Tennis coaching the start
I hope you are all keeping well in these strange times. Our thoughts are of course still with everybody who continues to be affected by Coronavirus.
This week I thought I’d follow on from my last blog where I was questioning if the community in North Wales Tennis would remember me and my previous work in the area by jogging everyone’s memory with a bit of my coaching background. I always find it interesting to see where people have come from and how they got to where they are, so I hope you’ll find this informative.
For as long as I can remember I’ve played Tennis and I think I was pretty good (you’d have to ask my coach!). I know I’ve always loved it and it was something I devoted a lot of time to through Primary and High School attending coaching sessions, events and competitions around the country.
When I got to the end of High School, I was lucky enough to be quite clear about what I wanted to do for a living, it was a no-brainer for me – I was going to be a Tennis Coach! I made the choice then that I was going to have to put all my time and effort in to making it happen as I knew how competitive the Coaching job market was, especially in a smaller area with other high level Tennis players also deciding to become coaches. That, along with only a limited amount of facilities in North Wales meant I was going to have to be focused to be successful.
With that in mind, the usual manic social life of an 18-year-old went out the window and was replaced with my first experience of coaching. I was asked to accompany the County Cup Captain for North Wales to the 14&u County Cup event as a kind of assistant. I was known to the Captain and the governing body through the tennis community in North Wales and they were aware that I had decided to make Tennis Coaching my career, so it was perfect timing. Long story short, the captain-although being fairly experienced in years-was very out of his depth with regards to the process and skills needed for County Cup so I had to take over the organisation of the team etc. Luckily it came very easily to me! Sometimes being thrown in at the deep end is a pretty good way of seeing if a path is right for you – I found out I was definitely on the right path by trying to control the likes of Eifion Jones, Ian Noonan, Matthew James and Chris Hales when they were 14!
I believe I have always naturally had the abilities and skills that you need to teach and obviously had the specific Tennis knowledge from being a player for many years. I have also always had a pretty strong entrepreneurial streak and love to be in control of my own destiny so the natural progression for me was to start my own Tennis Coaching business. Coaching qualifications were gained, and First Advantage Tennis was born with the aim of producing the best Tennis Players in the area. Here was my introduction to running my own business as a self-employed person – IT WAS HARD WORK! Building something from scratch means working all hours of the day, not knowing what your income may be month to month (if you even have any income!) and as the aim was to work with the best players you can also add the stress of having to deal with (how to put it nicely…?) ‘demanding’ parents and children. However, I persevered with school visits and events to build up and promote the programme and after about 12 months I had a pretty high standard of players attending the sessions across a few local venues such as Danny Hawker, Steve Billington, Kirsty Jones-Williams, Elin Anderson and Rhydian Morgan (all of whom are now in their early 20’s which makes me feel very old!)
So far so good – lots of hard work, some challenges to overcome but all in all a pretty successful start to my Coaching career which I continued to build on for the next few years. And then I got the opportunity to have an employed position. As I said earlier, one of the few negative things about being self-employed is the varying level of income you can have and having got married and started a family the idea of a steady income to supplement my own business was appealing.
And that’s where it all got…. messy. But that’s a story for next time