Posts tagged tennis tournaments

It’s Signing Week

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6 months ago
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This is the week when high school tennis players (and all high school athletes for that matter) can first sign on the proverbial dotted line to commit to playing their sport at the collegiate level.  There are press conferences, lots of picture-taking, and lots of hype surrounding the top players – TennisRecruiting devotes a ton of bandwidth to Signing Week and where the Blue Chips and 5-Stars are headed next Fall.  It’s a pretty big deal!

We are still two years away from Signing Week in our house, thank goodness.  And, I know to my son that seems like an eternity.  But for me, I’m realizing that it’s right around the corner.  Two years can pass in the blink of an eye.

I’m trying to urge him – nudge him gently – to start taking bolder More >

Who’s Really #1?

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7 months ago
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USTA rankings vs. Tennis Recruiting star ratings vs. Universal Tennis levels . . . is anyone else confused here?  I don’t know about the rest of you, but this obsessed Tennis Momma spends an inordinate amount of time trying to understand what the different ratings and rankings actually mean and how my son can best use the information to improve as a player.

A quick overview of some of the different ranking/rating systems out there . . .

USTA currently uses the Points Per Round (PPR) system which awards ranking points based on the level of tournament and which round the player reaches in the tournament.  A player’s top 6 singles tournament results and top 3 doubles tournament results for the previous 12 months are included in his/her More >

Tennis Parent/Non-Tennis Parent – It Takes Two!

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11 months ago
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If you’ve watched any professional tennis in the past couple of years, no doubt you’ve noticed Novak Djokovic’s parents in the stands during his matches – they are the ones cheering loudly, wearing their son’s image on their shirts, standing and fist-pumping after every winning shot.  Rumor has it that the King of Decorum, Roger Federer, once told them to be quiet (not the words he used!) during a match with their son.  They are the epitome of the hard-core Tennis Parent.

In most junior tennis families, though, typically there is one parent in charge of all-things-tennis and one parent who is less involved.  Even in families where the parents are no longer living in the same household, I’ve seen this distinction develop.  There is one More >

Pusher or Grinder?

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11 months ago
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The word PUSHER is often uttered with disdain and a snarl among junior tennis players.  It is the supreme insult to hurl at another player, as in, “I can’t believe I lost to a pusher!  I must totally stink at tennis!”

But, really, what is a pusher?  And is it such a bad thing to be called one?

According to coach Don Petrine, pushing is a style that one encounters in developmental tennis (and perhaps senior and club tennis).  “A pusher uses all your pace on the ball, never generating their own pace, parasitic in nature, and uses it against you. A pusher never tries to end the point with an offensive shot; they just use your pace and hit high percentage shots until you hang yourself, go insane, or make an unforced error. They are usually More >

The Ins & Outs of TennisRecruiting.Net

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11 months ago
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By now, most of my readers are probably very familiar with the TennisRecruiting.net website.  Well, I recently discovered that the creators of the site, Julie and Doug Wrege, live about a mile and half from my house (!), so I figured I would pick their brains a bit about how the site came into existence as well as the way parents and players should be using the information available on the site to their best advantage.

The first thing to note is that Julie and Doug are not now, nor have they ever been, Tennis Parents; that is to say, none of their children played tournament tennis.  However, Julie is a very accomplished player and college coach in her own right – she started the very successful women’s tennis program at Georgia Tech – and More >

Time Off for Bad Behavior

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11 months ago
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School isn’t the only place – the Junior Tennis World will give you time off for bad behavior, too!  And, yes, I do speak from personal experience.

I haven’t really addressed the whole area of conduct and suspension points on ParentingAces yet, so I figure now is as good a time as any given that my kid just avoided a very close call with a 3-month tournament suspension.  I suspect there are junior tennis players who will get through their entire tournament career without ever receiving a code violation or suspension point, but my kid isn’t one of them.

Let me advise you once again that if you and your child have NOT yet read the USTA publication FRIEND AT COURT, do so immediately!  It is crucial that you and your child are both familiar More >

Beyond Winning & Losing

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11 months ago
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Our state qualifier for the Southern Closed was this past week.  For the first time ever, my son knew when he applied for entry to the tournament that he would get in – he had worked hard all year to move his state ranking into a proper position.  Now the challenge was getting far enough in the Qualifier to secure a spot in the Closed.

The Tennis Gods smiled upon him with his draw, but it was still up to him to capitalize on some great opportunities to get to the Round of 16 (or further) and get that guaranteed entry into the sectional tourney.  It was going to be a challenge, for sure.  His track record with “gifts” in the draw wasn’t all that great – in the past, he had often lost to players with much lower rankings than his own, so he More >

Tennis Etiquette

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11 months ago
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I saw a Facebook post from a friend of mine over the weekend whose two elementary-school-age sons have recently taken up tennis.  They were playing in their first USTA Junior Team Tennis match, and the mom was rudely informed by another parent that cheering was NOT allowed.  These two brothers also play baseball – where parental cheering is not only allowed but often gets way out of hand – so Mom just assumed she could vocally encourage her boys during their tennis match in the same way.

In the interest of helping other Tennis Parents avoid any untoward (ha!) behavior during their children’s tennis matches, here are some tips:

League Tennis Matches

  • No coaching of any kind is allowed; saying, “Move your feet” or “Hit to her backhand” is More >

Dealing with Disappointment

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12 months ago
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I know.  You saw the title and expected to read about how to deal with your child’s disappointment after a loss . . . or something along those lines.  But, this piece is about dealing with your own disappointment when something doesn’t go quite right in your child’s tennis-centric world.

A fellow tennis parent wrote me last week, telling me about her child’s recent tournament schedule.  He has some important tournaments coming up and so decided to play a low-level local tourney just to build some confidence.  The child figured he could get a couple of easy wins and feel ready for next weekend, which will be a much tougher tournament.

Well, as I am sure you can guess, it didn’t go as planned and the child played the worst tennis of his More >

Student of the Sport

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12 months ago
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This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a USTA College Information Session for high school players and their parents held during the NCAA Championships in Athens, Georgia.

The panel, led by USTA’s Senior Manager of Junior and Collegiate Competition, Erica Perkins Jasper, included the following heavy-hitters from the tennis world:

  • Bobby Bayliss – Head Men’s Coach at Notre Dame University
  • Christine Bader – Head Women’s Coach at Ball State University
  • Maria Cercone – junior coach in Florida whose daughter plays #3 doubles and #5 singles for the University of Florida
  • Rick Davison – Director of Competition at USTA Georgia
  • Steve Johnson, Sr. – Father of top-ranked D1 player, Steve Johnson, of USC and top junior coach in Southern More >
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