Be our guest!

workouttennis.com is a site for you! We have a guest page. This is not a twitter page nor a facebook page, but a page for reflection about issues concerning young players wanting to be full-time, or spending a period playing full-time. There are plenty of these players out there, and you'll see what sort of issues I have raised.

You may be wanting to talk about schedules, money, facilities, coaches, fitness, equipment, injury, objectives or the psychological side of the game. It is very rare for a player, or a player's entourage, to be totally happy about the environment he is in. This period of full-time tennis is a period of great strain, expense and opportunity. No-one would want such an oportunity to escape them for lack of planning or information.
 

A press service for guests

So workouttennis.com is an information service. The website pages here skate the surface of the biggest problems. We are far from exhaustive!

I know that there are others out there with other experiences, maybe an experience I have never had! In any case, we want to be able to help anyone who is trying his luck as a full time player. Any input from anyone is welcome. However, the website as it is, is not a fully interactive one. The information on it is considered definitive and concrete. So any articles we publish will have approximately the same format as existing ones, 400 - 600 words, and making a specific illustrated point about our favourite subject. So if we publish an article it is at risk of being edited. We will return the edited copy to you to get your approval, and then you will be on! The article may spend a long time on the site, maybe short! It depends what sort of feedback we get. Your copyright will otherwise be respected. If you wish for the article to be removed, you can send an email to request this at any time.
 

Parents - write in!

I'll give you a couple of examples of articles that we have received.

One was from a player who gave his experiences of playing tournaments in France, that reflected much of those mentioned elsewhere on these pages. His English was good, so we had little editing to do.
 

Tournament tour

Then another article from a parent who had sent his daughter away to an academy. He looked at the reasons for doing it, the finances involved, and the benefits for his daughter. I needed to do a bit of translation work before this was published.

For one of the tournaments we visited there is a tennis academy on site. The director agreed to give us an idea about how his operation works. He was able to use the article to advertise the school! In such a case we of course take no responsibility for the accuracy of information that is given, but even from people in the same field as ourselves, we appreciate their vision of things.

People think that, particularly on the internet, that competition is immense, but I have found the contrary. The information that is available is so precise, from many sources, that is is almost impossible to fabricate the situation at an establishment that you'd like to advertise. You can sell yourself with honesty and precision!
 

Academy life

For example, there is another academy, which offers tennis, but not as a speciality, that has been in financial difficulty. From an article on this we learned that he wished that he DID have a speciality at his school to differentiate it from others. He found the reputation of his school too neutral, and he'd have rather set up, for example, a tennis academy, confronted with competition, but able to fix all his marketing on high level delivery of a special service. He said that the fact he had good teachers in class was not enough any more. Any academy needs to develop a special reputation, and fast. In his case it required an investment that he could not achieve. He would have liked to have mixed in with the competition though.
 

School + Tennis

The other great plus of the internet is that the competition is more visible than ever. It means that you save yourself a lot of time and money on research into academies, and you may end up taking the one that is most practical for you. You can better weigh up the pros and cons. This means that people make better choices than ever before!
 

Choosing the best facilities

workouttennis.com has some essential technical pages, but our main theme is the human side of tennis performance between the ages of 12 and 22. On other websites you will find great features on the technical, or psychological side of the game, and I use them myself!

However, I cannot do this on workouttennis.com because our type of player is quite specific. We want to attack technical, physical, strategic, organisational, psychological aspects from a particular angle. We also try and avoid giving fact sheets with key points. Our main objective is to observe and let you draw your own conclusions from this evidence. it may make you think differently, and more effectively. So if your article treats our subject with this detachedness, you will find your contribution particularly welcome!