The PTM Podcast

017 - Verbal Communication

017 – Verbal Communication   Today’s Quick Tip Is:  Learn some basic verbal communication skills.   These skills will attract players as much as your teaching skills sometimes. I have witnessed it over and over with pros on my staff. There are two types of communication: non-verbal and verbal Nonverbal communication is all about gestures, facial expressions, body movement,  touch, and anything else done without actually speaking. Verbal communication includes sounds, words, tone of voice, volume, and pitch are all ways to effectively communicate verbally and will make a big difference in the lesson. In a lesson it might be:   1. Saying students names  2. Inflection 3. Talking the right amount Saying students names, especially on the first day can be the most important.  Nobody likes,  “Hey you in the red shirt”  When I was a USPTA tester, it was important to use the students name 6 times and tim, tim, tim, tim, tim, tim didn’t work. This may be tough, but come up with a good system that will help. Inflection was also on the test and this Is wheee your voice goes up and down There are lots of opportunities to work on this, so with a little practice, you should be good to go. How we speak is important, and you can even break it down to the group you are teaching. If you are teaching some 8 year olds, the adult  comments will mean absolutely nothing. You have to speak their language for sure, whatever that me be. How about when or how often to talk to your students, well this might tie in with your coaching style like we talked about in episode 014 If you are a Command Style Coach, it probably means you will be doing a lot of talking while you have the group all together and while they are hitting on court. If you are a submissive style coach, you might be a bit less talkative and let the group run the practice more on their own terms As a cooperative style coach, there might be a little of both.  More talking during the “Huddle” but then less during the hitting, except for things like “Why do you think you won/lost that point” because this lets them give the input. When I look up effective Verbal Communication Skills online These popped up and I tried to connect them to teaching. 1. Be friendly.  2. Don’t talk too much.   3. Be your authentic self.  4. Practice humility.  5. Speak with confidence.  6. Learn the art of listening.  BOTTOM LINE: Having good verbal Communication Skills is important and can make up for some of the areas you are lacking for sure. Just keep practicing in those other areas…….

032 - Oscar Wegner and His Preferred Coaching Style

Oscar’s Success As a Coach When the coach can communicate through easy words and willing to permit the student to experiment and fail, learning will create a independent and lasting result. People learn when they experiment what does and does not have the correct result. We need to get creative when working with players to get them to understand concepts. They need to practice using a self-discovery model because this is what hey will do during a match. They need to figure out how to handle adversity for themselves. Oscar used this method with Bjorn Borg and Gustavo Kuerten. To learn more about Oscar go to tennisiseasy.com Well that was an important interview with Oscar, to get his principles off the ground for his future episodes, so be on the lookout for those.  But according to Oscar:  Finding ways for your students to learn for themselves, or guided self-discovery will allow your students to learn and have a longer lasting result. I have seen it first hand. Good Luck,  Coach Mick, USPTA

031 - Dr. Mark Kovacs - Become a Specialist In an Area You Are Passionate About

In today’s episode, I had another chance to interview Dr. Mark Kovacs, one of the nations leaders in sport science. In this episode, Mark talks about the importance of trying to specialize in one of your passionate areas. 1. You want to develop a skillset in any area that may make you known in: 2. Your Local Area 3. Your District 4. Your Section 5. Or eventually even nationally Some examples may include: * The way you design drills * How you teach * Club management * High performance All payers can be trained with a HP mindset, be at different levels.   You may adjust the drills, the language…..etc You may need ore seasoning than just on-court at your club: * Online * Workshops * Volunteer at a different club If you  are not currently working where you are passionate about. Take a program that is successful and water it down to fit the level you are working with. Tennis is tennis and similar at every level.  What changes is: * Intensity  * Volume * How you provide feedback at the different levels   If you are fired up in a certain area that you are NOT involved in, became an understudy and even volunteer your time.  You will not get turned down if they see that you are passionate about it.  They will most likely profit off it anyway. Email Dr. Kovacs on his site at Kovacsinstitute.com Mark is always such a wealth of information and one thing I really admire about him is how he projects himself when he is around someone who does not have the knowledge he has. Even with me, I feel like he is truly passionate about teaching me and helping me understand things at my level.  Very easy to talk to and not intimidating at all. One suggestion: If you are just starting out, look at the ten and under players or program at your club.  This group sometimes gets overlooked and it’s crucial that you’re developing skills with these players at an early age anyway.   Bottom Line: Find an area of tennis, on or off court, that you are passionate about, come up with a plan on how you can educate yourself in that area at your club, locally, or even through online courses or workshops. Good luck and please email with any questions. Coach Mick, USPTA

