Before I say anything about this topic, I want to get a shout out to the good tennis coaches that are out there, working hard day and night to help their pupils out. Having said that, I now have come to believe that most coaches are overrated and their benefits are temporary at best.
We all heard yesterday about Federer being vulnerable against Hewitt due to the fact that Lleyton was being coached by Tony Roche (who is an excellent coach and former coach of Federer). But at the end of the day, Lleyton didn’t have the game to implement the right strategy against Federer. So here are a few reason why coaches are mostly overrated:
- A coach can give you a different perspective, but a lot of top players (e.g. Federer) know deep down what tactics they need to use to beat their opponents. Sometimes knowing the right tactics is not enough. Sure. Everybody knows that Federer’s backhand can be a liability but only Nadal and Djokovic have taken advantage of it whereas against someone like Blake, it becomes a weapon.
- Real life problems are usually different when you face them head on. You can put down X’s and O’s before a match, but if you are a bad problem solver, you’ll be in trouble once your opponent tries something drastically different that you had planned for.
- Coaches can’t fix things that are not fixable. In essence, you can’t teach a camel how to swim. Really. If you do things out of habit, then it would be extremely difficult to get that out of your head. Roddick has worked on his backhand and positioning for a while now. But you can still see that most of the time he has no idea why he is going forward or where he needs to stand to cover the lines.
Coaches can be good motivators and sometimes having that other voice is helpful to get a new perspective. But as we have seen with the mighty Fed time and time again, if he is not willing to or not capable of implementing the right strategy against a Nadal on Clay, there is little a Tony or Jose can do for him to get over the hump.