Maximize Your Child’s Tennis Experience
Is your child just starting to play tennis or have they played for years and are ready to take it to the next level? Crosscourt Consulting was created to help parents make the most of their children’s tennis experiences.
Tennis is unlike many other junior sports. While there are incredible coaches, their focus is appropriately on skills and technique and strategy. They generally do not focus on the details of tournament plans, rankings, or all of the other minutiae that’s critical to a successful junior tennis experience. Instead, that falls on the parents.
There is no "one-size-fits-all" recipe for the development of a junior tennis player. There are truly endless possibilities in terms of lessons, training, tournaments, and team play. And then add in the complexity of school, costs, logistics, and other family obligations, and it can be difficult to figure out what is going to be the best "fit" for your child.
Parents have so many questions—what’s more important, lessons or clinics? How do we sign up for tournaments and what are other options for competing? How do the rankings work and do they matter? What are nationals? How can we balance the demands of training and competing with academics and our school schedule?
Our advice to all parents of aspiring junior tennis players:
Start small
Develop short-term goals, and a development plan that supports those goals, while keeping the love of the game as the primary focus.
Dream big
Whether your child dreams of playing on their high school team or playing on the tour, the dream is important.
Enjoy the ride
If the development of a junior tennis player were a road race, it would be a marathon and not a sprint—so pace yourself and enjoy the ride.
Note: This article was co-authored by Rachel Kros, co-founder and co- principal at Crosscourt Consulting.
