Judy Murray: Why so few women are top tennis coaches
SA: To start with, many people don’t really realise that you were such a great tennis player yourself. I certainly wasn’t aware of that myself until I read more of your autobiography etc. So what drew you to tennis originally, way-back-when?
JM: Well I think that’s very kind of you to say that I was a very good tennis player because I think I was actually pretty decent at best. And I think that because I won a lot of Scottish national titles at junior level and senior level, that can sound really good. But the reality was there were very few women playing competitive tennis in my day, so you kind of played the same people in every single tournament. But, as my dad used to say, you can only beat who’s put in front of you. But I was very aware that the pool of competitive women to play against, but also to hit with, they just weren’t there. I think that I got to a level in tennis that was pretty good considering the background, given that tennis was very much a summer sport only when I was young and I played badminton in the winter and I became quite a good badminton player. I played for Scotland Juniors at badminton and I was the British Universities champion at badminton.
But the reality of that was just that there were no covered courts in Scotland and we have terrible weather, so you could only play tennis probably only 5 or 6 months of the year. So you found something else to do in the winter. But I got into tennis through my parents. They both played at our local club and they both played for the North of Scotland county. So they played pretty well and they got me started when I was big enough to wield a wooden racquet. In those days, the court was huge, and the balls were white and the racquets were wooden and quite heavy.
[0:03:51]
So you probably had to be about 10 or 11 before you could get into it. Where nowadays kids can get it into it at 4 or 5 with the mini racquets and the sponge balls and the wee courts and so forth. So that’s how I got started.
SA: And you had a sporty family, you mentioned there, so both your parents played tennis as well. And your dad played football I believe?
JM: Yeah, my parents both played tennis and badminton to quite a good level. They played to I suppose a regional level at both of those and my dad was a footballer in the days where you had a full-time job and played football as well. So in the late 40s, early 50s, he played for a number of Scottish clubs including Hibs, which was the biggest club that he played for. But I don’t remember any of that because it was all before I was born but definitely the sporty genes come through I think both sides of the family. And the competitive gene, the kind of never-say-die and I-hate-losing attitude definitely!
SA: You put a toe in the water of playing professionally. You’ve talked down your playing but you were ranked very highly in terms of British girls as you were growing up. So what happened there with that pathway?
JM: Well I grew up in an era where you didn’t have coaching and squads and accompanied trips to events and things like that. You pretty much had to do everything yourself and learn for yourself. So I learned to play the game by playing the game at the club with, firstly the other – well my parents – and then the other kids. And when I got good enough I was allowed to play with the adults and it was really the adults at the club that taught you how to play the game – doubles mainly. And then as you went into the wider district and county, you learned to play with the better players and that was really how I learned, and it’s actually also what’s formed most of my coaching philosophy – the whole thing of the sport is about competing. It’s about playing the game. It’s not about going to endless coaching or activity sessions. There has to be lots of competitive opportunities.
So, I think again with that lack of infrastructure and that kind of backdrop, I probably got to a pretty good level and when I was in my last year of juniors, I was ranked 8th in Britain. And the top six were girls were given an opportunity to join a squad that was based at Queens Club in London – which of course was everything paid for, everything covered; the training, the trips to tournaments, the ? fitness and so forth although that wasn’t such a big thing in those days. [0:06:26] And so I kind of just missed out and it was the difference between having the opportunity to get everything that I kind of dreamed of, somewhere you could train on a daily basis, other girls to train with, opportunity to travel and compete overseas etc. Just that kind of being too out of it and of course being too out of it and being stuck in Scotland where we had wee-er infrastructure meant the difference between everything and absolutely nothing.
And so I think I became very aware at that stage of the importance of creating opportunities for everybody. And that picking the top 6 on ranking, for me, was like, well what happens to the rest of us? We were so close and who’s to say you picked the right ones? Everybody comes from a different background. We don’t all develop physically or emotionally, don’t all mature at the same times, blah-blah-blah. So I think I became very aware of that. And I took off on my own. I’d passed my school exams that gave me a university place and I had done this deal with my dad that if I got my exams, that I could take a year off to play tennis, to see how good I could become.
[0:07:39]
And I managed to do that but the reality of that was my dad ran his own business, my mum had my 2 brothers at home, I really had to go on my own. And in those days, which was kind of 1997/8, you were really disconnected. There were very few flights, there weren’t mobile phones, there weren’t ATM machines, there was no internet so you made phone calls home from a phone box where you reversed the charges on international operator. You picked up money from the post office in whatever city you were playing at. It was wired through. It was a very, very different world and so I travelled a little bit with a girl from England who was similar level. But even when you’re travelling with someone, it’s quite scary to be out there on your own as a teenager trying to find your way across Europe. Enter yourself in the competitions, find your lodgings. Get your transport to and from, because, at that level, and in those days, it wasn’t you jump in a courtesy car, it was you get the tube or the tram or the bus or if you can afford it, a taxi.
