I Didn't Get Up and Run to the Tennis Center to Lose to This Kid

Sometime in the mid-1990s, at the Georgia Junior Qualifier, one of my players, Timirin Collier, was locked in a tight third set against a higher seed. We called him Mighty. As best I remember, he was seeded around ninth in the Boys' 18s and the kid across the net, Staton Helton, was around fourth. I couldn't tell you the score. I can tell you what Mighty yelled.

"I didn't get up and run to the tennis center every day to lose to this kid."

My memory says he won every game from there. If you've spent any time around junior tennis, you already know how this story is supposed to go. Hard work pays off. The kid who wants it more finds another gear, and the fitter player outlasts the favorite in the third.

That's not the story I've been carrying for thirty years.

What stays with me is where he went looking when he needed something to believe. He didn't reach for a forehand cue, a serving target, or a reminder to play the big points well. He reached for the mornings.

We were in Atlanta, getting ready for the Georgia Junior Qualifier and the Southern Closed. Kids slept at the house where I was staying, got up early, and ran to the tennis center for workouts before school. Nobody was waiting at the other end with applause, and nobody handed out trophies for getting out of bed. There were easier ways to start a school day, and every one of those kids knew it.

I'm sure the runs did something for their fitness. But when Mighty called on those mornings in the third set, he wasn't making a claim about his lungs. He was reminding himself he'd done something hard, over and over, in pursuit of something that mattered to him.

Then he did something even more interesting. He made a comparison he had no way to check.

He didn't know what the kid across the net had done to prepare. Maybe that kid got up earlier, ran farther, or had outworked Mighty for years. None of it was available in the third set, and I've come to believe none of it mattered. I think the real value of hard preparation is being able to hold the belief that you did something the person on the other side of the net was unwilling to do. And I think it matters less whether that belief is true than whether you hold it at the moments that count.

That's a strange thing for a coach to say out loud. We're supposed to deal in evidence. But look closely at what Mighty actually had. His evidence wasn't about the opponent at all. It was about himself. The comparison was the packaging, and the mornings were what was inside.

The packaging still mattered. Telling yourself you've worked hard is a reason to stay calm. Telling yourself you didn't do all that work to lose to this kid is a reason to fight. And the mornings never guaranteed him anything. They were his regardless of the score.

## Too Far From the Line

Here's where I think a lot of junior programs come up short, and I include my own history in the question. I've spent more than thirty years in junior development, in Boston, Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, and Austin, and most programs I've seen stay too far away from the line. They err on the side of not chasing anybody away. I understand why. A program has to keep families enrolled, keep kids coming back, and keep practices feeling productive and fun. Those are fair goals, right up until they start setting the ceiling on how demanding preparation is allowed to get.

When that happens, something quiet goes missing. Kids still sweat. They still run drills and finish the fitness circuit. What they don't get is the experience of standing near the edge of what they're willing to do and choosing to keep going. When we keep removing the difficult parts, we shouldn't be surprised when players have fewer difficult experiences to reach back for in a tight match. You can't retrieve a memory you never made.

I've taken juniors to the track. Some who were in their early teens at the time still describe those sessions as grueling. I once took a young professional out there too, nineteen as I recall. She got sick on the way back to the car and told me she was never going back.

I want to be careful with that one. Getting sick isn't proof I designed a good workout. It's a warning sign, and a coach who celebrates it has missed the point. It's also possible the session was simply more than she was ready for that day. Training near the edge is not the same as shoving a kid past it, and the edge looks different depending on the work. In a speed session it means full-quality efforts with real rest, not exhaustion for its own sake. Still, her reaction left me thinking about something I've seen many times since. Wanting the results of serious preparation and being willing to do the preparation are not always the same thing.

## What Sampras Said, and What I Remember

Pete Sampras announced his retirement at the US Open on August 25, 2003. At the press conference that day, he was asked if there was one moment when he knew. He said he'd started practicing ahead of Wimbledon and, after three days, he was done. "I didn't want to do everything you have to do," he said.

My own memory of that day adds a detail I haven't been able to confirm. As I recall, he was later on the broadcast walking through his old routine, and he got to the part about running 400s on the track. He paused and said something close to this: once he wasn't willing to run those 400s anymore, he knew it was time. I haven't found the footage, so treat that as my memory and not his words.

Either way, the point holds. One of the best players who ever lived didn't describe the day he forgot how to play. He described the day he stopped wanting to pay for it. It tells you where a competitor's identity actually lives, in the preparation as much as in the matches.

For a young player, the question is whether they're willing to start paying. For a champion, it's whether they're willing to keep paying. Most of that price gets paid in training, long before anybody walks out under the lights.

## The Coach Isn't Coming With Him

I spent a good part of my career trying to make myself less necessary at the moment of competition. In most junior tournament matches, once the player walks on court, the coach isn't coming with him. A coach can design the work, ask good questions, and help a kid make sense of what happened afterward. When the third set gets tight, though, the player is the only one standing on the baseline.

There's a difference between a coach telling a player he's tough and a player having his own reason to believe it. Reassurance from the sideline is borrowed. The memory of mornings you chose is yours to keep, and it's already on the court with you.

Mighty did something that afternoon I couldn't have scripted for him. He took a pile of ordinary, uncomfortable mornings and turned them into a reason to compete. I can't prove that thought won him the rest of the match, and I don't need to. What I know is he didn't wait for me to tell him what those mornings meant.

He'd already decided.

The same holds well past tennis. The stories kids build about themselves under pressure are the ones they carry into classrooms, jobs, and relationships, places where no coach is waiting at the changeover.

So when I say programs should train closer to the edge, I'm not mainly arguing for fitter players, though we should want those too. I'm arguing for players who have done enough meaningful work, and owned enough of it, that when things get tight they can reach into their own history and find something worth believing.

The opponent doesn't need to know what you did. He doesn't even need to have done less.

You need to know what it meant to you. Sometimes, in a third set, that's enough to change what happens next.