Confidence on the Tennis Court

If you could bottle and sell confidence you’d be a millionaire a hundred times over. Unfortunately you can’t, but there are steps you can take to build your own confidence to ensure that you go into each match believing in yourself and your ability to win.

The best players are the ones who remain calm under intense pressure and can moderate their temper and behavior.

So how do you become confident? Practice. If you enter the court knowing you have worked as hard as you can, have practiced over and over shots that you have trouble with, have eaten a good diet and are well hydrated then you have already won half the battle.

You can’t become a great tennis player overnight and you will experience ups and downs during your training, have good days and bad days but if you embrace the bad days and view them as a step in your learning curve they become a lot more bearable! Every time you lose a match turn it into a positive experience and learn from it. If you served 20 double faults-you need to work on your serve, if your drop shots kept hitting the net-practice those. A defeat isn’t always a bad thing, especially if you are willing to learn from it, and your confidence will grow in leaps and bounds when your practice yields results.

Make sure you recognize the bad shots you make during practice and be gracious when receiving criticism, your coach is only trying to help! If you feel your temper rising take a couple of deep breaths and start again, losing your temper only encourages your opponent: if you are shouting and slamming your racquet about you are not concentrating on your game and your opponent will take full advantage of that.

The best players are the ones that can accept that they have made a bad shot and why they have made it, whether they rushed it or were out of position and can learn from it. You don’t always have to play winning shots, and you should remember points are more often won and lost through unforced errors than they are through winning shots.