An Introduction To Coaching High School Tennis

Why Your School has a Tennis Team

The main reason for scholastic sports is to help students develop life skills through athletics. These skills include goal setting, discipline, teamwork, self-esteem and sportsmanship (winning and losing gracefully), to name a few.

Never forget that you do not coach tennis, you coach youngsters.

1. Getting Started

You’re not Alone

If you are a first-time coach (and even a coach who does not play tennis), realize that you are not alone. There are thousands of high school tennis coaches who are not experts with years of experience and advanced playing ability that’s higher than their team members.

Many tennis coaches have taken on the responsibility at the request of the school’s athletic director because there was no one else to coach tennis that season. If you are a parent or local tennis enthusiast who has volunteered to coach the team, you should also understand that you are not alone, either, as many high school tennis programs are coached by volunteers as well.

If you have never coached a team before, you’ll want to prepare yourself as fully as possible before you meet with your players and/or their parents. This site contains almost everything you need to know about getting started coaching high school tennis.

Plan Ahead

Take advantage of the Articles & Drills Database of this website. It contains a wealth of information, sorted by topic, to help you plan, begin and run your season. There are articles on how to plan a season, making line-ups, conditioning, sport psychology and much more. There are also model practices and many drills.

Use the Search button (looks like a magnifying glass) that appears near the top, right-hand side of each page of this website. Type in a key word or phrase when you have a specific question, such as “conditioning” or “lineups” or “volley.”

Know the Rules and Regulations

The rules of tennis are different for officiated and unofficiated matches. Your dual matches and non-state tournament will be probably not be officiated, so your matches will also be governed by the Code of Conduct, which is a set of guidelines for playing unofficiated tennis matches. To get started learning the basic rules of the game, print this helpful booklet, Friend at Court. It’s a long document (230 pages), but you’ll want to have a copy at your matches to help solve disputes.

Have your players bookmark this link. They may not be allowed to ask for spectator or coach help to resolve rules issues. They can quickly search an electronic copy of the rules on their smartphones using keywords.

You will also need to know any league, district or conference rules in effect for your school, as well as your state high school athletic association rules. These rules cover topics such as when you can have contact with players during the year, how you must make your lineups and academic eligibility.

1. Establishing Your Coaching Style

It’s important to develop a coaching style and to stick with it throughout the season. If you decide to be a “buddy” and find that this doesn’t work, it’s tough to try and change course midway through the season and be a stricter leader. Just as with parenting, if you don’t earn a youngster’s respect in the beginning, it’s tough to try to do so later.

This is why announcing that you don’t have experience coaching or in any way acting apologetic to the team will create an immediate lack of leadership on your part. Conversely, if you come on too strong in the beginning in order to establish credibility or instill discipline, you may alienate you players.

Find a coaching style with which you feel comfortable so that you can coach with confidence — kids smell fear in a coach, so determine what your strengths and abilities are, and coach from them. You may want to read. What Kind of Coach are You? in our Articles Database.

Following are tips to help you establish your coaching style.

1. Meet with other coaches at your school

No one knows the kids at your school better than the other coaches, who may have already coached some of your players in other sports. Ask them for their advice in three areas:

• General coaching tips
• Working with the AD and the school
• Working with particular students

1. Meet with local tennis pros

If your players are very good, chances are they’ve taken or are taking lessons from a local tennis pro. Local tennis pros who work with juniors can give you an idea of how long or how often you can expect certain types of conditioning, drills and practice routines to hold a teen’s interest and how to set up your practices.

If your players aren’t very experienced and the local pros don’t know any of your team members, they will probably still be willing to help and might be able to lend you books and DVDS, let you watch one or more of their junior program practices, or spend an hour on court with you showing you some basic drills. Offer to take the pro to lunch in order to pick his or her brain and listen to any advice they can give you.

One way to motivate a local teaching pro is to contact the National Tennis Academy, Professional Tennis Registry, or U.S. Professional Tennis Association and ask them for the contact information for their members in your town. (This information might be available at their websites). You can find contact information for these two organizations in our Links section. Check to see if you have a USTA district or sectional office in your area.

When you call a local teaching professional, you can then begin your conversation by stating the national office of the NTA, PTR or USPTA gave them your name.

