Professional Tennis on the ATP Tour: A Case Study of Mental Skills Support

Abstract

Success on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) World Tour requires a specific blend of perceptuomotor abilities, technical proficiency, tactical awareness and mental skills. This case study describes the competitive structure of professional tennis and outlines the program of mental skills delivered to a professional tennis player over a 3-year period. The program embraced five stages: (1) education; (2) assessment/profiling; (3) mental skill learning; (4) application of mental skills in context and (5) evaluation, and was associated with some positive outcomes. This case study provides some possible guidelines for sport psychologists who may wish to provide consultancy services within professional tennis.

Mental imagery and tennis: a review, applied recommendations and new research directions

“…The current review revealed that MI is effective in tennis by improving learning and performance in different tennis tasks, regardless of participant type, as well as positive influence on motivational and affective factors. However, it is important to specify that the current review revealed that MI is generally combined with other techniques such as: Goal setting (e.g., Mamassis & Doganis, 2014), arousal regulation (e.g., Daw & Burton, 1994), positive statement (e.g., Mathers, 2017), self-talk (e.g., Dohm et al, 2019), relaxation (e.g., Koehn et al, 2013), breathing (e.g., Dominique et al, 2021;Mamassis, 2005), or video (e.g., Atienza et al, 1998;de Sousa Fortes et al, 2019). The latter combination can be used whatever the age or level of the participants (Di Corrado et al, 2020).…”

“…Authors found that awareness and flow was related to tennis performance and that a MI intervention increased flow state and performance in tennis competition (Koehn et al, 2013), and that the use of this mental technique was particularly useful in tennis (Cece et al, 2020). For example, during a match, tennis players perform an intermittent activity, consisting of playing time interspersed with frequent rest times between points and games during which they can use MI to notably improve their accuracy, strategy, concentration or emotional control (Dohme et al, 2019;Mathers, 2017). That's why we reviewed the use and the potential beneficial effect of MI to improve learning, performance and motivational or affective outcomes, and to give practical suggestions, to tennis players and coaches, in order to incorporate this mental technique in training programs as suggested by Di Corrado et al (2020).…”

“…Although participants reported using MI for all five functions: cognitive specific, cognitive general, motivational general-arousal, motivational general-mastery, motivational specific imageries (Cumming & Hall, 2002), motivational general-mastery and cognitive specific imageries were the most frequently used by the tennis players as generally observed in the literature (Slimani et al, 2016). Indeed, studies revealed that MI facilitated the learning and increased performance in service (e.g., Blankert & Hamstra, 2017;Cherappurath et al, 2020;Dominique et al, 2021;Fekih et al, 2020b;Noel, 1980), service return (Coelho et al, 2007;Robin et al, 2007), volley (Cherappurath et al, 2017;Türk et al 2019), forehand and backhand stroke (Dana & Gozalzadeh, 2017;Hegazy et al, 2015;Koehn et al, 2014), or general (Mathers, 2017;Morais et al, 2019) performances. One applied implication is the importance of educating tennis players, especially beginners and non-experts, on the value of using different function of MI (Cumming & Hall, 2002), including the motivational specific function which can influence intrinsic motivation and the motivational general-arousal function which is associated with stress, anxiety and arousal regulation which will find its use especially during competitions.…”

Beneficial Effects of Motor Imagery and Self-Talk on Service Performance in Skilled Tennis Players

“…These results confirm those of previous researchers that have shown beneficial effects of using MI interventions whatever the level of expertise of the practitioners (Toth et al, 2020). Indeed, while beneficial effects have been observed in children (e.g., Atienza et al, 1998), teens (e.g., Dana and Gozalzadeh, 2017) or adults (Cherappurath and Elayaraja, 2017) playing at a recreational level, others studies showed a positive effect of MI in teen with a regional level (Guillot et al, 2012), in young adults at collegiate level (Daw and Burton, 1994), in youth (Dohme et al, 2020) or young adult (Robin et al, 2007) elite players and even at a professional level (Mathers, 2017). More specifically, our results confirm the beneficial effect of MI on service performance in teen (Guillot et al, 2013;Türk et al, 2019) and young adults (e.g., Fekih et al, 2020;Dominique et al, 2021) skilled (i.e., national and elite) and international (e.g., Mathers, 2017) tennis players.…”

Influencia de las habilidades psicológicas sobre los niveles de ansiedad y estrés en el deporte

“…Número 9 • Año 2019, 120-129 Guillermo Barahona-Fuentes & Álvaro Huerta Ojeda Influencia de las habilidades psicológicas sobre los… / Nota P á g i n a 127 El objetivo principal de esta revisión fue analizar las habilidades psicológicas más utilizadas por los deportistas, en específico del tenis, para reducir el estrés y la ansiedad durante entrenamientos y competición. En relación a este objetivo, se pudo observar que la gran mayoría de artículos encontrados ocuparon las estrategias visuales como habilidades psicológicas con cuatro estudios (del Campo et al, 2015;Defrancesco et al, 1997;Goulet et al, 1989;Reina et al,2004), en segundo lugar, se encontraron las estrategias de auto-diálogo con cuatro estudios (Defrancesco et al, 1997;Mathers, 2017;Palazzolo et al, 2013;Van Raalte et al, 2000), y en tercer lugar las estrategias de relajación con dos estudios (Defrancesco et al, 1997;Palazzolo et al, 2013). Hasta donde se ha podido investigar, existe poca evidencia de protocolos de entrenamientos que utilicen las habilidades psicológicas para la reducción de factores que desencadenan índices altos de estrés y ansiedad.…”