ParentingAces - The Junior Tennis and College Tennis Podcast

Carlos Goffi has a very impressive coaching resume, listing John McEnroe and Mary Carillo among his successful charges. In this week's throw-back episode from 2013, Coach Goffi shares how he learned to coach, why he feels young athletes should play a variety of sports, and why it is so important for us as parents to learn how to control our emotions and body language as we watch our young players compete in the classroom, on the field, or on the court.

This episode was recorded several years ago as I was driving with my son back from Mobile, Alabama, where we had spent the long weekend at a junior tournament. Listening to it today brings back so many memories and emotions of my years traveling with my son! Having just returned home from spending a long weekend with him and my daughters in Los Angeles, I am reminded of how tennis helped cement a bond between us that I hope will last forever. Tennis is truly the gift that keeps on giving!

You can find Carlos Goffi's book, TOURNAMENT TOUGH, here. 

Thank you for listening and sharing our podcast with your tennis community! Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Google Play or wherever you like to grab your podcasts!

If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of the ParentingAces Podcast, click here for more information.

Please check us out at www.parentingaces.com. Email us at [email protected]. 

 

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In this second in a series of episodes devoted to the business side of tennis, Coach Todd Widom discusses how to determine what coaches and academies have really accomplished with their players. Whether it's rankings or college placements and scholarships, sometimes you have to dig deeper to truly understand what an academy's claims truly mean. Todd offers up specific questions to ask and helps parents cut through the marketing hype as they search for the right training environment for their junior players.

To listen to Part 1 of this series, go to http://traffic.libsyn.com/parentingaces/Todd_Widom_podcast.output_1.mp3

You can find Todd online at www.twtennis.com or via email at [email protected]. His phone number is 954-296-5610.

Thank you for listening and sharing our podcast with your tennis community! Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Google Play or wherever you like to grab your podcasts!

If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of the ParentingAces Podcast, click here for more information.

Please check us out at www.parentingaces.com. Email us at [email protected]. 

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Y'all know how much I love to hear about tennis players giving back to their communities. And, when the various organizations within our sport take the initiative to sponsor community service opportunities . . . well, that is The Best!

In this week's podcast, I chat with Mary Edman, Director of Community Programs for the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) and Rhiannon Potkey of TennisRecruiting.net about their respective community service programs.

The ITA is sponsoring an actual Community Service Month throughout October wherein college teams come up with community service activities, log their service hours with the ITA (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeA6-g6MN1NvgXp0AFOeXRtQehb4-ZNZuDJtD88-TY2tL8MqQ/viewform?usp=send_form), post photos and videos to earn points (http://indi.com/itachallenges/communitaservice), and have an opportunity to win grants for their college teams.

TRN is sponsoring its own Community Service Initiative called First Serve for Community to encourage junior players to give back. This is an ongoing initiative wherein TRN will feature the good works of its players through articles on its website, social media, etc.

I am so happy to have an opportunity to share these great initiatives with all of you and hope that you will encourage your junior and college players to get involved. I will be sharing both the ITA's and TRN's stories on the ParentingAces Facebook page and Twitter feed.

To reach Mary Edman at the ITA, email her at [email protected]. To reach Rhiannon Potkey at TRN, email her at [email protected]. 

If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the ParentingAces podcast, please go to http://parentingaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SponsorshipPackages-Aug-2017.pdf for more information.

We hope you'll visit us online at http://parentingaces.com. Email us at [email protected].

 

 

 

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In the last year, we saw something pretty remarkable in terms of Roger Federer's career. He took extensive time away from the game then came back to win 5 titles including 2 Majors and 2 Masters 1000s. Federer's time away had to do with his age (he's now 36!) and some recurring injuries that were impacting his ability to perform at his best. And his decision to decrease his playing schedule is starting to trickle down to others on the tour, including Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic, as well as players at the entry level of the professional game. 

If things continue as they have in the past, we will likely start to see these types of extended breaks from training and competing trickle down to college and maybe even junior tennis. And, according to this week's guest, that is a very good thing.

Your kid can't play if he/she is injured. So, what can we parents and coaches do to help prevent the most common injuries in our young players? 

Dr. Neeru Jayanthi of the Emory Tennis Medicine Center offers some valuable insights into how we can use early screenings and other methods to reduce or even prevent injury from over-use and over-training.

Dr. J shares information on his STAY (Specialized Training Assessments in Young Tennis Players) screenings and how he's using the data he's collecting to help coaches at all levels better train their young athletes. He also discusses his opinions on how our current ranking structure feeds the need to over-train and over-play, leading to a high attrition rate in our sport as young as age 13.

The goal, according to Dr. J, is to keep our kids playing tennis beyond their junior or college years so that it truly is a sport for their lifetime. Through early assessment and smart scheduling we can help them prevent the injuries and burnout that may take them out of the game prematurely.

To schedule a free assessment with Dr. J and his team, go to https://calendly.com/neerujayanthi/tennis-medicine.

To contact Dr. J directly, email him at [email protected] or [email protected]. 

To read Ben Rothenberg's New York Times article addressing the WTA's age eligibility rule referred to in the podcast, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/sports/tennis/us-open-girls-final-anisimova-gauff.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share 

If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the ParentingAces podcast, please go to http://parentingaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SponsorshipPackages-Aug-2017.pdf for more information.