1. Meet with parents

With some high school tennis programs, the parents are very involved, while in others, you may meet one or two parents during the course of the season. When parents become involved, it can either be a positive experience or a very negative one. Make sure you address the area of parental involvement with your AD, and if possible, the local teaching pros.

Parents can be a great help, assisting with fundraising, driving to meets, filling you in on your team/program history, and even helping on court, depending on the level of your program. They can also be a huge interference, especially if you are new to coaching, as they try to tell you how to coach your team or lobby the AD or principal to make sure you play their children. Don’t be intimidated, but be careful not to be dismissive or try to “lay down the law” until you find out how much weight parents carry with you’re AD or principal.

Some parents feel they pay your salary and you’re coaching their kids, not yours, so they have a say in how you run your program. Remember, some of them may be athletic department boosters and can might cause you headaches with your AD or principal. This doesn’t give them the right to interfere with your team, but you must have the patience of a waiter or waitress with a difficult customer and use as much tact and diplomacy as possible in the care and feeding of parents.

1. Determine Your Team Rules

What happens if one of your best players has a part-time job? Can team members miss practice if they are attending a local tennis academy? What are your school’s rules concerning academic performance?

These are just a few of the questions for which you must have answers before situations involving them arise. Using your school’s rules for athletic programs will give you a sound foundation for building your tennis program. Additional input from your AD, other coaches, local pros and parents (who know exactly how their kids will try to test the rules), will also help.

Once you make your rules, stick to them, or you lose your player’s respect and confidence. Sticking to ill-conceived rules can be just as harmful as bending good ones, so plan your rules thoughtfully and in advance.

III. Planning Your Season

It’s a good idea to follow the athletic performance theory of specificity, which states that as you draw nearer to your time of peak performance, you practices should more closely proximate your performance goals. This is a simple rule that coaches in all sports have used successfully for many decades. So, if your season runs 12 weeks, you’ll want to look at your calendar to see when you begin playing your matches so you can create three training phases to help your players peak at the optimal time.

Sample Season Training Plan

• Preparation Phase — three weeks
• Pre-Competitive Phase– three weeks
• Competitive Phase — six weeks

1. Preparation Phase

Many conferences prohibit coaches from working with their team members prior to the official start of the season, so you may not be able to work on getting your players back into shape until the first day of the season. The preparation as we will refer to it will be the first two to three weeks of your season.

Conditioning

During the preseason you’ll want to establish your players’ aerobic conditioning base. Tennis is an anaerobic sport, however, requiring high-intensity for extremely short (10 seconds) periods of time. While an aerobic conditioning base is necessary for tennis, a tennis player can develop and maintain an aerobic base with interval training. Limited jogging during the preseason is fine for most high school programs, but should stop during the pre-competitive season.

Power weight training, long-distance running or other aerobic training, which train the muscle’s slow-twitch fibers are also not appropriate throughout a tennis season.

On-Court

At the start of the season, discuss with each player any stroke work they’d like to accomplish. Conventional wisdom holds that stroke changes take months, but this is not true, and is explained in the book, “Scholastic and Academy Tennis: Planning the Season.”

1. Pre-Competitive Phase

Conditioning

After your players have developed an aerobic base, then interval training will be sufficient to maintain that base for the rest of the season. Weight work should move from low-intensity and higher volumes, to higher intensities and lower volumes. Remember, as you get closer to your time of desired peak performance, your workouts should start to mirror a tennis match. There are plenty of great books available on this subject, and your fellow coaches and AD should have books they can lend you.

On-Court

Drills should move to live-ball work, with increasing difficulty and pressure, moving from cooperative to competitive as players begin to retain and master the technical skills they worked on in the preparation phase.

• Use points and realistic target areas in your drills.
• Long rallies are not realistic. Create a match environment by practicing shorter shot sequences that your players expect to see in a match.
• Work on first-strike points (aces and return of serve winners).
• Use handicaps (balls must be hit past service line; no slice; etc.) to practice particular technical skills (depth, topspin) without working on technique.

Begin to practice like you play (or you’ll play like you practice).

III. Competitive Phase

Conditioning

Your conditioning should now focus exclusively on high-intensity, low volume training, similar to a tennis match. If you are using weights, lighter weight settings at a higher intensity with fewer reps are more appropriate. On-court, sprint training will help players develop the ability to work harder during points and recover between them.

