Excerpt from Hardcourt Confidential: USTA Player Development

Being from a tennis family helped prepare me to run player development.

When the job as general manager of the USTA’s player development program came open, I felt I was a good candidate. Tennis was in many ways the glue that kept our family close, although my dad might, with some justification, flip that and claim that family was the bonding agent that enabled our success in tennis. Either way, we’d lived a typical tennis family’s life, and stood out mostly because of John’s extreme talent.

You could substitute the words “parent management” for “player development,” because the road to success with a promising player, runs through parents especially in more recent times. The stakes have been driven sky high. Today, God forbid you play any other sport by the time you’re twelve or thirteen. Perish the thought of going to a “regular” school. It’s a very different world from the one in which I grew up.

Parents do-and don’t-understand this. I take a lot of time trying to explain it to people like the former boxer who’s trying to coach his own kid, and who almost had a fistfight with one of our USTA pros at our training facility…