How to get my !@#$ing high school coach to shut up?

[altawolfe]

you knid of have to learn which wars to fight. if you can get away with mentioning to him in private that his advice sometimes causes anxiety and hinders perfomance, than you gotta do it. but if there is no interpersonal context between you ... if there is no way for you to point out this problem tactfully, that is, without adding more dysfunctional layers of drama, than suck it up and remember this: the tour is tough. there are often no ideal solutions to problems like this, and little can be gained from losing your cool or driving yourself crazy. this is just one of the things about life that sucks.

[K!ck5w3rvE]

listen here you ungrateful little sh!t. dont put cr@p on ur coach, coz if u dont respect him then noone else will either. u have to lead by example, and this message isnt doing that

[jayserinos99]

wow. i'm just glad my coach let me do whatever i wanted when i played my matches; then again my coach wasn't anything more than a 3.5 and he accepted that he couldn't teach me anything i didn't know already. but what was so cool about him was that he stuck up for us because we sucked as a team (i was the only one who played tennis seriously) and other teams and coaches were *****holes to us and he defended us.

[ma2t]

Continue to improve your tennis and then play several matches against your coach yourself and beat him every time. If he can't break your serve, he'll stop commenting about it!

[Frankc]

Interesting... as a High School Coach years ago and as a lifetime player, this is a tough situation... If two things come out of it, IMHO, they are: 1) All of you who have good, caring, competant coaches, thank that coach sometime in the future, 2) understand that any high school coach is doing this for pennies an hour. That does not excuse any incompetancy, but is a problem with the system. The coach did not make the system.

If you have a coach who is great and , for some reason, $ is not an issue with him/her - you are both lucky. Other than that, if you have less than a good coach, think of all the fine coaches who have passed on that job due to working conditions. Most of all, enjoy anyone who gets you on the court in your youth and lets you compete. That is the name of the game.

[Tim Tennis]

From the other side of the coin. I am assisting with the local high school tennis team. I don't get paid. I just do it because I love working with the kids and the coach asked me to help. If I can help them improve great. During a match I try not to interfere, I mostly give encouragement but sometimes I will give advice if I pick up on a players weakness, like hit to his backhand, it is really weak or hit to his forehand he can't hit 3 in a row. I only talk to them during the change over. The only thing I really care about during a match is that a player give 100% and displays good sportsmanship. I get to practice an hour early and I will stay an hour late. If the kids just want to hit or want to work on something specific, great. Some of them, their mechanics are so bad any change would help. I think the kids respect me simply because I can back up what I say with my game. Even our number 1 player would be lucky to get a couple of games off of me.

The biggest weakness I see in our team overall is 1) Most of them do not have a good second serve. 2) Most of them do not volley well, yikes! 3) Overheads, whats that, poor. 4) Inconsistent and no idea how to work a point. 5) They are all a step slow which with a little work on quickness could win so many more points for them. Sprints! I wonder how this applies to your teams?

I have noticed they hate to do drills, they hate sprints, they just want to come to practice, hit the ball around with their buddies and play challenge matches. I wonder how this applies to your teams? Don't get me wrong, they are a great bunch of kids.

As far as your coach, take it easy on him. When kids come to me and ask me to help them with their game or a particular stroke I am honored. I tell them you don't have to agree or accept my advice, just give it some thought and try it to see if it works for you.

Your right, high school tennis in most places it treated like a red headed step child, which is a shame because it is a great life time sport. You got to love the game.

[kevhen]

Yes, most high school (and 3.5 level players) have very weak or inconsistent overheads because they fail to actually practice hitting them and don't practice good mechanics either when they do. Dropshot and lob is my motto against a player with a weak overhead.

Another thing to do with your coach is to use reverse pyschology and constantly ask him for advice and if he is yelling during your match, stop and go over and talk to him to find out what he is yelling about, until he realizes he is disrupting your match and starts leaving you alone.

[juu]

You've had some good advice in this thread, especially by Kobble, Rod K and Tim Tennis.

One doesn't have to respect somebody just because he's an authority figure, as posted by Ace. But you will rarely find a person from whom you'd have nothing at all to learn (either through things he does well or mistakes he's made), especially while you're young, or whom you'd have nothing at all to respect for.

I see a coach coaching some young kids next to the court where I have my weekly practice, and his strokes and advice look totally off to me. He even comes to ask for (trivial) advice from my teaching pro. But he seems to care about his students, and one way or the other they improve (faster than I do, since I'm 25 already).

I take what my teaching pro says with a grain of salt as well. He advocates flat volleys, while I try to practice them with a bit of underspin. He likes very closed stances while I hit with an open stance once in a while. He suggests not doing a full preparation on serve while learning it (i.e., tossing with right hand ready to hit), while I do the full preparation and try to work my timing from there. He advocates Wilson Triads while I play with a Prokennex 5G (which he calls a ladies' racquet as it's "soft"). I hope I'm doing what's right for me on at least a few of these .

I recently browsed through the Inner Game of tennis and it basically says - forget about technique, just relax and do what comes naturally. As if coaches were irrelevant, and their main task was to feed balls and be quiet.

I guess the truth is always somewhere in the middle.

[Verbal_Kint]

Juu, the inner game of tennis does NOT say forget about technique. It says you need to have basic mechanics, but after that you have to trust your strokes. That means you gotta have strokes and gotta have technique IMO.

Marnix