And you are pretty living hand to mouth of I need to win a couple of rounds this week to be able to afford to get ? [0:08:56] So I think I’ve learned a lot about life and survival , independence, responsibility, accountancy I suppose. You learned as you went along in the same way that I learned to play the game by playing the game. You learned by doing it. And it’s a very, very different world now. There’s much more laid-on things, there’s much more spoon-feeding. But I think I wouldn’t change it for anything, but I didn’t last very long. I think that where it came to a head was when I had my bag kind of broken into I suppose on a packed bus in Barcelona. I had gone down to the coast just to pick up money that my parents had wired to me. Was on the bus going down, picked up the money, got the bus back up to the hotel that we were staying at and I was on my own and I was aware that the bus was really busy, it was crowded, people were jostling and when I got off I realised that my bag had been opened and when I looked inside, my wallet had gone.
And I remember this so clearly, looking in my bag and then realising it wasn’t there. Sitting on the pavement and kept shutting it and opening it, and shutting it and opening it, and hoping that one of the times it would be there. And when I realised it wasn’t there, I thought, right, I need to solve this. I’ve always liked a challenge. I’ve never panicked when something goes really wrong. I almost see it as a, right, click into gear. What do I have to do now? And that’s because I always had to think for myself. Whereas nowadays, kids would get out a gadget and say, where is the nearest police station? And then they go on Google map and they find it. So I had to find a policeman, then I had to find another one who could speak English and went to the police station. They connected me with the Embassy and I managed to sort it. My passport was in my wallet. It was just one of those nightmare situations.
Phoned my parents via the international operator and let them know what had happened. And my dad said, Look, just come home. It’s too dangerous. And for them – I didn’t realise this at the time but I would realise it now as a parent – for them I am in a European country. I’m in a massive city, Barcelona. They can’t connect with me and suddenly I’ve got no money, no passport and they just wanted me to be home. So I got home and my dad said, Look it’s too dangerous, we’re just not allowing it. And I think in some ways I was quite relived that they made the decision – that it wasn’t me that was sort of saying, I can’t do this, it’s too tough or whatever.
[0:11:30]
Anyway, from there, I had about 6 months before I could start university and my dad got me enrolled in a, did my first coaching qualification. That was over a kind of a number of weekends and he also enrolled me in a crash-course of shorthand and typing which he said, That will be useful to you whatever you do, that will be useful to you. It was a 3-month course in Edinburgh. I went through on the train very day. I actually loved it because it was so intense and it has been without question one of the best things I’ve ever done because taking notes at Uni, writing, when I’m watching or in a press conference or if I’m watching somebody playing and I’m making notes and I don’t want anybody to know what I’m writing, shorthand’s been really useful!
Of course typing is now, just everybody does it now! Yeah but I would have … I do think a lot of always saying this, we are all products of our environment. But I do think that experience that I had of really wanting that opportunity and wanting to see how good I could be, and having a go at it, which really wasn’t there because of where I lived, because of lack of infrastructure, I do think that further down the line that really formed me a lot when I did actually get into tennis coaching to creating opportunities for the Scottish kids. And eventually I went on to become the national coach which I never would have imagined I would do. And created opportunities not just for players but for coaches to improve to a level where they could travel and so forth. So yeah, we are all formed by our experiences, good and bad.
SA: You talked about that early time of coaching, pre-university. Was there an option for you to do more and continue more down the coaching route at that time?
JM: Well I did the course, it was called the Elementary Coach Award and I managed to pass it and I did it as a means of being able to earn some pocket money when I was at university. Something that I could do either in the evenings or on the weekends to earn some money as a student. And I got a coaching gig up at Craiglockhart Tennis Centre in Edinburgh so I must have been about 18 and I went up and it was a Saturday morning thing and I was giving these 8 kids – luckily there were coaches on the other courts as well doing similar things – there were loads of children there. And I suddenly realised that even though I played to a good level, I’d passed this elementary coaching award, I had actually no idea how to talk to these kids or to organise them because the coaching award had never covered that.
It was all about, here’s what to do. And a bit of why to do. But there was nothing about how to be or how to do. Which of course is crucial because the whole thing with coaching is face-to-face communication, interaction, being the Pied Piper, being lively, I always say, being fair, firm and fun. And I know that now but at the time I just thought, I don’t know how to talk to these kids and I looked across on to the next court and I saw what the other coaches were doing and I literally just kind of copied what they were doing the whole time. But I didn’t enjoy it because I didn’t feel comfortable and I completed the 6 weeks of it and I never did it again. And, again, that experience has formed me to so much of what I do now which is building ? [0:14:57] courses and everything we do is about what to do, why to do, and then how to do and how to be.