030 - Sid Newcomb - USPTA National Tester - The Importance of Diagnosis

Today we welcome Sid Newcomb, USPTA National Tester to the PTM Podcast. Sid is going to discuss the importance of the diagnosis in a lesson. Diagnosis is such an important part of what we do as teaching pros. A lot of inexperienced pros tend to diagnose based on the last ball they just fed.  Way to much info instead of one thing they can work on. In a private: 1. Start by removing yourself (or don’t teach the way you necessarily play) 2. Be observant of the student 3. Ask questions These are all super important in the diagnosis. A good pro has the confidence to ask questions to find out what is going on so you can diagnose. Like a doctor when you take your sick child in and tell him that she has had a fever. He/She will ask questions in order to get to a diagnosis based on the answers you give him/her. For someone just starting out in their teaching:  Watch your student start hitting the ball to try to come up with some conclusions and ask questions in regards to what they are looking to do.  (Ex. Keeping it low) Bottom Line: Be observant, ask questions and remove yourself and how you learned from the equation. Sid made a great point about asking questions because sometimes your cure isn’t the cure they’re looking for. By asking the right question it’s going to be easier to pinpoint out what to start looking for because you know the issues that your students are having. And hopefully, most of your students will be worried about the match and not the warm-up. To learn more about Sid go to: www.Uspta.com Good Luck, Coach Mick, USPTA

