Making the Junior Davis Cup Team

[johnyandell]

Let's hear your thoughts on Barry Buss' latest - "Making the Junior Davis Cup Team"

[dipperhitter]

Been away for a while and just read thru Mr. Buss's series. Painful--painful memories that is! I have a questiion Barry, what is or could be done to improve all this? Or are certain families just going to do what they do?

Not sure the article on parental blunders can quite account for this kind of dysfunction...Barry?? ...Frank?

[barrybuss]

Where to start...

Greetings Dipperhitter...

Thanks for the kind words...You asked a couple questions, let me do my best to assist. Regarding my situation growing up, From an in house perspective, certainly having a hands on coach would have been enormously beneficial. I was self taught and had nobody to go to with my angst about the tougher exchanges that would take place between my dad and I. Certainly a more active and supportive mother or other relative would have been a nice counter balance to my Father when he would go off the handle. But that just wasn't the case.

On a more macro level, The USTA could and should do more to help at risk kids like myself. But that starts to veer in to a Big Brotherish type of relationship between the organization and its members. The USTA is not in business to raise anybody's kids or tell parents how best to raise their own. The environment the USTA has established for junior competition is a mine field for all kinds of child/parent dysfunctional interaction. The USTA has commissioned numerous studies over the years to understand and approve the environment but obviously to little avail. Their best solutions have been to come up with a similar style of recommendations not unlike much of what is in Frank's piece.

The problem with such laundry lists of Dos and Donts is they are great up to a point if you start implementing them immediately upon entering the junior tennis competitive environment. But nobody has ever done that. The questions are what do you do when parent and child are incapable of executing many of the well intentioned "Dos" and are incapable of not executing many of the duly warned of "Donts"?

Listen, logically if maintaining a healthy junior tennis environment for parent and child were as simple as a well intentioned laundry lists of Dos and Donts, there would be no problems. Everyone would get the list and do the dos and avoid the donts and we have no problems. The sheer fact that books are still being written on this subject and studies are still being commissioned and that each generation of new young players has no shortage of highly abusive and dysfunctional family dynamics means we as a sport are missing something in the equation of how we deal with this most charged of atmospheres.

In my opinion, this is about troubleshooting, identifying red flags and recurring episodes (tanking, cheating, anger, losing interest) and trying to solve them as effectively and efficiently as possible. Any discussion about how to best raise a tennis child that does not contain a strong segment from the childs own voice about the experience of growing up trying to be a player is just too limited in scope to be effective. That's what I've tried to do in my book, to give voice to the kid out there on the court every coach and parent are trying to micro manage from afar without anything close to enough insight in to what the kid is really going through out there on the court in the heat of battle.

The two goals for all parties here is that families get a quality return on their investment in their childs tennis and that players learn life skills and tools from tennis to segue healthily in to adult life after the last ball has been struck. Discussion of these issues is great, but its my opinion having been in this environment for 40 years now is that we need better discussion with all parties involved...Players, parents, coaches, organizations to have any hopes of manifesting any lasting impact..

[dipperhitter]

Excellent answer.