Coaching on the professional tennis tour: Elite coaches’ perceptions of contextual challenges and effective coaching strategies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to explore professional tennis coaches’ perspectives of their unique coaching context, including how this context influenced their coaching practices. Five professional tennis coaches, all of whom were coaching a top 20 ranked male player at the time of the study, participated in individual semi-structured interviews. On average, the coaches in this study had more than 15 years of tour coaching experience and had collectively coached male and female players to four singles grand slam titles and one grand slam doubles title. Additionally, the coaching group had won more than 15 ATP titles with their current players. Our reflexive thematic analysis revealed several common challenges for these coaches, such as a unique power-dynamic in which their player was their employer, potentially affecting the style and content of their feedback. Managing relationships with other stakeholders, such as parents and agents, was also perceived as critical to sustaining both player development and coaches’ careers. Additionally, coaches emphasized the demanding nature of the tour on players, particularly due to the constant travel, highlighting the importance of offering social support while strategically taking time apart to maintain the coach-athlete relationship. Finally, participants noted the challenges faced by incoming coaches in navigating this unique context, pointing out that the sport’s competitive nature often makes established coaches hesitant to provide mentorship. Overall, this is one of the first studies to provide qualitative data on an elite sample of professional tennis coaches who described their perceptions of coaching in this unique environment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".