Have you ever thought that you practice better than you play matches?
Have you ever gone on court and tried to understand why the things that were happening in practice yesterday are not coming through? I used to ask myself that question as a player. I know that a lot of kids that I coach always bring up the same topic with me as well at times.
You think to yourself, "Why is it that?" You know the court is the same. You know there is no difference in dimensions.
The only difference that happens between practice and matches is the pressure. The element of pressure that comes on. One thing that I'm always debating about in my mind as a coach is how much point orientated work do you need to put into someone's practice? How much is it based on the development of stroke fundamentals and the development of little elements of someone's game, or ironing out some technical issues?
One of the things that keeps coming up to me is the area of development your player is in. Obviously the focus isn't on winning at a young age. When you're in the development stages of your life you don't need to focus on the winning aspect, but winning plays a really big part in developing your mindset. When you're developing all of your practice ideas a lot of the time, we need to ensure that there's a balance of this too.
It's important to ensure that there is a large amount of your session based on point structures and scenarios, and then from that you can then manipulate how you work on the stroke fundamentals within point orientated situations. What this will then do is get the players mind to link to what will happen in a match. That's what we all need to do as coaches, or if we're just players out there needing to get better, play the situations that you need to get better in from a pressure perspective.
Then when you make some certain mistakes on the court, you fine-tune the technique or the fundamental that you need to. I feel like the more we can do this and put ourselves under match scenario pressure, the better our matches will become in the future. So ensure that you add that element to your game and hopefully that helps you to become a better match player, not just the best practice player.