This past weekend 34 Patana students competed in the U13 BISAC singles championship on Saturday and Sunday with the oldest in year 8 and the youngest in year 4.
All players were guaranteed two best of 3 short set matches with many playing 4 or even 5 matches during the day. At this event as with our tennis events all matches are played without an umpire on court.
This got me onto thinking about how sport but in this specific case tennis aligns itself so well with Bangkok Patana’s mission statement, vision and values.
One of our goals is always to help all our tennis players achieve their full potential and the Academy structure is designed to facilitate this.
A few key words I have taken from watching the students at the weekend are:
Independence - students are responsible for calling their own lines, making sure they know the score and call it at the start of each point, knowing when to change ends, how to deal with a possible bad line call from their opponent etc etc.
Some of the above of course as adults we wouldn’t think too much about but as Head Coach I personally won’t enter them into an event if I don’t they can cope with the stresses that go with it even if their tennis standard is good enough.
Resilience- tennis is a win or lose game, draws don’t exist, yes we can talk about technical and tactical improvement after the match but at the time the students shake hands they have either won or loss. I will often say you learn more from losing and if you don’t learn to lose early on in competitive tournaments then it will get harder to manage, however at that particular moment it’s sometimes tough to accept and all students deal with these situations differently.
Whether they win or lose is not the key factor it is how they handled the situation.
Motivated and engaged -this you would think is a given but there are many factors which play a part all the way from nerves to parental or coach pressure to perform, to the plain and simple fact that they are losing and it’s tough out there on your own.
The simple fact is tennis is an individual game where you are hitting every other shot in the rally, unlike a sport like rugby or football where you may be able to run around and be involved in the game without actually touching the ball, in tennis your skill set has to manage everything that is going on.
Creativity- there are many ways to hit a ball and lots of different shots to master and to out perform others you have to develop an all round game which is going to gel together when competing and also when under pressure from an opponent.
Passionate- loving what you are doing, the students do have a great sense of camaraderie and it’s true lifelong parent friendships are made through their child’s tennis as there is an awful lots of training sessions and events to watch and support at.
The students though have got to enjoy the environment as success can’t just be valued by medals and trophies but more importantly by memories. The large majority of students who graduate from school having played at the highest level Patana has to offer don’t carry on playing and competing at University and beyond often because it is the environment they have had at school with can’t be recreated.
Daniel Ahl.