[0:15:04]
But the way that we do it is if we do 3-hour workshops we do 2 hours with the candidates where we show them all the what, all the content, we explain why we use this content, what skills it develops that you need for tennis. And then we do an hour where we bring in a class of kids for adults and we show them a class in action and we show them how we are, how we organise it, whether it’s big numbers in a small space, whatever it is. So they can see, ‘cos it’s that whole thing, if you can see it you can be it. So you’ve got to put in front of them what it is that you’re asking them to be or to do. So, again formed by an experience so at that early qualification I never used it.
SA: Tennis was still part of your life when you had the boys, so kind of jumping forward through university and various – I was a sales rep as well, I worked for Cadbury’s when I left university – so I kind of aligned with your story of working in selling sweets and chocolate.
JM: I did, yeah, that was one of my first jobs. I was a trainee sales rep, with a company that was called Cabanim Confectionery at the time. It was a whole range of brands under one roof -further down the line became Famous Names Confectionery and its biggest line was probably Chewitts or Elizabeth Shaw Mint Crisps, they were probably the biggest things that people would have heard of. That was what I did but I played tennis right through university. I went to the World Student Games, played a fair bit in the WSG which was a wonderful experience and then when I started working, I played for a club in Glasgow for a long time ‘cos I was living in Glasgow, working through there.
And when we moved through to Dunblane, just before Andy was born so that I had more help with two kids, ‘cos Jamie is 15 months older, to be closer to my parents so that we had some help with the kids. And that was really when I went back over to the tennis club that I’d been a member of since I was young and discovered that there was still no coaching there, nothing. There were kids playing but there was nothing organised for them, no junior teams, etc, etc. So I started to volunteer just a couple of hours a week, playing with some of the older teenagers and showed them how to play the game. And as word spread, more parents asked me if their kids could join in, if I could do anything for the younger ones, etc, etc.
And I said, well I was doing it voluntarily and I couldn’t afford to pay for childcare because I’d had to give up my job and the car went with my job and I was really feeling quite trapped. My house was walkable from the tennis courts thankfully, but I basically said, your kids can join in if you can look after Andy and Jamie in the clubhouse! So our clubhouse became full of toys and things and there was a park beside it and a duck pond and all the rest of it. So that was kind of how it started. And what I discovered was that I actually loved sharing my sport, just as much as I loved playing it. And I got really involved and over time, grew a mums’ army in the club. I got all the mums involved to run the café, help me run competitions, the club teams and so forth. Because you can’t do it all yourself.
I knew what needed to be done but I kind of basically brought all the mums in and said, right, okay, and who wants to have more things for the kids than the parents so that made total sense to me as well? We had a wonderfully thriving club over the years which was a whole lot of fun but Jamie and Andy obviously as very young children grew up in a wonderful community club environment where all the older players would play everything with them. From football to table tennis, to water bomb fights, to tennis itself of course. And the golf club was next door. I mean it was a brilliant environment for kids to grow up in.
[0:19:03]
SA: And you transitioned then on from there, so you became, I believe, were you first woman to pass the LTA’s Performance Coach Award in the 90s? How did you make that transition?
JM: I was. Yeah, so what happened was that as the kids at the club were getting better and better and some of them were getting to a level where they were playing at sort of Scottish national level and I realised how much the game had changed since I learned to play it. There was double-handed backhands, there was top spin serves, there was weird grips like what Rafael uses - the western grips - and so forth. And I had learned very traditional wooden racquets, step in, over your shoulder, follow through kind of stuff and it wasn’t working with them. And I thought, oh gosh, I need to do another qualification.
So I did the second qualification which was called the Intermediate Coach Award. That was a one-week course, and I found the same thing. I found that it didn’t give me what I wanted. I wanted to see how people coached good kids on a daily basis and what it did was it just gave me the what to do and a bit of the why to do. Didn’t show me anybody working with a really good junior. So I found that I really had to learn everything for myself in terms of coaching because there were no role models in my area and nobody, because tennis in Scotland was such a minority sport, nobody aspired to be a great player or a great coach because the infrastructure just wasn’t there to support it.
So I went off with this what to do and why to do and kind of experimented a lot with a lot of things myself. So I really kind of for the most part formed my own how to coach philosophy but was very aware of the how to be. How you make kids feel good about themselves, you are only going to influence their performance if they feel good about themselves. And I think through all my years of being involved in Scottish squads, once in a blue moon, for juniors, was very aware that the coach who was in charge, who was part-time was not interested in the girls. So we were always shoved off to the end courts or a separate indoor bubble - there was one centre that had a bubble. So I was very aware of that whole thing of making inclusive, everybody feels the same, that you don’t have favourites, that you are interested in everybody.
So I did this Intermediate Coach Award and same thing about a year later I went to the lady who ran coach education and I said, look, I really want to learn. Some of my kids are getting really good and I’ve got nobody to learn from and is there anything else I can do? And I had started by that stage to go to an occasional workshop for some other sports to try to learn but it was difficult when you’ve got young kids to actually find these things and actually get to them. And so she said she was working on a new course that was going to last for a year called the Performance Coach Award and to wait for that. She thought that would be really good. So I applied for a place on it when it came up. There were 20 spaces and I got one and I was surprised that I got one, given that I was more or less still a part-time volunteer coach and I was stuck up in Scotland and so forth.
