Tennis Coaches under fire for lack of British success

It’s Wimbledon time again and the annual British Tennis Bashing Championships are in full swing, not helped by the fact that it has been 22 years since British involvement in the men’s and women’s singles had ended as early as the fourth day of the championships and 17 years since we lacked a single representative in the third round of either event.

Players have been at the forefront of the criticism but coaches have also coming in for their share of the blame, typical being this comment from the national press:
“Coaches prefer to maintain tennis as a sport of the relatively priveliged, a pastime conducted in a buorgeois ghetto.”

Roger Draper has also questioned the motives of some coaches when it comes to promoting competition. “There is this disconnect between coaches and competition. We’ve got 6,000 coaches in Britain and [only] 8,400 kids competing. Well, I don’t get that. Why do you coach? You coach so you can stand and watch your pupil compete. But it’s not in the best interest of coaches to do that because they don’t get paid their hourly rate. The big, big fault line is exactly that” said Draper.

“We don’t have problems attracting seven-year-olds and upwards into the sport, but then they stand in a queue and hit the ball once every 10 minutes and then say, ‘That was boring, I’m going off to play something else.’

“What kids want is competition, so every week we have to get them playing short, sharp competition. They want tie-break shoot-outs, not to be hanging about all day, and their parents want to drop little Johnny or Kate off at 9am and pick them up at 11 and they will have played six matches. You don’t learn to compete when you’re 15, 16, or 17. You learn to compete at seven, eight and nine.”

Draper (pictured right) also stated his view on what it takes to make it in tennis. “To succeed in tennis you do have to be on a more or less full-time programme by the time you are nine or 10. If not, you have no chance of getting into the world top 100. What we have to do is convert more athletes to play tennis at a younger age, get them on the proper programmes and then make sure that those costs of £30,000 or so a year are subsidised.”

“The sacrifices parents have to make are far different than in any other sport. Our challenge is to remove the excuses. Desire and hunger are essential. We have got the talent without a doubt but we have to channel it in the right direction. Whether we like it or not, Tim and Andy were accidents, in a way. There wasn’t really a system. We need a group of players pulling and pushing each other through.”

“Getting those kids doing all the right things all the way through is critical. That has to be our legacy. But I’m not naive. I know people want instant results as well. I know they are saying, ‘Oh, they’ve appointed all these world-class coaches, what have they been doing the last six months?’ Most people know it does not happen that way but managing those expectations, getting some quick wins, getting Andy into the top 10, trying to get Alex Bogdanovic into the top 100, all these are little steps you have to take.”

“What a lot of the other nations do when their players have not made it is say, ‘Thank you very much, now go and get another job.’ That may be a bit brutal but there’s no point pootling about as No400 in the world, going from Sunderland to Bolton to Wrexham. We are going to have to be more ruthless with the players, the coaches and the people out there who are happy to take our money and slag us off. I don’t mind people slagging us off, but don’t take the money as well.”

Draper’s comments have touched a raw nerve with a number of prominent British coaches, not helped by the comments made by Greg Rusedski and Pat Cash at Wimbledon this week that gave the impression that coaches were not going into schools, hence our failure to produce players. “It’s time the LTA asked coaches what they feel should be happening” said one prominent national coach. “All we hear is that we are being negative and unsupportive but how else can you take the slur on our profession from coaches who have no concept of what is happening at grass roots level?”

Draper also indicated major changes to coaching later in the year, in an article published by the Financial Times in June. “British tennis will ‘shut down’ after the summer, probably for a month or two, and the 6,000 tennis coaches will be retrained in the latest coaching techniques. There will be those who resist and others who simply won’t turn up. We’re not just here to maintain the status quo. We’re here to disrupt the status quo,” Draper told the newspaper.

“We know we’re not going to get 6,000 coaches in 700 clubs doing all the right things, but even if we got 500 clubs or 500 coaches doing the right things then we would start making a big difference in this country.”