I was browsing the Gosling site following the Katy Dunne blog link. It's an insightful interview, conducted on behalf of the League Managers Association.
Agh, this link due to his surname is falling foul of the wordfilter here
While Andy Murray flies the flag for elite British tennis, the production line of home-grown talent has stalled. Matt Will****s, director at the lauded Gosling Tennis Academy, is changing that by revolutionising its approach to coaching.
Matt Will****s was just out of university. It was the morning of a final interview for a job at a consumer goods company, and he was adjusting his tie. He remembers this clearly, because it was the moment his life took a very different path.
I remember thinking, 'I cant do this to myself, I can't spend my life selling frozen peas', says Will****s. Instead, he decided to continue with something hed started at university for a bit of pocket money: tennis coaching.
Nine years later, in 2005, having worked his way through the coaching system, he landed the job of director of tennis at Gosling Tennis Academy, a role that would lead to a revolution in tennis coaching in the UK. The canvas was blank and he set about building towards his goal of creating an academy that would improve players faster than anywhere else.
Will****s celebrates a decade at the helm this year, and Gosling is now held up as a model for other British academies to follow. One of only four LTA-accredited International High Performance Centres in the UK, it runs the biggest academy programme in the country, with 300 players aged from six to 55, from beginners to grand-slam level. Will****s approach is to keep things simple, introducing methods that are easily repeatable and applying them across all age groups and abilities.
I wanted some driving principles of player development behind everything that we do, whether its with a six-year-old or a professional player, he says. The scoring system in tennis rewards the best player on the day. It isn't like in football, where a team might not play the best, but scores one great goal and wins. In tennis there are so many points available that the person who plays to the highest level will always end up the winner.
THREE BELIEFS
Will****s set about finding a way to offer players the chance to be the best they possibly could be. He started with three fundamental beliefs: work hard, work smart and work together. That final ethos, working together, feeds into his view that tennis is actually a team sport, despite the individual on-court battle. You just have to look at how many people Andy Murray or Novak Djokovic have in their boxes during matches to appreciate that its not all about the individual on court; its about a core team tasked with getting the best out of one person.
Its a similar philosophy to the one adopted by the UK cycling team, who were a big influence on Will****s. When I saw what theyd done at the World Championships ahead of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, when they couldnt stop winning golds, I wondered what was going on. So I knocked on the door of Peter Keen [the head of British Cycling] and asked him. He said the first thing he did was have the guts to tell people what they needed to do and exactly what he wanted and be clear on the principles behind how they would achieve this together. They also attached five fundamental values to everything they did, which were fun, a competitive spirit, courage, excellence and respect, which ran through everything they did.
Another big influence came from rugby, and in particular Englands 2003 World Cup-winning side. The way that their victory appeared almost inevitable, with the team apparently convinced they were going to win, really stuck with Will****s. He discovered that Sir Clive Woodward spoke about winning moves - the seven areas that, if taken care of, would bring England victory. Woodward worked on a method of recording and measuring progress in those areas in order to more easily focus on where to make improvements.
Will****s took this concept and introduced it at Gosling. He called it the Holy Grail 11 aspects of tennis that can help deliver victory. In any situation serving, returning, rallying I wanted to know what level of competence a player needs to be at to have the best chance of winning at the level they're competing at, he says. We then trained each skill for an amount of time relative to the contribution it made to winning a match.
This equation allows Will****s and his coaches to know immediately where improvements are needed and where players are excelling. It is no real surprise to find that many of Will****s colleagues call him Moneyball, and he is a disciple of Michael Lewis book of the same name. It chronicles Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics general manager who used statistics to identify which baseball players did well at the small things, despite not necessarily having the highest home-run numbers.
Will****s was smitten by the idea that if all of the little things are done well, the big picture will take of itself, and he applied the basics to tennis.
While British tennis was obsessed with style, Will****s wanted to ensure his players excelled at the simple things, such as keeping the ball in the court.
