Emma Raducanu - Leapfrogging

[stroke]

He was a very good forum contributor, tennis_chiro. He even wrote at least 2 articles on tennisplayer.net, about feeling the weight of the racquet head. Good stuff.

[stotty]

Send him my best. Ask him if he wants to hook him up on Tplayer n/c...

Sure, I will be catching up with him later this week.

[johnyandell]

Send him my best. Ask him if he wants to hook him up on Tplayer n/c...

[stotty]

It was inevitable that Emma would struggle to recreate her US Open form but I have little doubt she will prosper going forward. I was chatting by email recently with tennis_chiro, (who has been to hell and back health wise in the past year) who was once a regular on the forum, about Emma. He is very impressed with her serve. It's a beautiful motion. I have only seen one slow motion clip but it seems to be really good technically other than she didn't have a full ISR. Her toss seems overly high also. A couple of tweaks here and there and her serve, you feel, could get even better. It's always encouraging when we are talking a 'couple tweaks' as oppose to a complete overhaul.

[seano]

Raducanu's body language and demeanor was completely different than the US Open, unengaged and uninterested. Expectations, demand for her time, social media and pressure is and will continue to be enormous. Tough thing for an 18 year old to handle. Hope she has a strong and supportive entourage. Hoping that she and Fernandez have great success. They were/are a breath of fresh air.

[jimlosaltos]

Emma gets her first taste of competition as an Ultra Celebrity. How will she react? Her first opponent is Aliaksandra Sasnovich.

Oops...the above was a post I forgot to hit "post reply". Apparently she didn't react. Hmmm...she has that huge target on her back now that says..."hit me". She fired the coach and comes out of the gate like a lead balloon. The psychology of her win and the implications were huge. She thought/thinks she needs to add a big name to her posse. It will be interesting going forwards. Expectations is a nasty mind you know what.

Sasnovich only beats players like Serena and Emma <g>. So, there's that. In fairness, the conditions in Indian Wells that day were about as slow as one will see on a hard court, vs the US Open where her return of serve shone.

Today, Emma's fellow finalist Leylah Fernandez plays with Coco in doubles. They're already won one match with breadsticks, while Leylah beat Cornet 2 & 3. She's one to watch. Went through the top seeds at the US Open like an ice breaker opening the way for Emma, only to not be able to make yet, one more come from behind push to take it all.

I get positive vibes from Leylah's lefty game. Quoted as getting a very helpful "pep talk" from Sharapova, which she won't reveal.

[don_budge]

A friend who had coached grand slam champions in the past was working with a then top 20 women's player. I saw him at Indian Wells and he asked me to film her serve, which was a technical disaster. He told her about the film and suggested she look at it. The next day she took him out to breakfast at Denny's and fired him. I think my friend was looking for a way out due to her personality and I helped him find it. He was visibly relieved.

Emma gets her first taste of competition as an Ultra Celebrity. How will she react? Her first opponent is Aliaksandra Sasnovich.

Oops...the above was a post I forgot to hit "post reply". Apparently she didn't react. Hmmm...she has that huge target on her back now that says..."hit me". She fired the coach and comes out of the gate like a lead balloon. The psychology of her win and the implications were huge. She thought/thinks she needs to add a big name to her posse. It will be interesting going forwards. Expectations is a nasty mind you know what.

[johnyandell]

Yes yes it did. And a few other similar ones too... Don't under estimate the blindness of really good players... She dropped off the face of the earth in the next year or two as I recall...

[bababa]

Did that really happen??

[johnyandell]

A friend who had coached grand slam champions in the past was working with a then top 20 women's player. I saw him at Indian Wells and he asked me to film her serve, which was a technical disaster. He told her about the film and suggested she look at it. The next day she took him out to breakfast at Denny's and fired him. I think my friend was looking for a way out due to her personality and I helped him find it. He was visibly relieved.

