Coach, set and match: The Inner Game of Tennis (revisited)
As the dust settles on Wimbledon, I was reminded of the book that first introduced me to coaching: ‘The Inner game of Tennis’.
More to the point, this book, by Timothy W Gallwey, taught me the true essence of coaching – previously, like many others I had labelled myself a ‘coach’, and delivered what I had believed to be ‘coaching’.
To be fair, I had been helping others by providing explanation, my own insights and suggestions. But really I had been wearing a ‘mentor’ or ‘consultant’s’ hat.
Gallwey had gone through this realisation himself, as a tennis ‘coach’. Rather than instructing on technique, he began to understand that improvements came quicker if he created the environment to allow his coachees to make their own connections and gain their own insights. He discovered his role was to stimulate the type of thinking that would take them in this direction; his function then was to just ‘get out of the way’!
In sport, I am always amazed how the supreme competitors play the ‘big points’. In the Wimbledon final on Sunday, Djokovic would go for shots involving great risk, on points where his opponent, Federer, was piling on the pressure. I guess it’s the same when the likes of cyclist Chris Hoy are on the starting line of a race to determine the recipient of the Olympic Gold medal. If it was me, I would be thinking: ‘I’ve trained four years for this moment; don’t mess it up now!’ (although the language I would choose would be less polite!) And if it was me serving at Wimbledon, on a break point against me, having missed my first serve, the prospect of a double-fault would loom across my mind.
Boris Becker is Djokovic’s coach, but it would be fascinating to understand the level of coaching he actually provides. When Ivan Lendl joined Andy Murray’s team he had an immediate impact on Murray’s performance. I recently saw an interview with Lendl, in which he reflected on his time with the British Number 1. Lendl said he never really said much or offered much advice. I conclude that the sheer presence of somebody who themselves had experienced dips in their careers, or had failed to win a major tournament before finding a way to do so, had been incredibly valuable. Perhaps, more than anything, Becker offers this to Djokovic.
I get nervous for the players on the big points (I think they call this transference!). Before I read Gallwey’s book, as a coach I would have said: ‘Just relax and think of it as any other point’. Now I would ask: ‘What do you need to explore to enable you to relax on the big points?’ Coachees need to engage with experiences, rather than being offered explanations – the route to success lies there.
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