029 - Motivating Your Students To Learn

Today’s Quick Tip Is:  Tell Your Students What They Are Going To Learn – Teach Them – Tell Them What They Learned And using my online marketing method, may just get those stubborn players eager to learn. A Quick story: I had a group of students recently come to the campus for a week and it was an amazing experience for me s well as for them (I hope anyway)  And by the way, if you are interested in bringing a group here, talk to me and I will set you up with an experience that you will not forget. Each day this group worked with an expert on campus: Monday: On-Court With Player Development and working with High Level Players Tuesday: TDM With Our TDM and Tournament Expert  Wednesday: On Court With our 10 and Under Expert and working with Red Ball Kids Thursday: Progression/Regression With our Director of Coaching Education Friday: Group Lesson Evaluations (Live steamed on PlaySight) with me,    Like I said, You can set this up with me anytime as well if you want to bring a group down here. Now during the group lesson with me, I made it similar to how it worked when I was a tester for the USPTA. I gave them an area to work on, gave the coaches time to come up with a plan and then they executed that plan. We did about 6 round of lessons. Overall they did a great job (and yes Nate, you did this initially, just to get that out), but after each round, my first comment was, “You did not tell them what they were going to do BEFORE you started teaching the lesson. Then it continued to happen until the very last group lesson. My point was that students do not want to go out there and not have a clue what they are going to learn or do. They have nothing to look forward to (or dread) Imagine in school walking into every class having NO CLUE what you were going to learn that day. You just sit down and the teacher says, “ the quadratic equation is used when you can’t factor out an equation easily”   The the next day, SAME CLASS the Boston Tea Party was protest by the Sons of liberty………. You would kind of like to have a heads up, right instead of being hit with some arbitrary topic. Well the same goes for a tennis lesson and I am going to show you how you might do it, based on my experience in the online marketing world. The more in advance you can let someone know what they are going to do, the more time they have to prepare, or ask a question that they want answered during their time with you. Even on court if you say something like (and this is NOT the best way) “ Welcome to class everyone. Today we are going to warm-up, work on some forehands and backhands, do some cool drills and finish with some fun points.” At least you gave me an idea what we are going to do. Now when writing out a sales page there is a formula that I am accustomed to with the acronym, P.A.S.T.O.R. This stands for: P- Identify a problem A – Amplify S – Story/Solution T – Testimony O - Offer R – Response (Decision Time) Now I now you might be saying, whatever Coach Mick, this is a tennis lesson. Well try telling my 3.5/4.0 group that they are going to work on something NEW (Without telling them why) and they will probably fail initially most of the time. Trust me, it takes a very experienced SALES PERSON to get them to make any major change, ha! So here is how I would approach it. P- The Problem A – Agitate the problem S – The Solution Let’s define the problem as ……. The Lobber Now let’s get to the lesson: Problem – Pain: You might start off by saying – “ Good Morning Ladies, today we are going to work on how to handle the dreaded lobber” Agitate The Problem – The person who drives us crazy. You think you hit the most amazing serve or approach shot, follow-it in to the net, only to get lobbed and then you and your partner are sitting there starring at each other, not knowing who should have taken it and to finish it off you see the other team high-fiving like they did something spectacular when you know that they can’t it a decent pass to save their lives…… And of course it is YOUR fault, even though your partner gave then the dream ball to lob in the first place. (oh yeah……Phyllis does that to me every time………..) Solution – So today, we are going get them where they can’t lob you from, the net. This is VERY effective.  But it can be tricky, because the ball we get them up there with needs to be short and kept fairly low, but if you can execute this, even with some success, you will have the upper hand. We will start with working on the shot to bring them up, put it into some controlled points and then let you go for it on your own. Done. Now this is one of many ways to counter a lobber, but now you have their attention because you told them what they are going to learn AND you hopefully inspired them to want to learn it by AGITATING the problem. It is like when you are online reading some sales page, or watching an infomercial and in your head you are saying, yeah…….that’s me! You got them to relate, then you got them to feel those stressful feelings  again, in this case, on the court with the lobber and now you will most likely have their attention.  Step 2 is to teach them how to execute the shot, in this scenario, the short low ball. You will have to progress through it by most likely working on under-spin and working on ways to adjust if it is not staying low or short enough. Then you will put them in a situation to where they start each point by executing the shot. So, what I would do here is to do it champs and challenger style, and let me stop here and give you a tip, because I have seen this many times, even in a testing situation. DO NOT have the champs hitting the shot that you have just worked on.  If they stay champs for a while the other 4 players (or 2 teams) on your court will never get a chance to work on it. I like to almost always have the challengers hit the shot that we just worked on so EVERYONE gets many opportunities Here is an example: 1 champ/4 challengers and you have just worked on app. Shots all day, and you are feeding the champ the approach shot (the other 4 are NOT working on it, so get at least the 80% hitting the shot you just worked on all day (If he/she stays champ the WHOLE TIME) OK, so now that the champs know that the challengers will be hitting a short ball to them (not fair), move them back to a cone, or the back curtain or whatever, but don’t let them move forward until contact is made by the other team. (or they lose the point ) This will probably be pretty close to the proper timing when the opposing team is NOT expecting it, plus it gives the players a bit more success and will be more willing to keep trying, once they see the benefits. Then finish with some regular points and have each team try to throw that shot in at least once a game or something to that effect. And Finally bring them in and TELL THEM what they just learned and why they want to continue to work on it. What I would do is keep track and especially if it worked in my favor would say, after the points. Every time you brought the team up to the net, you won the point XX% of the time, and you are just starting out. You might even explain ow this shot is good for other situations, like giving your opponent’s overheads (usually weaker than you think(, to keep them fired up to learn the shot. Give them some incentive, or homework, to try it out away from the class and don’t just drop it. Continue to ask how it is going, during the week and during class. Bottom Line: Let your students know what to expect BEFORE the lesson starts.  It may be something simple or you may have to go the sales page route with those stubborn players. Good Luck,  Coach Mick, USPTA