Before I Ever Had an Opponent, I Was Competing Against Myself

In high school I tried out for the tennis team. Mind you, I’d never played tournaments or taken formal lessons. The summer before, I watched a few Serena Williams matches on television and then went out and bought myself a Venus & Serena Titanium Series Wilson racket, the one with the pink cover. It's probably considered vintage now, but at the time I was convinced I could do amazing things with it.

When tryouts started, I walked onto the court with confidence. But as the days went on, that confidence slowly disappeared. The same mind that gave me the courage to show up started working against me. “Who was I kidding?” “I didn't belong there.” “I wasn't good enough.” In the end, I didn't make the team. Looking back, I don't think it was my lack of technical skill that made the decision for me. I think my mental space did. Before I ever stepped onto the court to compete against anyone else, I was already competing against myself.

Years later, I find myself back in the world of tennis, but from a very different perspective. As a sport psychologist, I support athletes at every stage of their journey, from developing players to professionals. What I've learned is that while the details may change, the struggle often looks remarkably similar. The real opponent is rarely the player standing across the net.

The Athlete Who Looked Fine on Paper but Felt Exhausted Inside

Did you know that elite tennis players typically win only a little more than half of the points they play across a season? The exact percentage varies depending on the player and surface, but the lesson remains the same: success in tennis isn't built on avoiding mistakes. It's built on how quickly you recover from them.¹ If you spend enough time around tennis players, or sit in enough athlete support sessions the way I have, you start to notice a pattern. Matches are rarely unraveled by a single mistake. More often, they're unraveled by what happens mentally after the mistake. A few years ago, I worked with a player who had just finished what most people would consider a successful season. Her ranking had improved. She had collected wins that few people expected her to earn. From the outside, everything looked like it was moving in the right direction. One of the first things she said during a debrief with me was, “I'm exhausted.” She wasn't talking about physical fatigue. She was talking about the mental toll of competing. She described spending entire matches telling herself not to mess up, not to disappoint people, not to lose ranking points, and not to prove her doubters right. Every point felt heavier than it needed to be. Every mistake seemed to carry meaning far beyond the score. Every match felt like a judgment of who she was. What she described wasn't unique. In fact, I've heard versions of that same story from tennis players at almost every level.

Tennis Is More Than Physical

When people talk about tennis performance, the focus is usually on what they can see or measure quantitatively, like footwork, serve speed, endurance, shot selection, and technical execution. All of those things matter, but what often gets overlooked is how much of tennis is played inside the mind, especially when things stop going according to plan.

Over the past decade working with athletes, including tennis players across developmental, collegiate, and professional levels, I've seen a common trend. Athletes invest countless hours developing their physical and technical skills, but far less time intentionally developing the mental skills required to manage pressure, maintain focus, and regulate emotions during competition. Encouragingly, I have seen more athletes and coaches prioritize mental skills training in recent years, and I hope that trend continues. Tennis, as a whole, asks athletes to make decisions, regulate emotions, recover from setbacks, and maintain concentration in real time, often without anyone beside them to help. That mental load is significant, yet it is often treated as an afterthought until something goes wrong.²

The Loneliness Players Don't Always Talk About

One of the most consistent themes I see in tennis is how isolating the sport can feel. Even when athletes have supportive coaches, parents, teammates, and friends around them, the competitive experience itself remains deeply individual. You step onto the court alone. The result sits next to your name. The responsibility feels personal. When things go well, athletes often embrace that ownership. When things don't, that same ownership can become incredibly intense and unhelpful. I recently worked with an athlete who was going through a difficult stretch of tournaments. They felt like they were letting everyone down, despite the fact that nobody around them was actually saying that. The pressure wasn't coming from outside expectations. It was coming from the expectations they had placed on themselves. That is something I see a lot of in tennis. Athletes can carry expectations that no one else has placed on them, and over time those expectations become exhausting.⁴

