If your kid is an aspiring Tennis Player then Tennis must go in the calendar first
Parents will look at me and say, “Oh, that's awful”
If you are american you leave every Christmas day to go to Arizona for the nationals in the juniors or you're gone every Easter. You don’t really have vacations anymore. How I (Steve) look at it is if you're really that serious and have a goal to be e.g. a division 1 College Player or possibly higher, you have to put tennis in first. You have to learn how the system works wherever you're at. You have to play a certain amount of tournaments and you have to play and get enough points to qualify to play nationals. So there's a system put in place that you have to learn and understand.
Then you need to get out there and perform to have the opportunity to represent your section and play in the Nationals. I'm not sure how it is in your country, but there's ways of earning that. The one thing that I like about tennis is everything is earned. You're not given anything. You have to just win. It's just flat out based on results. So there's no opinions on results, which I'm big on. It's not a coach's decision.
So for four for us (Steve, his wife and 2 children), we never felt that we were sacrificing leaving at Christmas to go to Arizona. Stevie would say:
"Dad, how lucky I am. I'm good enough that I get to play in a tournament on Christmas Day and go to Arizona"
That was from the 12’s through the 18’s. That's just where and when our nationals are held. So we get in a van and drive to Arizona and it's been a week. We feel very fortunate that he was able to do this. When I hear parents say they want to be good, but they'll say:
“Oh, yeah, we can't really play that term because there is a carnival that we love to do or I have tickets to the theater that night”
I say, that's absolutely fine, but then you have to quit saying that you want your kid to get a division 1 scholarship. Of all American high school kids who play, less than 4 percent play college. So what most people don't realise, is that it's a very, very small funnel at the end. From there I think it’s about 1 percent of college kids who play professionally. Most parents don't realise that high school is the end for most kids. That next level is quite a jump and quite a commitment.
So to get there, I don't think you can have sleepovers every weekend and go to parties every weekend and play a tournament once in a while.
I think tournaments go in and then you plan around that. There were times where I would say to Stevie “OK, this is your weekend to go play, weekend to go to sleepovers. This is your weekend out.”
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