On-Court

Now that you’re in your competitive season, you can do more than just play sets and tiebreaks. Drills that simulate matchplay (three- or four-shot, live-ball rallies) can be used to keep improving your players’ shot-making abilities.

As we stated previously, most points at competitive levels of play last fewer than 10 seconds, with many rallies less than six strokes. Drills that include many rallies from the baseline are unrealistic because this never happens in a competitive match at higher levels of play. Determine, with your players, how many strokes their points are lasting during their matches, and develop drills that mirror their matchplay needs.

Practice does not make perfect — perfect practice makes perfect.

1. Your First Team Meeting

Establish yourself

When you first meet with you team, you will establish your authority as their coach, simply by the confidence with which you convey your information.

Introduce yourself and tell why you were selected by the AD to coach the tennis team this season and your qualifications to do so. Even if you are an English teacher who has never hit a tennis ball in your life, you are still a faculty member and an adult who has agreed to organize the tennis program this season so the kids can have the opportunity to play. Don’t oversell yourself in order to gain the kids’ confidence — they’ll see through it.

Hopefully, you have already met with the other coaches, parents and a local teaching pro or two, and have possibly located someone who can come out once or twice a week to help with practices. Even if you have not, the books we’ve recommended and other articles on this site will help you at least organize your season, and you’ll be able to present this to the team, but don’t apologize for not having more of a tennis background or you’ll lose them.

Honestly let the kids know what your role is this season, even if it’s just organizing practices, handling the paperwork, arranging rides, etc.

If you must, recruit your top players to help you plan your practices. Have the team elect a captain or co-captains who will then fill you in on how practices were run in the past, and with them, develop the program. In this scenario, it’s important that you establish that you are the coach and that you will organize and run the practices — don’t allow the kids to run their own.

Explain the school’s goals for the program

Every high school offers sports programs for a reason. Present these reasons to the kids, emphasizing that they are student athletes and that a major goal of scholastic athletics is to build life skills. Letting the kids know that the school wants the tennis program (and all of its sports) to help teach its students discipline, goal setting, teamwork, etc., will make it easier to enforce your team rules (discussed below) throughout the season.

Explain the team goals

Your athletic director will have not only general goals that apply to all of the school’s sports, but also specific goals for the tennis program, as well. The AD should know how the team did last year, who has returned, who the traditional strong schools in your conference are, etc. Your AD should have realistic goals for the tennis program and reasons on which those goals are based.

In addition to your AD’s goals, discuss with your team what they want to achieve and what goals they are willing to work hard for. When a roomful of team members sets and agrees to goals, this puts more pressure on individuals to pull their weight, and work on all parts of their games, including conditioning.

Using the USTA Player Development Programs fitness protocols to measure your players’ speed, agility and endurance is a great way to motivate your team.

Develop individual player goals

Setting individual, as well as team performance goals not only gives meaning to each day’s practice, but also builds team camaraderie. Discuss individual player outcome goals (such as number of wins) as well as performance goals (e.g., improved first serve percentage, deeper returns, improved down-the-line backhand) and set steps for the player to track his or her performance.

Announce team rules

Once you’ve established your team goals, you’ll damage your credibility with team members if you keep changing them. It’s important that you develop team rules with your AD and other coaches and try to anticipate problems before they occur. If you have overly strict attendance policies, you might preclude a top player with a once-a-week after school job, or who volunteers his or her time at a local charity, from playing on your team.

Team rules should cover attendance, grades, behavior, curfew and take into consideration players’ behavior away from school and the tennis team. What if your players are caught drinking at a friend’s home (not on school grounds) on a Saturday night? Working with your school’s athletic director will save you from having to reinvent the coaching wheel and running into problems you might not foresee on your own.

Establish lineup/challenge procedures

It’s important to establish objective criteria for determining who will play #1, #2 and on down the line. Some coaches believe that allowing any player to challenge for a position prior to a team match keeps every player focused. This may not be fair to other teams in your league if the last week of the season, your number #3 player, who has never taken a set off your #1 player, beats the #1 in a challenge match. Your conference may also have rules regarding fair lineups, so be sure to know the rules before the start of conference play.

Because teamwork is so critical in doubles, personalities must be taken into consideration, making choosing doubles teams a more subjective endeavor. Once teams are chosen, however, use objective criteria for which position each pair will play.