What Tennis Players Tell Me Most Often

Across conversations, sessions, and post-match reflections, the same themes tend to emerge. Athletes may say to themselves, “I keep thinking about my ranking,” “I get tight in big moments,” “I can't stop replaying mistakes,” or “I know what to do, but I can't seem to do it in matches.” These themes usually aren't technical problems; they are attention and emotional regulation challenges that increase when the athlete is under pressure. I've worked with athletes who train exceptionally well. Their coaches are confident in their development, and everything looks great in practice. Then competition arrives. One mistake leads to frustration. Frustration turns into self-criticism. Self-criticism narrows attention. Then, before they can even realize it, the athlete is no longer focused on solving the challenges in front of them. They are focused on battling their own thoughts, and when that happens, performance takes a downward turn.

It Usually Isn't the Missed Volley

One scenario I see frequently with tennis players starts with something simple, like a missed routine volley. When this happens, the athlete gets frustrated, which is normal. Then the internal dialogue begins, and the athlete starts to say to themself, “I can't believe I missed that,” “I always do this,” or “My coach is going to be upset.” Attention leaves the present moment and becomes stuck in the previous point. A few games later, body language changes, decision-making becomes less clear, and their shot selection becomes more reactive than intentional. After the match, many athletes point to that missed volley as the reason they lost, but the volley wasn't really the turning point. The turning point was everything that happened afterward. The game of tennis moves quickly, and athletes don't have the luxury of staying attached to the last point. The ability to reset and return attention to what is happening right now is one of the most valuable skills a player can develop.¹

Pressure Starts Before the First Serve

Many people assume pressure begins when players step onto the court, but that isn’t the case. Pressure begins to increase days earlier. Athletes may replay previous losses, think about their rankings, imagine worst-case scenarios, and basically mentally compete before the competition even begins. By match day, some athletes are already mentally exhausted before the first serve. I've worked with athletes who spend so much time worrying about future outcomes that they arrive at competition already mentally depleted. Pressure itself isn't the problem. The challenge is how athletes interpret the pressure. Some athletes experience pressure as evidence that something important is happening, while others experience it as a threat. That difference can completely change how an athlete responds when adversity shows up.³

The Truth About Confidence

One of the biggest myths in sport is that confident athletes don't experience doubt. They absolutely do! Some of the highest performing athletes I've worked with have gone through significant periods of uncertainty. The difference is not whether doubt appears; the difference is what athletes do when it does. Many athletes believe confidence must come first. They might say something like, “Once I feel confident again, I'll trust my game.” Confidence is often built by continuing to act, compete, and trust skills even when certainty isn't fully there. Athletes who wait for confidence often stay stuck. Athletes who learn to perform while confidence fluctuates tend to move forward.² Confidence is rarely a prerequisite for action; it is the result of it.

The Mental Load of Constant Visibility

Today's athletes are navigating something previous generations never experienced to the same extent: constant visibility. The match doesn't end when the final point is played. The match can feel like it remains on repeat as rankings update, highlights circulate on social media, and opinions about performance continue to appear online. Research suggests that the constant accessibility of social media can extend competitive stress well beyond the match itself. Athletes frequently report feeling pressure to monitor rankings, public commentary, and online comparisons, reducing opportunities for psychological recovery between competitions and increasing emotional fatigue.⁷ Comparisons may run rampant for an athlete, with seemingly nowhere to hide. Social media often creates the illusion that everyone else is succeeding effortlessly while ignoring the setbacks, struggles, and difficult days that exist behind every athlete's journey. Comparison has always existed in sport, but the difference now is that it follows athletes just about everywhere there is WiFi or cellular service. For many athletes, there is no real break from evaluation.