Anyway I took it up, it was quite daunting, because all of the courses were down south which meant a lot of travelling, a lot more extra expense and my kids were young - maybe 7 and 8, 6 and 7 at that stage. I was aware it was a whole year of workshops to go to so I did it.
[0:22:36]
And when I got down to the first one, I discovered that there was 18 men and 2 women on it. I hadn’t even thought to ask who else was on the course! And a considerable number of the men on the course were very high-level players. Everybody except me was working full-time at a big club down south. We didn’t have big clubs and we certainly didn’t have jobs in tennis. Everybody had to be self-employed and there were hardly any coaches in Scotland such was the lack of infrastructure. So I felt very daunted by it. Very intimidated and thinking, on that first workshop that I had made a mistake going down. And I had bad experience with one of the tutors who told me that I was very lucky to have a place on the course. That they’d had to turn a lot of guys away and I really looked at him – I go back to what I said before about making people feel good or bad about themselves – and I thought, why are you telling me this? And then he said that they’d even had a complaint from somebody who had been turned away from the course or who hadn’t got quite, and that the person had said, what could I possibly offer to performance coaching when I had two young kids?
And I just …! Anyway I went off and I just said, really, really? And then I went off and I sat on my own for a bit and then I just, I just felt very – I just went into what I call ‘fuck-you’ mode – and I thought, I’m here now, I’m going to do it and I really had to develop a thick skin because I hated it those first few. Then like within any group you find a couple of people who are quite like-minded in terms of the way you think or the things you talk about or laugh about, whatever. And that made it a whole lot better. But again that’s made me very aware of how tough it is to be a woman in a man’s world and how difficult it is to be in very much the minority in a situation like that. You don’t want anybody to ask you to demonstrate, you don’t want to ask a question, you don’t want to answer a question in case you look stupid.
And so that formed me further down the line in growing the She Rallies programme and the Miss-Hits programme which are all female. Because you bring a whole group of like-minded women together, you get a completely different atmosphere, relaxed, comfortable, supportive. So again, but you need to do something about these things, you need to speak up, you need to stand up and you need to have solutions to it. And I think I’ve always tried to do that when I’ve seen something that’s wrong or unfair or whatever. I’ve tried to create a solution for it and create a programme to help recover it rather than, I think it’s quite easy to be negative and blame and whatever. And I’ve always tried not to go down that route. It’s more like, here’s how it is, and here’s what I think we can do and the other thing that I’ve learned is don’t wait for somebody else to do it. Get off your butt and do it yourself.
SA: And how long was it after that award that you became the Scottish National Coach?
JM: Well I passed that in 1994/5 and literally just as I’d finished doing it, the Scottish National Coach job was advertised. And I think it had been vacant for about 18 months. I think they’d had one or two people come in for short periods of time but if they had come in from outside of the country, they would soon find out, no infrastructure, no covered courts, no aspiration, they never lasted very long! And I was persuaded to apply for it and I think if I hadn’t been persuaded to apply I don’t think I would have. I think it would have felt like it was a step too far. I’ve got young kids, what business do I have being the Scottish National Coach? I don’t have the experience.
[0:26:23]
And the lady who persuaded me to go for it was, at the time, the Secretary of the Scottish Lawn Tennis Association. Now you’d call that a Chief Exec, but at the time it was called Secretary. And she said to me, You know the infrastructure. You know all the people, you know all the challenges, you’ve got the passion and now you’ve got this qualification. Why wouldn’t you use it? And I went off and thought about it and I thought, yeah why wouldn’t I? So I went for it and there was a couple of foreigners – one from Poland, one from Australia – that were also interviewed and I saw both of them on the day that I went in – you did a sit-down interview and then you did an on court thing with a couple of players. And I was able to take my own players, which they weren’t, which probably stood me in good stead. But I was still at that sort of, he’s from Poland or he’s from Australia, they’ve got top players and grass and slams and major events in their countries. We don’t have anything.
But anyway they went with me and I spent the best part of 10 years trying to build an infrastructure and build a team of coaches and build the pool of players and actually when I look back, starting from scratch, on my own, no staff - literally a bucket of balls and a block booking at some indoor courts that were at Stirling University which were the only indoor courts and they’d just opened in 1994 - we didn’t have anything else. And that was really how I started and can’t say I knew exactly what I was going to do but I knew I had to start small and I had to start young to form the youngest ones, that that was going to be the pool.
And I started with 20 kids aged between 8 and 11 and they came in. At first just during the weekends and then some of them who could, would come in during the week so we sort of built up from there. But of those 20 kids we got 4 Davis Cup players and one Fed Cup player and Elena Baltacha who was world top-50 eventually and Andy, Jamie with their slams and Davis Cups and World Number Ones. Jamie Baker played Davis Cup and Colin Fleming, gold medallist Commonwealth Games, mixed doubles and made the top-30 I think and KTP Doubles.
