David and His Father, Goliath

This is one of my articles from the "We've All Heard this Before" file, but I am still amazed.

Playing tennis with a group a few weeks ago, I look over beyond a few vacant courts and I see this man at the net feeding (attempting to do so) balls to his three or four year old son (I assume).

His son is about two feet behind the baseline, doing his best to swing the adult racket at the ball, much less hit it, much less over the net, including the nets on adjacent courts which are now inundated with misguided tennis balls.


I have and many of you have seen those gifted little ones who seem to get the groove and rhythm quite early in life, but you can usually notice these little court monsters began with some very attentive and caring (hopefully) instruction with more realistic goals and even they may not be expected to clear the net from the baseline, not at three or four years of age. Yeah I know, we've all read some of those tennis pro biographies.

Can you imagine tossing your four year old a regulation college football, telling him or her you're going long and then sprinting out 40 yards on a sideline pattern? How about handing that little one a pan, a few eggs and your favorite fresh ingredients and saying. "How about whipping me up an omelet?"

Regardless of wishful thinking or some natural (innate - yeah, right?) ability one (parent) may perceive, there are some basic physics involved here and one need not study the subject to realize such conditions probably aren't promoting anything near the (selfish perhaps) expected results.

Many of us recognized this conundrum quite some time ago and 10 and Under Tennis has done such a fantastic job of addressing this on an organized level, but again, I'm still amazed.

I've seen teens and adults step on the tennis court for the first and last time over my lifetime, but seen those same people become terrible or mediocre golfers or bowlers for their lifetime. There's nothing wrong with this nor does anyone have the right to say so, but I think this says much for recreational tennis players and the game itself - it's not such an easy sport to learn, but can be, and so much darn fun, for a lifetime.

So I hope all parents and loved ones of those little ones being introduced to the game make it fun and relatively challenging for those future lifelong tennis players.