linear progress. They imagine a neat upward curve: lesson one, lesson two, lesson three, getting better each time. And then a plateau hits, or even a dip, and panic sets in.
But development doesn’t work like that. Research into how children learn and grow confirms that progress is naturally non-linear, children experience periods of rapid improvement followed by plateaus, and sometimes even temporary regression, before leaping forward again (Overton, 2015). What looks like going backwards is often the brain consolidating and reorganising before the next breakthrough.
I saw this constantly on court. A player would spend three weeks struggling with their serve, and then one session it just clicks and they’re better than they were before the plateau started. The dip wasn’t failure. It was preparation.
As a parent, learning to sit with the plateau, without panicking, without pushing, without interpreting it as something being wrong is one of the most valuable things you can do. Trust the process. The leap is coming.
Praise the Effort, Not the Outcome
This one changed the way I coach. And it has influenced the way I parent.
For years, I defaulted to outcome-based praise. “Great shot.” “Well played.” “You won, that’s great.” Perfectly well meaning. But research suggests that praising outcomes, rather than the process, can actually hold them back. It encourages a fixed mindset, where children become afraid to take risks in case they fail and lose the praise (Dweck & Yeager, 2019).
Children praised for their effort, on the other hand, are more likely to embrace challenges, persist through difficulty, and develop long-term resilience (Gunderson et al., 2013). One study found that children praised for ability were more likely to give up after failure, while those praised for effort continued to improve (Burnette et al., 2023).
On the court, this means saying “I love how hard you worked to get to that ball” rather than “you played so well today.” It means valuing the hustle over the scoreline.
At home, it means the same thing for me. The perfect pronunciation of a word matters less than the effort to say it. Walking independently matters less than the courage to stand up, wobble, fall down and try again. It’s easy to celebrate the milestone itself, but what I want to encourage is the persistence that got them there. By recognising effort rather than simply outcomes, we’re helping children develop the confidence and resilience they’ll need long after those early milestones have passed.
You Can’t Want It More Than They Do
Here’s an uncomfortable truth I’ve had to share with more than a few tennis parents over the years.
If you’re more invested in your child’s tennis than they are, if you’re the one tracking their ranking, replaying their matches in your head at 2am, wincing at every double fault from the sideline, something has gone wrong. Not because you don’t care, but because the motivation has shifted. It’s become about you.
Research into sports motivation confirms that intrinsic motivation, playing for the love of it, for the satisfaction it brings, is the most powerful predictor of long-term engagement and performance (Deci & Ryan, 2000). External pressure, even well-intentioned parental pressure, can actually undermine that intrinsic drive over time (Harwood & Thrower, 2020).
Children who play, or study, or practise music, or pursue anything because they genuinely want to will always outperform children who do it because someone else wants them to. Our job as coaches, and as parents, is to nurture that internal flame. Not to be the flame ourselves.
Sometimes Silence Is the Best Coaching
There are moments on the court where a player is struggling, and every instinct tells me to say something. To offer a cue, a correction, a word of encouragement. And I’ve learned, slowly and reluctantly, that sometimes the most powerful thing I can do is say nothing at all.
Let them figure it out. Let them sit with the problem. Give them space to find their own solution.
I’ve found this genuinely hard as a parent. When your child is upset, or confused, or failing at something, the urge to step in is overwhelming. But there is real value in allowing children to work through difficulty independently, it builds problem-solving skills, self-reliance, and the deeply important belief that they are capable of handling hard things on their own (Perry et al., 2019).
The court taught me that silence isn’t indifference. Sometimes it’s the highest form of faith in someone.
It’s About Nurturing Their Potential, Not Expressing Yours
The best coaches I’ve ever met share one quality – their ego isn’t on the court. They’re not coaching to prove something about themselves. They’re there entirely in service of the player in front of them.
I believe parenting at its best is the same. We’re not raising mini versions of ourselves, or vehicles for our own unfulfilled ambitions. We’re nurturing separate human beings with their own strengths, their own pace, their own path
Tennis reminded me of this constantly. As coaches, it’s easy to form ideas about what success should look like for a player. But time and again, I’ve seen players follow paths I never could have predicted. Some found success through competition, while others found it through confidence, friendships or a genuine love of the sport. That’s when I realised that success isn’t something we define for them. It’s something they define for themselves.
Our job as coaches, and as parents, is to help them become more fully themselves. Not more like us.
The court gave me more than a career. It gave me a framework for one of the hardest, most rewarding jobs in the world. And every time I’m on the court, I’m reminded of what we’re really doing. Whether we’re coaching or raising a child, it isn’t about shaping someone into who we want them to be. It’s helping them become who they are.
References:
Burnette, J. L., Knouse, L. E., Vavra, D. T., O’Boyle, E. H., & Brooks, M. A. (2023). A growth mindset intervention: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 149(1–2), 1–29.
Dweck, C. S., & Yeager, D. S. (2019). Mindsets: A view from two eras. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(3), 481–496.
Gunderson, E. A., Gripshover, S. J., Romero, C., Dweck, C. S., Goldin Meadow, S., & Levine, S. C. (2013). Parent praise to 1-to-3-year-olds predicts children’s motivational frameworks 5 years later. Child Development, 84(5), 1526–1541.
Harwood, C. G., & Thrower, S. N. (2020). Youth sport parenting: A systematic review and conceptual framework. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 13(1), 1–34.
Overton, W. F. (2015). Processes, relations and relational-developmental-systems. In R. M. Lerner (Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science (7th ed.).
Perry, N. E., Lundie, D., & Golder, G. (2019). Metacognition, self-regulation and self-regulated learning. Educational Psychology Review, 31(3), 483–518.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2020). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from a self-determination theory perspective: Definitions, theory, practices, and future directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 61, 101860.