Mental Component
THE MENTAL COMPONENT OF TENNIS : RECOVERING FROM A BAD LOSS
We’ve all been there. Whether you’ve been playing tennis competitively for only a few months or a number of years, every one of us at some point has walked off the court at the end of a match feeling dejected after having suffered what we consider to be a “bad” loss. While bad losses are subjective in their definition – meaning that you may have lost to an opponent you know to be of inferior skill level, or perhaps lost a terrific match that came down to just a few points that all went your opponents way, played two great sets before fading in the third, or were simply blown off the court by a far superior opponent, the feeling afterwords is very much the same for all of us. We’re upset, perhaps a little depressed, and would give anything to avoid having to feel like that again. Here in this article we will offer several tips on how to mentally bounce back after a bad loss and offer examples of how and when top touring professionals have been able to do the same.
Return to the site of previous successes – Tennis players are all a bit superstitious (some much more so than others) and have their favorite places to play or even their favorite court at a venue they play at all the time. Whether it’s the surface of the court or for reasons that make less sense logically, when we find ourselves in that comfortable setting we feel bulletproof. In 2008 after suffering a straight sets defeat to Rafael Nadal in the French Open final – one of which being a dreaded ‘bagel’ set, Roger Federer decided that rather than stew over the loss to his arch rival he would get right back up on the horse and play the Gerry Weber Open – a grass court tournament held in Germany as a warm up to Wimbledon, and a tournament Roger has never lost a match at in his career. Consequently the world #1 was able to immediately extricate those negative thoughts from his head and regain his focus by returning to the site of where he had (and still has) never tasted anything other than the sweet nectar of victory.
Learn from every match you play – Sounds easy enough, but you would be amazed at how while you can easily recall every agonizing detail of why you lost a match you might struggle to recall in such sharp detail as to the reasons why you won a match. You might struggle even more to recall what it was that your opponent was doing to give you trouble in a match that you walked away as the victor from as it is human nature to focus more on the result itself than the process which leads to the result. If on one hand you wipe your opponent out 6-0, 6 -1, there really isn’t a lot you are going to learn from the experience, but on the other hand if you defeat your opponent 6-4, 7-5 or even get stretched to a third set, your opponent was obviously doing something to give you trouble. You might think to yourself that your opponent only got that close because your backhand wasn’t working that day, but the truth of the matter is that your opponent was doing something specific to ensure that it wouldn’t hold up to the standards you expect from that shot and the sooner you can admit that to yourself the sooner you can key in on that in your next practice session and turn that weakness into a strength for your next match.
Let go of the fear – One of the biggest hurdles I see both junior and adult players struggle to overcome is the fear of making mistakes rather than accepting that they are going to happen. They spend hours working to perfect their ground stroke, their serve, their volley, etc. that when it comes time to use what they’ve spent hours practicing they become almost paralyzed by the fear of screwing it up in a match. Their feet seem stuck to the court, their groundstroke’s become too short, their volleys too long, you name it and it happens. Mistakes are a part of the game right up through the very top levels. Roger Federer has unarguably the most beautiful forehand in tennis and I promise that you’ve seen him shank a few right into the stands. Accepting that from time to time that shot(s) will fail you, immediately shaking it off, and focusing instead on what it was that resulted in the miss and then not repeating it the next time your opponent offers it up will pay huge dividends in the long run and hopefully prevent a few misses from turning into an ugly loss at the hands of a less skilled opponent . I recently played a match where my opponent kept rolling in second serves to my backhand on the ad court and setting up one of my favorite shots (backhand up the line) that I must have missed close to ten times before I finally got it sorted out and then I never missed one after that. Eventually I was able to get in his head and force him to go for bigger second serves which resulted in an avalanche of double faults on his part and stemmed the tide of the match in my favor.
Focus on off court conditioning – In my own opinion, one of the worst feelings in tennis is knowing that for two sets you were “right there” with your opponent and then you simply run out of gas in the third before going down meekly 6-2. Proper (or improper) conditioning has a lot to do with which end of that equation you end up on. The saying that Andre Agassi made famous when he began training with the legendary Gil Reyes was that “the strong body obeys while the weak body commands”, meaning that if properly conditioned your body can and will do pretty much anything you ask of it, but if you are not match fit your body will abandon you when you least want it to. The second act of Andre’s career in which he went on to capture the career Grand Slam and regain his world #1 status after dropping all the way to 141 in the rankings is evidence that what he said is true, and by focusing on tennis specific training such as interval sprinting and lateral runs as well as plyometrics and weight training, the carryover effect into your next match will be tremendously positive both physically and psychologically.
Accept that losing is part of the game – Winning or losing a tennis match is at best a 50/50 proposition, and one of the most important keys to shaking off a bad loss is accepting that sometimes it’s just not going to go your way in spite of your best efforts. This is not to suggest that you didn’t practice hard enough, didn’t want it bad enough, or that you are inferior or unworthy in some way, it’s just a fact that there will always be a mathematical chance that you will end up holding the short straw once the dust has settled from your match. Losing doesn’t make you a bad player or a bad person, but rather it offers you an opportunity to grow developmentally. When training juniors I hope to see them win about 75% of the time – enough to keep them engaged and wanting to strive for greater success, but experiencing defeat enough to realize that they don’t yet have all the answers and need to address certain areas of their game in practice so as to eventually realize their full potential. That same lesson can be easily learned by adults. Even if we go through stretches where we lose a few (or more than a few) matches in succession, tennis is a sport of a lifetime and if you can keep your thoughts on the big picture rather than on just one match or a few matches, the easier it will be to rebound from a bad loss or two and ultimately realize your full potential as well.
-Sean Craft