And we got coaches out of that as well. Leon Smith who is Davis Cup Captain and Head of Men’s Tennis, a very successful coach. He started with me when he was 20, I took him on as an apprentice. Couldn’t afford to pay him but he came in and I said I can give you the experience and all the rest of it and eventually I was able to pay him because we built things up. But yeah, he started with me and he just dropped out of college and said he wanted to be a tennis coach and he wanted to learn and he’s had a great career out of it.
So really out of my little cottage industry that started with just me, and actually the parents - I brought the parents in, same as I did with the club – and I said, here’s what I want to do but there’s just me and my budget was £90,000 for the whole country to pay for everything - other coaches, court competitions, training squad, talent ID, coach conference, everything. I did everything with 90 Grand! So the parents were my first port of call, again, and they were brilliant with job-sharing and putting kids up overnight so that they could come into that one centre on the weekends. Yeah, but I think, a lot of that, what you brought together, I think being a female and being a mum you learn to multi-task. You learn to organise, you learn to involve other people. You understand that you can’t do everything by yourself and that you need a team around you.
[0:29:59]
So the parents were my first team and then in time I built my little team of coaches as well. So yeah, I think we did okay for a little cottage industry.
SA: I’ll say! I really, really enjoyed your autobiography, Knowing the Score, a big recommendation to anybody listening to read that. And it gives a fascinating insight into your back story. Does it really frustrate you that for so long you were just viewed by many people as this kind of pushy mum, that was how people perceived you?
JM: Yeah, yeah. Really yes and still annoys me because still some people assume that that’s what I was. And others who say, oh well it’s alright for Jamie and Andy, their mum was a tennis coach. And I’m going, um, I wasn’t a tennis coach, I learned to be a tennis coach so that I could help them and others – others before them – because they were just little. But yeah I’ve always kind of railed against that because, for me, everything was about fun and opportunity and learning and trying to improve and being supportive and of course in an individual sport the onus is very much on the parents to make things happen for the kids. And when your kids – somebody needs to open the door for you whatever it is that you do and that is the job of parents - we create the environment in which way they can thrive.
But I think that the British media, they kind of painted me as that from pretty much from that first Wimbledon, where I was pumping my fist in the player box, which is possibly quite unusual for a mother of sons doing that. And I think what many people failed to realise was I had been there supporting them when nobody was watching them ever, all the way through, just because I do. And so I always would get excited and positive and whatever, because you’re the only person that’s watching. So if they need a bit of encouragement or a bit of energy to feed off or a bit of extra support if things aren’t going well, they are always going to look your way. So I was doing nothing different to what I would normally do.
I probably was extra excited because it was Wimbledon and my son was playing at Wimbledon that first year. And the nature of tennis is such that if you have 90 seconds at changeovers and at the end of a set and Wimbledon being on BBC has no ad breaks, the cameras, the commentators, everybody goes to the player boxes or the crowds to have something to talk about. And so I found myself being talked about and there was just this assumption that I was over-competitive, I was therefore pushy and the pictures that were all used in the papers of me during that first Wimbledon, were always baring my teeth or pumping my fists. And if I had been a dad doing that, I don’t think it would have made, I don’t think anybody would have made anything of it because it’s okay to be a competitive man or a driven ambitious man. But it was clearly for many people there was something wrong with being a competitive woman!
And I do think the dynamic of mother of sons in sport is less usual. But if my kids had been rugby players or football players or cricketers, or even golfers, nobody would have known that I existed. It’s just the nature of tennis is such that you are in the player box, the cameras go to you because of the gaps in play. So I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t like it. I would read everything. I wanted to know what people were saying but I had to do the common-sense thing and put the blinkers on. And this is written by people who don’t know you – they don’t know the back story so to go back to the book, Sue. When I did the book and when I did the book tour – I did quite an extensive book tour with it which my publisher put together - and I actually found I really, really enjoyed it.
[0:34:25]
The whole talking – you always do it with somebody else like we’re doing now – somebody asking you questions about it and then it sounds more like a conversation. But I think it really helped me to share the back story of everything that we had gone through as a family to get to where the boys had got to. I did the book tour in 2017 which was the year after they had both ended up as world number ones, end of year world number ones – one in singles and one in doubles which was great for family harmony that they both did it in the same year. And it just so happened that my book was finished, just finished, when they did that! It was incredible timing.
So when I did the book tour, it really helped me a lot to feel like I was telling people, here’s actually how it all happened and I am not what I have been painted over all these years but I think the other thing that perhaps changed people’s perceptions – I mean, and I could understand why, that if members of the public would see me and the only pictures they would see of me were me pumping my fist or baring my teeth or whatever or saw me in the player box – I could understand why they would think that that’s what I was like, I could understand it. But I think that when I did Strictly for example, I think so many people saw me in a completely different light, show how you are and you’re willing to put yourself out of your comfort zone. You’re prepared to do something that you are rubbish at in front of a live audience and you’re loving it! And I think that changed a lot of people’s perception of me as well.
