10. TOUGH DAY AT THE OFFICE

There are some days on the tour when things just don’t go as planned or as you had hoped. Your player loses a match that she thought she could win and it seems like her whole world comes crashing down. 

Dealing with loss is one of the toughest things a player (and support team) has to learn to endure when on the tour. Every week, week in, week out, there is only one winner and an awful lot of ‘losers’ so your player has to ‘learn to fail’. But a loss is not really a failure so long as the player is able to reflect on her performance (be it in singles or doubles – or both) and pull out the elements of the decisive match that need further work and the elements that were good. In other words, find some negatives but more importantly, find some positives as the only way the player (and support) can learn is from experience – making mistakes and learning from them. If a player never loses, what does she ever learn?

It’s very tough but the younger the player can learn this lesson the better. The Head Teacher of my player’s school once said to her, “what I admire about you most (player) is that you are learning to fail”. At the time, we thought this was a very strange thing to say but it is so true and so insightful. Of course, your player is going to be sad, angry and all the rest when she has lost but give it some time and some thought and she will learn to take things from the losses and utilise them in future match situations (and dare I say it, in life). 

It is hard also for anyone traveling with the player who has not got the result they wanted. How do you console someone who has just lost, what in their eyes, was the most important match of their life? What do you say? When do you say it? There is little point in telling her it’s fine and that it didn’t matter and likewise, there is zero point in ‘having a go’ and telling her how bad it was. So, what do you do? I will cover this in more detail in my next blog (“The Do’s and Don’ts”) but in summary, just be there; be prepared to listen and not judge; and most of all, try to be positive. The initial 24 hours will be tough but your player will recover and move on. Feeling the pain of loss is actually a good thing as it shows that the player cares about her performance and this needs to be utilised to enable her to develop and learn from the experience. 

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