What Are They Being Taught?

"Unless you are the 1/10^th of 1% who actually earn a living from playing tennis, remember that tennis is a game, a game that you can play your entire life." SC Tennis Pro Jerry Albrikes

Clearly, Coach Jerry sees the big picture and we totally agree with him - guess it's no coincidence that he's a good friend and supporter of HIGH-TECH TENNIS! This might be familiar to you since we post it all the time:

Tennis is a GAME, not brain surgery,
and junior players are CHILDREN, not mini-professionals.
Junior tennis is a JOURNEY, not a DESTINATION...
YOU MIGHT AS WELL ENJOY IT!

Tennis is certainly a game, but to us, it's also our J-O-B because we've been supporting tennis players with video services and virtually living, sleeping, and breathing tennis for the past 7 years. For a variety of reasons, we've now changed our primary focus to include other sports (via our new "division" HIGH-TECH SPORTS VIDEO) and we'll only pursue HIGH-TECH TENNIS activities when and where it makes sense. It'll be interesting to see how similar or different those other worlds might be. So far, the differences seem to be significant...we shall see.

During the month of June, we're always excited to visit several terrific SUMMER CAMPS and I've been noticing that the campers learn a LOT more than just how to play tennis. So, aside from just having someone to basically "babysit" your kids while they're on summer vacation, I started thinking about what the kids are actually being taught. Tennis is such a great disguise for learning life lessons (kind of like adding sugar to medicine to make it easier to swallow).

For instance, we recently observed a coach who was still very, very unhappy with a player because that player had thrown her racquet the previous day. He talked about how much money her parents had paid for that racquet and she definitely got the message that racquet abuse just would not be tolerated in any way, shape, or form. That lesson was much more important than which grip to use.

That same coach also couldn't believe that so many players withdraw from tournaments after losing in the main draw. He felt it was important to always finish something once you start it and when you don't get your way, you cannot be permitted to just quit and walk away. Again, what a lesson for those players to learn.

While waiting for campers to warm up the other day, I overhead another coach say words to this effect: We're a team and we do everything together so let's GO! Such a great lesson for players to learn, especially in such an individual sport like tennis.

Of course there are many, many coaches out there who provide a variety of lessons for children and the vast majority are doing the very best they can. HOWEVER, recent news concerning religious and educational figures of authority is incredibly upsetting. It's even more startling to realize that one out of every six boys and one out of every four girls will experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18.
(Child Sexual Abuse Fact Sheet)

Parents, please don't miss this very clear reminder: You absolutely MUST carefully select the people with whom your children spend their time. Protect your precious children from the creeps out there who look just like someone's grampa or as harmless as you and me while they're destroying human spirits every single day.