Dealing with the Triangle

I’m sure everybody has heard of the term soccer mom, but not many have heard the term tennis mom.  Like any mother watching her son or daughter play competitive sports, moms obviously want their kids to succeed and sometimes even more than their kids. What’s even more dangerous is when a mother has seen her kid play a specific sport for years and starts to pick up on how to really play, or at least she thinks this is the case.

This is the exact case with my mother as she was right by my side all throughout my junior tennis career, going to every match around the country. After awhile, she really knew how to win in the game of tennis and had developed a clear idea on the path I should be taking to better my tennis game. Even though she never played the game growing up, she would always tell me her thoughts before and after each match that I played. The worst part was when she would get overly emotional and started tossing her hands in the air and putting her head in her hands whenever I would make a dumb decision out on the court. Obviously, she was trying to do what was best for me as any mother would, but eventually, it started to get in the way of my success.

 On the other side of the triangle stood my college coach, the guy I trusted in to help further my tennis career once I had officially committed to the University of Illinois. My coach was a successful junior player himself earning many different singles and doubles titles during his college tennis career at Michigan State. From there he worked his way to becoming a professional coach and worked with some of the best players in the world including Billie Jean King. The point being, this guy knows tennis and it would be foolish not to take his advice.

Once I got on campus, the first thing my coach decided to do was to change my technique on my forehand. This was no minor tweak either. I basically did a 180-degree turn in terms of forehand techniques and changing a stroke to this extreme at the age of 18 was something not may people did. My coach said that my other technique would break down against the players I was going to play in college. Putting my doubts aside, I put my faith in my coach and his knowledge and completely changed my forehand.

 It comes as no surprise that with a major change in technique, comes period of time that is simply just a struggle. You don’t like the way it feels, you regret ever doing it in the first place and more importantly it doesn’t seem to work. It was during this time period where the triangle was really formed.

Just a week after this big change was made, I was entered in my first college event. It featured some of the best teams across the country and we were hosting it. Since it was only a couple hours away from my hometown, my parents decided to drive up and watch me compete. I had told them already about the technique change over the phone and just as I thought, my mom was pretty skeptical about it. Nevertheless, she trusted my coach and myself, so it seemed like she came around to the technique change.

For my first match, I played a junior from the number three ranked Texas Longhorns who had a great sophomore season. As you can imagine, I was pretty nervous since it was my first college match, but I was also scared because this new forehand I was working on was horrendous to say the least. The only comfort I had was that my coach understood that this technique change would take some time, so he didn’t put much importance on winning the match, just getting some points in while using my new forehand. The match turned out the way I thought it was going to turn out, as I was frankly embarrassed out on the court losing 6-2, 6-2.

My mom had never seen me play a match quite like this for some time, so immediately after the match she went over and talked to my coach for what seemed like hours.

After talking with my mom, my coach pulled me aside and just reiterated that this tournament was not about the results, but just a way to give my forehand some practice during pressure situations. My mom had some different thoughts. She pulled me aside a little later in the day to ask me if this forehand change was really going to be worth it and to do what felt best for me. At the time, in my opinion, it was best to go back to my old forehand, so I could potentially win some matches. Either way I was torn. I really couldn’t satisfy my mom and my coach since there really wasn’t any middle ground. I could either use my new forehand and fail (coach) or go back to my old ways and potentially win (mom). After thinking it over I decided to trust in my new coach and stick with the process of developing my new forehand. I knew my mom would support me in any way I chose and it would have been foolish to not give this a try.

Once the tournament was over, my parents and I sat down with my coach and talked this situation through. The meeting was excellent, and by the time my parents walked out of my coach’s office we were all on the same page. It was as if the triangle completely disappeared. To this day, I’m glad I took the route of the new forehand and handled that situation like I did.

Team Conflict

Since most people would agree that being part of an athletic team at the intercollegiate level is a form of “work,” my teammates, coaching staff and I had a substantial ongoing conflict with one particular individual during my sophomore and junior year. For the sake of this post, we’ll call him Fred.

Fred was a sophomore from Whales when I started my freshman season. He had tons of potential as a tennis player, but never seemed to utilize his incredible talents. Yet, that does not define a good teammate. All through my first year, Fred loved showing the freshman the ropes, being a good student in the classroom, and most of the time, showed resiliency both in practice and during dual matches.

Fred was always doing things that were a little unorthodox such as taking other teammates’ practice gear without permission, spitting on the courts when he was angry at his performance (which is very frowned upon in the US), and goofing off during community service and public events. These were all scenarios in which his actions were unacceptable, but not terrible in the whole scheme of things. We thought it was simply because of his different cultural upbringing in Whales.

It was during my sophomore and junior season’s where his actions started to change and needed to be addressed. Over the summer going into my sophomore year, Fred started to really utilize his talents and began to see some serious results. By the time the season started, he had earned himself a top 30 singles and doubles ranking. Unfortunately for us, his success seemed to have changed him.

On top of his continuing quirks from my freshman year, he was showing up late for practice, doing his own warm up instead of warming up with the team, getting in constant verbal conflicts with the coaches and getting in constant verbal and an occasional physical conflicts with my teammates and I. It was at this point, my coaching staff and fellow teammates needed to control this growing situation.

In my opinion, and in the opinion of many of my teammates as well, the origin of our conflicts with Fred arose because of Fred’s stubborn mindset of doing things his way and on his clock. He really seemed to not care at all whatever needed to be done to help him be victorious, which as a result, would help us. By helping himself, he was helping the team, and after all, tennis is viewed as an individual sport. If you win your individual match, you do your part for the team.

Once everyone became fully aware of Fred’s actions, two different things started to happen. First, my teammates and I discussed this issue privately without Fred present. We wanted to make sure that everyone was on the same page, and we all felt the same way about Fred. Second, the rest of the team, including myself, tried to get his side of the story individually. We loved having Fred on the team (at leas the Fred we knew before), so we wanted to the do the best we could to understand where he was coming from and then paint him a picture of how we viewed his actions.

Fed seemed like a reasonable and understanding guy. After we sat down with him for the first time, he seemed to take it well, like he understood where he went wrong and was more than willing to change. This however, became an ongoing routine as nothing seemed to change and these meetings became more and more pointless. Finally, one day at practice, Fred crossed the line. Long story short, he basically called one of our coaches dumb and he was indefinitely kicked off the team. As hard as it was to let one of our best players go, it was time for him to learn his lesson and our culture to get back to the way it was supposed to be.

Ultimately, Fred humbly apologized to the coaching staff and the team a couple weeks later and he was immediately reinstated. We saw excellent results for the first few weeks, but over time, Fred slipped back into his old ways and unfortunately, he damaged a lot of relationships with the guys on the team because of it.

Looking back at how we handled the situation, I thought we handled it almost perfectly. We basically executed Argyris and Schon’s Model I of interpersonal behavior to the exact steps as shown in Reframing Organizations. To be honest, I would have liked to have seen more drastic measures be taken earlier to really show Fred how his actions were unacceptable. Just because Fred was so successful on the court, did not give him the right to be treated differently than everybody else. Even if we changed our ways and acted more harshly towards Fred, I’m positive the situation would have ended up the same way in the long run and I’m sure my teammates would agree with me.