But I do try hard now to use my voice where I can, to be supportive of female coaches, women in sport etc, etc. Because I think it was in the Olympics in 2012 you wouldn’t have got me to stand up in front of people and speak for love nor money and I went along to listen to somebody else talking at a female-only conference that was part of the 2012. And this woman, she was Scottish, she wasn’t involved in sport in any way at all but her name is Caroline McHugh and she talked about the power of being you, not trying to be something that you thought other people expected you to be or say what you thought other … There’s only one you and you must be the best version of you that you can be. And afterwards I stayed behind to speak to her and she said, Oh Judy hen! – ‘cos she was Scottish - How lovely to see you! I had no clue that she would know who I was, I was blown away by it because she gave me goose bumps up my back listening to her talking. I was so taken with her.
Anyway, huge tennis fan and she invited me to tea at her house when I was next in London – it was the strangest thing – but from this one woman gave me the confidence to speak up. The first conference I put together when I did the LTA She Rallies Programme – which is a female workforce ? [0:37:36] I asked her if she would come and close the conference and do a similar kind of talk. And she came all the way up from London in a car that I sent for her, and she did it as a favour for me because – and I’m like this as well – if a woman asks me to do something, 99 times out of a 100, I will do it if I can, because it’s a woman that’s asked me and I know how much harder it is to make things happen as a woman and for women in sport. And she did that for me in the same way that I would have done that for her if she had asked me to do it.
But she just blew me away with this. She really made me feel like, Yeah, I’ve got something to offer, I can speak out. And I think for all those years where I was painted as the pushy mum and all the rest of it, I didn’t do the media. I didn’t speak out because I just didn’t, I just got on with it. But actually once Andy won Wimbledon, I really felt like I could speak out and all these things happened around the same time.
[0:38:35]
I got offered the Fed Cup captaincy at the end of 2011, everything happened around that kind of 2-year period. And stepping out of your comfort zone and speaking up in front of people is incredibly daunting for anybody and I hated it the first few times that I did it and I kind of analysed what I did and I wrote down things that when I watched people who were good at public speaking or that I enjoyed speaking to, what did I liked about it? How did they put things together? My terror was always that I would forget what I was going to say. And now I just, you make yourself do it. I made myself do three conferences a year – tennis conferences a year – because in all the years that I was trying to learn from going to overseas workshops and overseas conferences, I never once listened to a female coach.
It was always guys and when I did my first one in Mexico and I really wasn’t very good, I was bang average at best, and there was 1000 people there and of the people who stayed behind to speak to me afterwards, the majority of them were women and they were all saying the same thing. Thank you so much for being a woman and standing up and doing that blah-blah-blah. And I thought, you know what? Women need to listen to women. They need to hear our own experiences and so from that moment, I committed to do that. I’m going to do three a year until I get quite good at this. And now I’ve got quite good at it and you can’t shut me up!
SA: I’ve loved hearing you. The Women in Sport Conference and the Women’s Sport Trust Conference, I’ve loved listening to you and hearing your stories. I’m going to take you back just to Strictly for a moment. From where you had come from, was that a very tough decision to put yourself out there and agree to take part in it?
JM: Oh absolutely not! No, I think that I loved Strictly from when it started – loved it – and when it first started it was about 8 dancers who had never danced before and they were completely starting from scratch. And I loved watching that learning journey. Learning a new skill, performing it in front of live audience, all that kind of stuff, I loved it. So I’ve always, always enjoyed it. And when they asked me if I’d like to do it, I couldn’t believe that they’d asked me I was really, really pumped to do it. But I don’t think at that point I really considered how terrifying it might be to actually do it on a Saturday night. And so you do a sort of a dummy run with a dancer, they’re testing you out, you’re testing them out because you might not like it.
So that was fun, I did that with Robin Windsor at Pineapple Studios, loved it. So did all the sort of background stuff and then they said, Right, we’d love you to do it if you’d like to do it. And I was like, had to run it past the boys, and of course you may have heard me tell the story before, it was quite funny because the boys are quite different from each other. So I went to Jamie first, ‘cos he’s always the easier option. He goes, Oh mum you love Strictly! You should do it, you’ll have great fun, blah-blah-blah. And then I said to Andy who kind of like stared at me for about a full 5 seconds or so. And then he went, Oh my God! You’ll be rubbish! And it was funny because they were both right and I loved it and I was rubbish and I didn’t care that I was rubbish, ‘cos for all that I am competitive, I wasn’t competitive in that because I knew it wasn’t my thing and I just wanted to enjoy the experience of it.