[doctorhl]

Yes, on the whole it's a thankless task. If you remember, not too long ago, Dominic Thiem sacked Thomas Muster as his coach just two weeks into the job. No coach is safe. It seems unthinkable you wouldn't give Muster a year to prove his worth.

American coaches seem better at looking after themselves than Brits. Macci and Bollitierri, from what I understand, at least have players sign contracts that prevent them from exiting on the spot without paying their dues. In my day, the coach carried far more weight and it would have unthinkable to up sticks without a really good reason let alone talk publicly about it.

These days it's better to look at coaching as a service and nothing more. I've spent years coaching some very good players at cut price rates and got little in return except an expectation that they deserve a lower price. I learned my lesson the hard way and am now a lot richer in the pocket for it. It's a shame because my heart and soul is in tennis and no one could love the game more than me...no one could put more into a player than me. But as I have gotten older I have had to look after myself.

If you want to make bucket loads as a coach, focus on the rank and file, run massive group programmes, and hire plenty of coaches with personality and appeal. Forget the tour...

You confirmed what I always suspected about tennis coaching. I think same may be true for many other individual sports, especially those sports with a thriving pro tour. It will be interesting to observe how the new sport of Pickleball, with its mind boggling, projected worldwide participation numbers, develops its fledging pro tour along with its coaching ranks. Perhaps the early leaders will have the foresight to learn from the path tennis has taken. Other racket sports like badminton, squash, table tennis and racketball never could get their pro tours to grow significantly worldwide (due to the fact that they make for terrible television viewing among other reasons).

[stotty]

Being a pro tour coach is to me the worst job in tennis!

Yes, on the whole it's a thankless task. If you remember, not too long ago, Dominic Thiem sacked Thomas Muster as his coach just two weeks into the job. No coach is safe. It seems unthinkable you wouldn't give Muster a year to prove his worth.

American coaches seem better at looking after themselves than Brits. Macci and Bollitierri, from what I understand, at least have players sign contracts that prevent them from exiting on the spot without paying their dues. In my day, the coach carried far more weight and it would have unthinkable to up sticks without a really good reason let alone talk publicly about it.

These days it's better to look at coaching as a service and nothing more. I've spent years coaching some very good players at cut price rates and got little in return except an expectation that they deserve a lower price. I learned my lesson the hard way and am now a lot richer in the pocket for it. It's a shame because my heart and soul is in tennis and no one could love the game more than me...no one could put more into a player than me. But as I have gotten older I have had to look after myself.

If you want to make bucket loads as a coach, focus on the rank and file, run massive group programmes, and hire plenty of coaches with personality and appeal. Forget the tour...

[johnyandell]

Being a pro tour coach is to me the worst job in tennis!

[stotty]

Emma Raducanu splits from her coach. Seems harsh. There seems to be little in the way of diplomacy or sensitivity in the announcement. That's the coach's lot I suppose. You start off holding all the aces but in the end you become the card with the least value.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/sep/24/emma-raducanu-splits-from-coach-who-guided-her-to-shock-us-open-triumph-tennis

I have thoughts on this kind of thing but would be interested to hear what others think?

[stotty]

Key to her game appears, after a small sample, to be her service return. She's sort of a mini-Djokovic -- hard up the middle, rarely misses a return.

What else happened?

Funny you should liken Emma to a mini Djokovic. Yes, she does return well, and, like Djokovic, she continually applies pressure during the rallies so the server is never off the hook or able to relax. Knowing how and when to apply pressure is generally something that takes years to learn but Emma seems to have acquired the skill straight off the bat.

But, like you, all of us are still learning about Emma because we have so little thus far to go on. It will be interesting to see how she copes going forward. She's an outward person as oppose to Osaka who is an inward person. Being outward helps. The only inward person who truly succeeded was Borg. Generally, it's better to be 'outward' than 'inward' in tennis in my view.

What Emma has achieved is the most remarkable thing I have witnessed in tennis.