From ‘gentleman’ to battle-hardened warriors’
The 2015 Colombo-Futures assembled very good players from nearly 20 countries worldwide. This provided a rare treat of good Tennis right from the first round itself. It really has been a long time since Colombo spectators saw the world’s men’s top 500 players live in action. The ‘Colombo-ITF Futures’ was a refreshing reminder as to what the Tennis standard outside our shores is. What we saw was the standard of the game in the lower half of the world’s top 500. For the participants it was no family picnic but a serious pursuit in their annual Tennis calendar. Surviving in this class of Tennis is the first step in being a successful professional tennis player.
Talking to a cross section of players who came for the qualifying and the main draws in Colombo, some hard facts came to light. Some regions of the world have developed more by providing the base for players to achieve this standard. Indulging into Professional Tennis, players enter and face the challenges of the final frontier of modern sports. It is a ruthless battle ground where no tears are shed for losers and the winner takes it all.
Competition culture
To reach the top 100 of the world successfully, players will have to go through a few distinct phases and clear the hurdles at every stage. The first stage of development is the ‘skill’ challenge. This deals with ‘self’ and not from any external challenges. During this phase, time spent on the Tennis court will be with coaches and others together and not in competition. Those who come through this phase will then enter the performance-phase where the challenge changes to game-making skills against players at club and junior level. This transition has become very difficult in recent times in many countries, including ours. It is not a good area to identify ‘talent’. It is suicidal doing Talent-ID in this phase of development. Here a player is only beginning to develop the sporting life style and come to know aspects of ‘Performance-Culture’. It is not the eliminating stage but the indulging stage.
The few who survive the two above over a period of time are the hardened players with Competition-Culture. They are the ‘talent’. They will have the skills, game making ability, competition life style and the personality to compete. They will look like the men whom we saw in the main draw of the ITF- Futures in Colombo.
About fifteen million take to Tennis every year and only about 15 reach the top 100 of the world from each batch! Welcome to Tennis! This should give an idea of what it takes to be a world beater.
Good player profile
Ever since WTA and ATP took over the reins of elite Tennis the profile of a good player has changed from a gentleman to that of a battle hardened warrior. Most of the players in the entry level of the professional circuit, like the one we had are between 15 and 18. This means they are cutting short their junior tournament phase by up to three years. The Tennis they have to accommodate to go up the men’s ranking is different from that of Junior Tennis. This is the reason for this move. High world junior ranking is no proof of a player going to be good as a professional player. The player who won all three events in Colombo last week, Portugal’s Rui Machado was only 320 in the world junior ranking. He must have left the junior circuit well before 18 years of age. Serena Williams and Steffi Graff almost never played junior events. Professional Tennis accommodates late bloomers equally well as the early super talents.
The players in the Colombo-Futures had a men’s ranking of between 270 and 1500 in the world. Without exception all of them had a telling advantage with their first serve and service returns. From then on they were able to ‘engage’ the opponent effectively with very quick reaction, commanding ground strokes, amazing balance and noticeably fluid movements to cover court. Most of the time, it is this phase of the game that punished the players most. It is in this super speed scramble the good players were able to calculate the ‘free zones’ to attack. Good players have highly developed sense of court geometry. Using this, they figured out the loop holes in opponent’s defense.
Unusually high standard
Attacking strokes need a different set of skills. In the absence of such strokes players can only prolong the rally but cannot finish. Even on our clay courts, the game speed in the Colombo Futures was tremendous. One will have to wonder what it would be to stand against any top 100 players. February being the peak winter period in the northern hemisphere, the cold drove many good players to the warm Tropics. This took the Colombo ITF-Futures standard of Tennis up.
Our dilemma
If our schools had only the primary section, will we have graduates? Answer to this will reveal our problem very clearly in Tennis. In Sri Lanka, the ‘over size’ junior development programme is using up all our resources leaving nothing for men’s Tennis development. We only have a schools Tennis programme and not a national Tennis programme. In fact our junior school Tennis is duplicated by the Association as age group Tennis. This makes our national system a mere ‘kinder-garden’ of Tennis. This is why all the Sri Lankan players who entered the Colombo ITF-Futures did so only with complimentary ‘Wild-Card’ entry system and not on merit.
2015 is our Tennis Associations 100th year of ITF affiliation. Our Tennis should exhibit the corresponding maturity, but sadly it does not. Our men do not have the professional profile of the good players who came for the ‘Futures’. I do feel disappointed but hope it will change in this centennial year, where Sri Lanka’s men’s Tennis will reach a higher standard to compete with professional players of other nations.
Next weekend is Davis-Cup weekend worldwide. While our players go to the Philippines to play them on their home grounds, Kuwait and Pakistan have decided to play their tie on neutral grounds in Colombo. The Philippines have a strong team this year.
-George Paldano, former international player; Accredited Coach of Germany, ITF and USPTR; National, Davis Cup and Federation Cup Coach–gptennis.ceylon@gmail.com-