Professional Tennis Players and Their Coaches

The relationship between a professional tennis player and his or her coach is definitely a unique one. While in team sports like football, basketball or baseball the coach is employed by an organization that functions pretty much like a company, tennis coaches are hired directly by the players. This creates a sort of ironic situation, in which the coach, who supposedly is the boss and should have a commanding position, is in fact the employee on the relationship. At the end of the month, he or she picks up the pay check from the player, and not from the Human Resources department or from a payroll company. 

A team sports coach can get away with not being liked by every player in the roster. Team sports players have to follow coaches’ command so far as they are employed by their organizations. Tennis players, on the other hand, can fire their coaches at any time, if something is not going according to the their own expectations. And if this was not tough enough on the coaches, tennis is the only sport in which the coach is not allowed to work during a match, as instructions are not permitted, making life not easy at courtside.

This unique type of athlete and coach relationship requires, therefore, a lot of work from both parties. It works sort of like a marriage, since they spend a lot of time on the courts together, travel together all the time, and in most cases share the same hotel room all year round. The wear is inevitable unless player and coach are aware of that and are willing to make an effort towards preserving the relationship in good terms.

Many different situations have been observed on the tour regarding tennis players their coaches. There are players who hire coaches for a specific season only, like Roger Federer did with Jose Higueras for the 2008’s clay court season. There has been love and hate relationships like the one in which Tommy Hass fired and hired back David “Red” Aim so many times (they are currently not together, by the way). There are relationships that don’t last too long and there are relationships that are career long, like James Blake with Brian Barker, Gustavo Kuerten with Larri Passos, and Justine Henin with Carlos Rodriguez. There have been extreme cases of coaches getting fired on the court by the player, during a match!

Andre Agassi made a very interesting point in his foreword for Brad Gilbert’s book “Winning Ugly”, where he said that a good coach is the one who is able to take his player all the way to the level in which he is not needed any more. This is absolutely true!

Although being kind of underrated, the coach’s role on a tennis player’s development is of tremendous importance. A classic and recent example of that is Andy Roddick’s improvement under the guidance of Larry Stekanfi. The American coach made his player drop weight, for starters, and then turned Roddick into a better player by making him work out the points with more patience and strategy, leaving pure power behind. The results were a semi final appearance at the Australian Open, Roddick’s best result on the clay of Roland Garros (round of 16^th), and the longest Wimbledon final in history, where he fell to Roger Federer 16-14 in the fifth set. All of this created a great expectation about Andy’s performance at home, in the US Open.

Usually it is hard for people who are not really into tennis to notice the coach’s finger on a player’s game, and only specialized media approach this issue, but its existence is a true fact and can’t be denied. Tennis is an individual sport, and the uniqueness of coaching is only one more ingredient that makes it such a great sport.