GOAL SETTING EXAMPLE.

We are now going to look at a theoretical look at how we should approach our goals.

Scenario.  -  We are an average player in our tennis club and it is our aim to become club singles champion. We normally reach the third round of the championship and then are knocked out.

Before we set our goals we need to do some investigating to know what is ahead of us.

We need to look at the standard at the top level in the club and perhaps feature the 3 or 4 best players, certainly the previous recent winners.

We need to know –   What is their style of play?

             Are they all court players.

                          Are they baseline players.

                          What are their strengths:

                          Do they have a big serve.

                          Do they have a weapon –

                          such asa strong forehand.        

                          Etc.,

              What are their weaknesses:

                          Are they poor at the net!

                          Are they slow around the

                          court.

                                     and so-on.

Once you have found out these facts about your potential adversaries, you now need to lay out your own styles of play (whether you will need to change it) your own strengths and your own weaknesses.

At the end of this exercise, you should have a pretty good idea of what you need to do to prepare yourself to achieve your goal. This will have to take into consideration all of the opponents who are currently better than you. But it may not only be technical and tactical ability, perhaps the current champion is very strong mentally – so this is another area you may have to work on.

You will need to consider all of the possibilities set out in my programme – training – periodisation – fitness etc., etc.

So our long term goal is to become club champion, at this stage we will put this down to a 2 year goal – this is an outcome goal.

We now need to consider what we need to do to achieve this goal.

At this stage we will say that we need a more consistent server- we have a good forehand but need to improve our backhand.  Our fitness is a littler suspect over a three set match and we need more match practice.

Quite a lot to be getting on with in the next two years.

So lets look at just one of our goals for this exercise – Improving our serve.

It is probable in each of the sections mentioned, that we would need some advice from our coach as to what we need to do in each category.

For the serve I am going to advise you to work on getting a 75% hit on your first serve and at least 90% on your second serve – this is a target to aim at.  You will need to work on pronation and power for your first serve and to get a topspin serve for your second. (The latter is an area where you are particularly poor).

We can now break this down into our short term goals before looking at the medium term, much will depend on what you are trying to achieve. The reason I say short term first is that you must concentrate for a while on obtaining the technical skills for improving the first serve, whether it be flat or slice and also get the correct technique for the topspin serve. We should set small time scales for improving these points, and might even have to revise our goals from time to time (this is always necessary in goal setting as you might get on faster than expected, or meet obsticles to delay us, such as illness etc.,).

We should set our goals for improving our percentage of in serves and this would indicate how much work we need to put in, perhaps serving 10 baskets of balls each day. Again you need to talk this through with your coach.

You should now have an idea as to how to set your goals and should then show these to your coach and discuss them in full. I cannot be over specific here as I have not seen you play.

But – if you have any specific question you wish to ask, please drop me an email

to:  john@tennisatthenet.com