Parent's Question: I’m pushing my 10-year-old kid because other kids the same age are performing better. What can I do to help my child catch up?
Coach's Answer: Don't force it and let your child develop at their own pace. A coach wants their student to improve skills and learn new ones. That means the student needs to work on themselves and not worry about others. Attention elsewhere takes away attention from yourself. More importantly, people develop at different speeds but they all eventually reach similar skill levels if they keep training and working on themselves. Players that performed well young do not always end up getting the same results as adults, and the same goes for players that lagged behind when they were young -- they sometimes end up dominant as adults athletes.
When I was 13, I got selected into the U.S. High Performance Tennis Team and was second in the lineup for the Junior Davis Cup team. You could say I was the second-best U.S. tennis player in my age division. The best was Donald Young. He was our number one and at 15 he became the youngest Junior World Number 1 (in the 18 and Under age division). We won the 14 and Under World Championships.
In our cohort, Donald reached the highest rank of 37 ATP and won a doubles Grand Slam. A good achievement. I had 7 ATP points which put me in the top 1,000 in the world. But neither Donald nor I reached our expected potential on the professional tour. Donald was expected to be a top 10 player, perhaps even number 1. These expectations come from being among the best in the world at an early age. From other countries, a top junior from Germany, who beat Novak Djokovic in the Junior Davis Cup finals, didn’t live up to expectations either — never reached the top 500 ATP.
On the flip side, some of our top U.S. adult players grew up as “unknowns” in the junior tennis realm. Robby Ginepri, who reached the singles semi-finals at the U.S. Open and was ranked World Number 15, didn’t start playing until he was 11. Steve Johnson, who was also close to the top 10 ATP and among the best U.S. players on the Tour, didn’t start his dominance until his junior year in college. So, performance on the tennis court will begin to really matter as a young adult after he or she has gone through years of training and development. Even then, as long as they train to get incrementally better, their game will continue to evolve and improve.
The point I want to convey is that it shouldn't matter if your child is behind today. Rather, you should seek that your child is training well, competes, and gets better without feeling like they need to be or play like other kids. The best comparative measurement is if your child is a better player today compared to last week. That’s how you should approach it if you want to create a healthy approach to competitive training.