Mental Skills Can Be Developed

The encouraging news is that the mental side of tennis isn't fixed. Many athletes unknowingly operate from a fixed, or closed, mindset, viewing their mistakes as evidence of limited ability rather than opportunities to learn. By contrast, a growth, or open, mindset allows athletes to interpret setbacks as feedback, remain adaptable, and continue developing under pressure. An athlete's focus can improve, their confidence can be developed, their emotional regulation can be strengthened, and their self-talk can be reshaped. Recent evidence continues to demonstrate that structured mental skills training can improve performance, resilience, attentional control, and psychological well-being across competitive levels.⁶ Athletes can learn how to reset between points, build routines that anchor attention, and become more aware of the thought patterns that help or hurt performance. Mental training doesn't eliminate pressure. It helps athletes perform more effectively within it. Just like a serve or backhand improves through deliberate practice, mental skills develop through repetition and intentional work over time.¹

I see this even more clearly now with my own daughters, who are thirteen and eleven and both playing tennis. What stands out is how early the mental side shows up for them, even before anyone formally labels it as “mental training.” The way they respond after a missed shot, how quickly they move on, or how they talk to themselves between points already matters. What I find encouraging is that they're not waiting until patterns are deeply ingrained to start learning these skills. They're developing awareness early, while their game is still evolving. That gives them a different kind of foundation. Not perfection, but familiarity with what it means to reset, refocus, and keep playing without letting one point define the next. And in many ways, that early exposure to the mental side of the game is one of the biggest advantages they can carry forward.¹

What Athletes Actually Need

Tennis players don't need more pressure. If you ask most ITF, WTA, or ATP athletes, they'll probably tell you they already have enough.

What athletes need are tools. They need supportive environments. They need opportunities to develop mental skills early rather than waiting until confidence or performance begins to break down. They need coaches who understand that development and results don't always move at the same pace. They need parents who can separate performance from identity. They need systems that view mistakes as information rather than evidence of failure. Unfortunately, what I have noticed is that mental training often becomes a last resort. I have had agents and coaches reach out to me and literally say, “You're our last hope.” When, in reality, mental training works best when it's treated the same way we treat physical training: as an essential part of development from the very beginning and not an afterthought or Hail Mary. Sorry to mix my sports puns.

The Opponent Across the Net Isn't Always the Biggest Challenge

The more time I spend supporting tennis players, the more convinced I become that we underestimate the mental demands of this sport. Athletes are asked to manage pressure, recover from mistakes, regulate emotions, maintain focus, navigate expectations, and perform under constant evaluation, all while continuing to develop who they are as people. That's a lot, especially for young athletes who are still figuring out who they are both on and off the court. None of this reflects weakness. It's simply the reality of the sport. Like any technical skill in tennis, the mental side can be trained.

Where to Start

There are a few strategies that can make a significant difference right away for athletes reading this, or for anyone who knows an athlete who could benefit from them. One is building a between point reset routine. This looks like taking a breath, adjusting racket strings, or bouncing the tennis ball, and then choosing to redirect focus before the next point begins. The goal is not to overthink. The goal is to give the mind something reliable to return to so the athlete isn’t carrying the last point into the next one. Second, shifting attention to controllables in real time, things like effort, positioning, decision-making, and body language, instead of scorelines, rankings, or what the result might mean. Third, after mistakes, instead of defaulting to self-criticism, athletes can practice replacing that response with curiosity and adjustment by asking, “What do I need to do differently next time?” instead of staying in the emotion of the error. You may notice that these are not big, complicated interventions. They are intentionally simple because they are small mental habits that build consistency over time. 

In tennis, momentum can shift quickly, and every point starts over. Those small shifts end up making a much bigger difference than people expect.⁵ That’s part of what athletes have to learn to do, using pressure to their advantage through consistent mental training habits. I tell athletes all the time that pressure is not something to eliminate or avoid, but something to relate to differently and recognize as part of what the game demands. As tennis legend and 39-time Grand Slam champion Billie Jean King

once said, “Pressure is a privilege.” It’s a reminder that what feels heavy in the moment is often the exact space where growth and performance meet. When athletes start to see it that way, pressure stops being the opponent and starts becoming part of how they compete at their best.

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