1. Your First Team Practice

Skills Testing

Based on your discussions with individual players, have players attempt to execute the shots and shot combinations they will need to execute in order to use the style of matchplay they’ve decided fits them. Determine where the player is having problems tactically, and then locate the technical problems that are preventing the player from executing the shots and shot combinations.

Warmup

Since you may not always be there at the beginning of practice, go over with your players their warmup routine (including strokes and stretching), which will start each practice.

1. Working with Your AD

Regardless of whether you are a teacher at the high school, a local pro or a volunteer, the school’s athletic director is your boss. While he may be grateful to have you, he also has a boss and he is responsible for anything that goes on in your program.

Make sure to discuss exactly what the AD expects from any sport at the school. What is the goal of the overall sports program? What rules do all coaches follow? What are the team rules that apply to all sports? What are the conference rules by which your school must abide? What is the history of the tennis program?

Prior to or after meeting with the AD, meet with the other coaches to get their recommendations as to how you can best work with the AD and fit in with the overall program.

VII. Administration

In addition to your on-court work you’ll have administrative duties as well. Make sure you know whether or not you are responsible for the following:

• Transportation
• Uniforms
• Equipment (balls, hoppers, ball machines, etc.)
• Court maintenance (nets, windscreens, bleachers, garbage cans, etc.
• Fundraising
• Tournaments (organization, T-shirts, sponsors, balls, trophies, registrations, publicity, umpires, etc.)
• Awards
• Program budget and financial procedures (meals, hotels, equipment purchases, etc.)

Know your responsibilities in these areas before your meet with parents, who can help you with many of these tasks. Be sure to discuss with your AD which of these responsibilities can be shared or completely handled by parents.

VIII. Resources

In your effort to learn about coaching tennis, you will be happy to know that there are many free and low-cost books, DVDs and websites available for tennis coaches. There are even resources geared toward the novice coach which provide basic coaching information, with basics about youth psychology, discipline, self-esteem, eating disorders, building team spirit, and other useful information that transfers across any sport.

The following books and videos are great resources to help you get started as a tennis coach and can be ordered through the USHSTA at a discount at our bookstore.

Coaching Youth Tennis

Formerly the USTA Rookie Guide to Coaching Tennis, this is an introduction to youth tennis instruction for parents and beginning coaches. Coaching Youth Tennis provides both general coaching and sport-specific information. Parents and youth tennis coaches, even in their first season, will find lots of information they need for coaching effectively.

Successful Coaching

Published in conjunction with the USTA, this book is a great introductory workbook for those just getting started in any type of sports coaching. The book contains a wealth of information on topics such as developing your coaching style, sport psychology, conditioning and drug awareness. This book helps you not only develop your players, but also helps you develop yourself as a coach.

Coaching Tennis Successfully

This is another in the coaching series by the USTA, and continues to help coaches develop their personal coaching skills. In addition, this book has more specific information on planning practices, stroke production, match-play strategies, psychology and conditioning. The book provides a 15-week master plan, as well as sample daily practice plans.

Fitness Testing for Tennis

Want to know how your kids stack up against the top junior tennis players in the country? This video explains how to administer the USTA fitness testing protocol for junior tennis players ages 8 to 18. Designed under the direction of the USTA Sport Science Committee for Player Development, this battery of tests helps you identify your players’ baseline fitness levels. Fitness Testing for Tennis begins with a cardiovascular test and warmup routine to ensure safety and prevent player injuries during testing. The video lists all of the equipment needed for each test and shows how to properly record the test results.

Tournament Tough

Written by one of the great junior and pro coaches, Carlos Goffi, Tournament Tough addresses core strategies for developing all-around players. From strokes to footwork to mental toughness, this is a comprehensive, yet common-sense guide. With a foreword by John McEnroe and a chapter for girls by Mary Carillo (both Goffi students as juniors).

USPTR Manual on Sport Science

This is an excellent book on sport science as it applies to tennis, and makes a wide variety of topics easily understandable for coaches in the field. This comprehensive book covers conditioning, strength training, flexibility, injury prevention and more.

Scholastic & Academy Tennis: Planning the Season

Written by USHSTA executive director Steve Milano, this is the first book to show coaches how to effectively plan their seasons from day one through the playoffs. The book explains why many popular drills actually degrade one skill when coaches use them to improve another.