There used to be a divide between the coaches and the numbers men in baseball, but now they all work together and have come up with a much better solution for getting the best out of their players. Were trying to apply that here, he says.
He admits, however, that it doesn't work the same for everyone. Some players dont want to go anywhere near numbers, while others are really into them. For example, when Roger Federer is playing I understand hes always tuning into his percentages and often talks about them after matches, but Rafa Nadal doesnt respond in the same way.
BUILDING THE HOUSE
With Will****s, player development is not all about what happens on the court. He believes what you do without the racket is as important as what you do with it. He uses the analogy of building a house to illustrate the three keys assets to improving a player. The foundations are the team around a player and the environment theyre in; the walls are the players mindset, their athleticism and their application of lifestyle, such as choice of nutrition and hydration; and the roof is having the right skills in the situations they encounter on the court.
Some players might have all of the game (the roof), but a poor lifestyle (the walls), so the whole thing falls down, he says. What we try to do with our players is grow the foundations, make the walls stronger and make the roof more watertight. If we can make improvements in each of those areas, together we will produce a better tennis player, one who will have the best chance of winning on and off the court, now and in the future.
- See more at: http://website.prod.lma.ostmodern.co.uk/leadership-wellbeing/feature-interviews/other-side-net-matt-will****s/#sthash.rOtvLoEC.dpuf
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Thanks for that, i think many of these concepts have been adopted by most elite tennis players and as a consequence we have this change in demographic at which players peak, tennis has been way behind the 8 ball when compared with other more professional (I mean that in reference to attitude) sports, accelerating the transition from excellence to mastery in an individual is a generic challenge across sport but the timing of that consistent at about 5 years from physical maturation.
Bill Beane was looking at acquiring value ie using statistics to identify specific competences that add it (ref thread "is elite tennis getting more boring"). Baseball is like football in the UK a cornerstone of American culture, there is equity of access, all 5 tool athletes are exposed to baseball and get the opportunity to excel, the paradox is billy himself, ie a 5 tool athlete who couldn't this lead him on a journey of self discovery and a passion for seeking innovation in achieving success when deprived of the young studs given the 2nd worst budget in baseball.
Let's face it UK tennis faces different problems, we are not badly funded in comparison to other tennis plating countries the key to improvement is equity of access.
Last year my kids primary school fielded one girls football (U11) by the skin of its teeth and the never ending enthusiasm of a teaching assistant, this week they fielded an A and a B team, two thirds of the girls in the A team were 8 or 9 and they won one lost one. This is the type of school where Andy Murray would come a distant third or fourth in any dads race. No disrespect to Andy but there are some serious wheels on the touch line!
A senior school down the road where one championship side have their academy boys enblock (state school) all the new starters got to meet a professional footballer, not a premiership star but one of the England women recently returned from the World Cup. Tennis may get a mention perhaps sometime in June.
Tbh, i'm far from convinced by what this guy said in the interview. It's a matter of whether the player fits Gosling. Clearly this system won't suit all players personalities and the type of tennis they envision for themselves. I think track cycling is a sport where you cannot be overcoached in what you are doing, whereas tennis is. The factor of individuality and personality is much stronger in tennis. And the statistics of cycling lend themsleves much more easily to meaningful measurement and analysis.
How can you say you can't be overcoached in an endurance sport like cycling or even athletics, say? If you get a poor coach, particularly at elite level, you could virtually get broken through the wrong kind of training. Any coaching system worth its salt will recognise individual attributes and take these into account.
When i say overcoached, i mean the mental side of it. Being disempowered and dictated to in regards decision making when competeing on court. Leads to uncertainty and a lack of confidence on court. I dont mean being physically ground down in back to back 12 hour training blocks. Yes, maybe a track cyclist can be told all the wrong things to do during their race but i feel the risk of it is greater in tennis because it is more mental with continual decision making and less emphasis on athletic competence. I think it is more easy and more likely to destabilise the performance of a tennis player in that area.