[0:42:11]
And I did love the experience of it and had the most wonderful partner in Anton du Beke. We got on like a house on fire, became great friends, still are great friends. And he had a wonderful way of teaching with humour which is very much how I work as well. That you can get your points across with humour, which means that people never feel bad about they can’t do it. You’re not saying, no, no, not like that! It would be like, it was something I did with my arm, waving my arm across my body and it was part of this waltz. And I said, Is that it? And he said, No, no, you look like you’re swatting a fly! You’ve gone far too fast but it was just great. It was really good fun. Absolutely terrifying on Saturday night when you have to do it live.
Terrified that you’ll forget everything, that your mind would just go blank. Terrified that I would trip ‘cos I hate heels, so the heels were a real challenge for me, I always wear flat shoes. Not an entertainer. Don’t have any kind of rhythm and timing, couldn’t read the music. Everything was a massive, massive challenge, much more than I imagined that it would be. But the fun of it and the learning experience, the life experience, I would not swap that for anything. And every week that you survived you got a bit stronger and a bit more confident. I’m not saying I got any better at dancing, but you definitely get more confident and you get more comfortable with the surroundings, and so forth. But it was just the most wonderful experience but if you never dip your toe in the water, how do you know how far you can go with anything?
And that’s become a great talking point as well. And when I talk about things like that to women, I’m talking about this being brave, being confident, taking the first step and talking about having supportive people around you. The other female dancers who would help me with the female side of the steps, if I asked them to, because they want to help you that you know. So I think there are so many life lessons that I learned from that. So many things that can transfer into other things that I do and everybody is interested in that. But I do think that for me it made a lot more people interested in what I do in the tennis world because they’d seen me in a completely different set of circumstances on a TV show.
SA: Excellent! Tennis obviously is one of the sports where I think we see women have more semblance of equality in terms of prize money and media opportunities, but do you feel it’s still quite a male-dominated sport?
JM: I think that, yeah, it definitely is ahead of most other sports in terms of the opportunities for prize money and endorsements and profile because the major events are well televised and well publicised and always have been because the majors have always been men and women at the same venue. And the audience watching tennis is pretty much 50-50, men and women, so we’re ahead of the game in lots of ways at the top end of the game. I still think as you go down the lower or earlier levels, I’m not sure quite what the right word is there, of the game, I don’t think it’s the same.
I think we’re still way behind in terms of number of female coaches, number of female decision-makers, the number of women that are on boards and so forth. And really for the female side of the game to be influenced and promoted and progressed in a fair way, you need much better representation among those who are making the decisions. So I speak about that quite a lot and I talk about the importance of having a pathway for women within sport and I don’t just mean in coaching, I mean in everything so you can see what’s the next stage - if you want to progress and you are competent enough and confident enough to progress - that there is a pathway for you.
[0:46:26]
And I would say that probably all sports don’t have a female pathway and I suppose I experienced it more on the coaching side so therefore it doesn’t surprise me that most of the higher positions within tennis are still occupied by men, even on the women’s side of the game. Our Head of Women’s Tennis, Head of Coach Education, Head of Performance Coach Education, they are all men in those positions. I’ve always argued since I started speaking out that every sport should have a female-focused development strand in its strategy that is led by women because women see things on behalf of other women. They see them with their eyes, they hear them with their ears, they understand their bodies, their psyche etc, etc, in a way that men won’t. But why should they? They’ve never been women!
So yeah, I will continue to speak out about that but unless you have equality of opportunity all the way through, you won’t get those women coming on to boards and vying for those positions, we’ve got to prepare them for that. So you need to tell them to identify I think in the way that you identify players and you need to create the pathway that sets them on that road so that eventually we have got … because women would want to be there because they are good enough to be there because they, and to get good enough to be there, you need to have gone through all the stages and amass the knowledge, the experience – working alongside people who have been great at what they do which of course is the easiest way to get good at something. So equality of opportunity I think still has some way to go.
SA: We’ve heard a lot recently haven’t we in terms of mistreatment of young female and male athletes, in terms of gymnastics, swimming and athletics. In that era of Me Too, do you think there is more that will come out in that tennis world historically, in terms of that dominance of male coaching and infrastructure?
JM: Well I think there are very few female coaches on the women’s tour. It’s dominated by male coaches and of course the men’s tour is as well. You’ll find an occasional woman. Usually it’s a wife or a mother sometimes but it’s very, very rare. The tennis circuit is pretty much 11 months of the year. It’s tough to be on the road for that amount of time whether you’re a male coach or a female coach but traditionally if women want to have families it’s very, very tough to travel and leave the child at home or to take your child with you is almost impossible. It’s also very expensive. In an individual sport you are responsible for all your own costs. So you have to pay your coach, coach’s expenses, your fitness trainer if you are able to afford them, very few are able to afford the entourage.
But the ones at the top of the game can. So if you are a player on the middle level or even getting close to maybe top-30 or so, you probably haven’t got the luxury financially of being able to pay for a physio or a fitness trainer and a coach on the road. All those fees, all those expenses, travel and accommodation, food, phones etc. So often the choice of coach comes down to somebody who can also operate as a hitting partner and perhaps do some of the fitness training as well. As a hitting partner, you are far more likely to find guys who have been at a reasonable level that is closer to women at a good level. And I think that goes against female coaches on the road as well. If you asked me to go on the road as a female player, there is no chance I would be able to hit with them.