We hope you'll visit us online at http://parentingaces.com. Email us at [email protected].

 

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With the growth of the internet and the proliferation of online tennis sites, it's tough to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff. Coach Todd Widom comes to the rescue!

In this first in a series of episodes devoted to the business side of tennis, Todd discusses the best way for parents to see past the bells and whistles to determine whether or not a potential coach or academy is right for their family. 

Thank you for listening and sharing our podcast with your tennis community! Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Google Play or wherever you like to grab your podcasts!

If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of the ParentingAces Podcast, click here for more information.

Please visit us online at www.parentingaces.com. Email me at [email protected]. 

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The topic of cheating in junior tennis seems to come up ad nauseum both on this podcast as well as on the ParentingAces social media outlets. I'm not sure if that means the issue is getting worse or if we're just talking about it more, but, either way, it is something we as a Tennis Community need to act on to ensure the growth of our sport. 

In this week's ParentingAces podcast, Bill Patton and I revisit past conversations we've had around cheating and what to do about it. Bill lays out some specific action items in his e-book, How To End Cheating in Junior Tennis (visit https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00Y00NKNK/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00Y00NKNK&linkCode=as2&tag=pareaces-20&linkId=2b3a09843f63af59fba90d21bf36832d to view and order the book). He also leaves the ParentingAces community with a challenge to take specific steps ourselves to stop this negative aspect of our sport.

We also discuss Bill's upcoming USATennisCoach Deep Coaching Workshop. You can get more information on the USATennis Coach Facebook page here.

To watch Bill's live YouTube broadcast of the first part of our podcast, click here.

Thank you for listening and sharing our podcast with your tennis community! Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Google Play or wherever you like to grab your podcasts!   If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of the ParentingAces Podcast, click here for more information.   Find us online at www.parentingaces.com. Email me at [email protected]. 

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Seventeen year old Trey Hilderbrand and his father, Mark, joined me in the interview room at the US Open to discuss his incredible run at this year's US Open Juniors event. They share details about Trey's tennis development and his plans for the future.

We appreciate the support for our podcast. If you are interested in sponsoring one or more episodes, please go to http://parentingaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SponsorshipPackages-Aug-2017.pdf

Visit us online at www.parentingaces.com. Email me at [email protected]. 

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Since I'm not yet at the 2017 US Open, I thought I would throw things back to my last trip to our Home Slam and my conversation with Tennis Parents Extraordinaire: Wayne Bryan (father of Bob & Mike, the Bryan Brothers), Steve Johnson (father of Stevie who passed away earlier this year), and Melanie Rubin (mom of Noah). These three have so much knowledge and great advice to share to those of us coming up behind them. I hope you enjoy hearing from them.

I plan on releasing another podcast episode later this week from the 2017 US Open, so please keep an eye out for it. The US Open Juniors tournament is now underway, and the Collegiate Invitational starts Thursday, both of which will provide lots of great content for another podcast!

And, for those interested, we are now accepting sponsors for the ParentingAces Podcast. If you'd like to learn more, please visit parentingaces.com/sponsorshippackages-aug-2017/

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Coach Craig O'Shannessy knew there had to be more to developing players and analyzing matches than simply relying on the opinion of others. He looked to other sports like baseball, basketball, and soccer and found that those sports relied on a unified method of collecting data, analyzing it, then using it to improve performance. The eyes, afterall, don't always tell the whole story!

In early 2010, Craig started Brain Game Tennis (click http://www.braingametennis.com to go to his website) so he could share his data with others in the tennis world. As Craig writes on his site, "Tennis looks like a game of pinball, with the ball careening here, there, and everywhere. But it's not. It's actually the exact opposite. Tennis is a game of repeatable patterns in four specific areas - serving, returning, rallying and approaching. Study the patterns, learn the winning percentages, and make the game simple. That's what Brain Game Tennis stands for. No more guessing. No more opinions. Just the facts please..."

And now Craig has introduced Gameplan, his newest product for use in junior development, college tennis, and beyond. Listen to this week's podcast for more information on Gameplan and how you can purchase it. Then go to this link (https://www.braingametennis.com/stop-guessing-start-knowing/) to read more.

NOTE: If you purchase Gameplan - or any of Craig's other Brain Game Tennis products - during the two weeks of the 2017 US Open, you will receive a 20% discount.

To contact Craig directly, go to his homepage here (http://www.braingametennis.com) then scroll to the bottom for the Contact Craig O'Shannessy link.

If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of the ParentingAces Podcast, please contact us. You can reach us at www.parentingaces.com. You can email me at [email protected].

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High-performance coach Jim Harp has been around a few years, more than 30 to be exact, and he knows his stuff! He makes it his mission to learn something new every day so he can better coach the junior players under his care. He works with all levels of juniors - from the very beginners to the D-1 college bound and everything in between.

In this week's podcast, Jim and I discuss his coaching philosophy as well as his new role as an advisor to TennisMentors.net. He has a lot of wisdom to impart to Tennis Parents and is more than happy to answer your questions if you'd like to reach out to him. You can find him online at HarpTennis.com or via email at [email protected]  

 

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