[0:50:17]
I could feed balls to them out of a basket, of course I could and put pressure on that way, but I couldn’t hit. So therefore you need to find somebody else so that is another side of it - the cost factor, the hitting ability. But I think there are ways round that. I do think the WTA tour could provide a list of hitting partners at every venue that they’re at – they could create that of local players – male or female and you just draw from that. So if I was the coach and I couldn’t hit and I’d look for a hitting partner, I’d go to the list and that could be provided in the same way as the physio rota or the lifestyle rota of people - it is a service that is provided - and I think that might encourage more women to take on female coaches as well.
But you’ve got to give them the opportunity to get there and so often I hear coaches who want to climb the ladder, they just get stuck. They get stuck because they run into … there are so many guys to be chosen from and whoever is doing the choosing is also a guy and doesn’t create the opportunity. You do hear that a lot so I’d love to find the start of a solution that would lead to more women at the top end of the game.
SA: Are you hopeful for the future that things might change?
JM: There’s definitely been a big ground swell around women on sport. There’s all the MeToo movements. I think there is a groundswell, it’s a pity that Covid has kind of stuttered everything but I think the key to it is that we have to collectively be prepared to stand up, speak up, show up and continue to do it, not just do it once and go, Oh that’s it, I’ve done my bit. We have to be there for the long-haul cos although we’ve made progress we have to keep our foot on the gas so that we get it closer. Making a little bit of progress is good but it’s not enough. If the gap is very big and you make an incremental move forward you’ve still got a long way to go and the only way to do it I think is to band together and to be collectively strong together but we have to be prepared to use our voices. We have to be prepared to be shouted down, develop a thick skin and so forth.
SA: I love that Andy’s been so celebrated as a feminist for calling out what other people might have chosen to ignore in the sport. Has that surprised you or what you would have expected of your son?
JM: I think it’s been great because he has done it consistently. He hasn’t just pitched up with one comment and then said, That’s my bit, I’m done. He regularly does it which is great and it makes such a big impact when he does or when a man speaks out on behalf of the women, it makes much more impact than when one of the top women does it sadly. That is just the case. So I’m really glad that he does it. I think he has always been, like everyone in our family, we kind of really rail against unfairness of any kind and I think he’s always been aware of how difficult it was for me working in a man’s world - how little opportunity or little encouragement and how hard it is to open doors and so forth. Or get people to listen to you, in the early days, not so much now.
I think when his eyes were really opened was when he took on Amelie Mauresmo as his coach and the amount of criticism that he got for that hiring which he just didn’t understand it at all. She had the expertise, she’d been a former world number one Grand Slam champion. She had the skillset, great people skills and for him it was nothing to do with gender, it was, I really like being with her. I like what she has to offer. We are a good fit and he also wanted somebody who could listen to him and he was at an age and a stage where he wanted to have more, I suppose take more direction on which way he was going and he wanted to be able to talk to somebody about it. And you do get a lot of male coaches who don’t listen! I am telling you what to do, you know, whatever. I think especially when you’re younger, it’s quite easy to be kind of dictated to and I think listening skills are something that women do particularly well.
[0:54:39]
So that partnership came in for a lot of criticism and I think he was aware from the very early stage that if he didn’t do as well or better than he had been doing before, she was going to get it in the neck. He speaks about that a lot and I think to be a woman in a position of excellence or at the top of something, you have to be absolutely brilliant at what you do because you are so easily knocked down and it’s not always the same with guys. You get a lot of guys in top positions who are absolutely average at what they do and it’s something that I heard Michelle Obama talk about a number of times that for us to be at the top we have to be excellent at what we do because we are so easily knocked down and we are much more easily judged on how we look, what we wear, than guys are.
And that’s something else I learned, and probably relates a bit to Strictly - you know prior to that I didn’t really have any interest in clothes, I was hoodie and jeans or my tracksuit and so forth – and then I realised that when you put yourself up in front of loads of people, the first thing that most of them do is judge you on how you look and what you are wearing and so forth and I try and keep myself in good shape. I want to be a good role model, I want to represent my sport, I want to represent women and so I am much more aware of visually I suppose how I’m perceived.
But I think with Andy, he takes his role in his sport, he gives back a lot to his sport. He gives very informed opinions on things and I think because he has consistently batted on the women’s side, he watches a lot of women’s tennis. He knows the women’s side just as well as she knows the men’s side, and that is great, because there’s not many people who could say that. So I think, because he’s done it consistently, he’s got a lot of support and a lot of respect from the women players and from the media and from the public as well. So it’s great, and long may it continue.
SA: You’ve obviously done a huge amount to take tennis to a wide audience – you mentioned She Rallies and Miss-Hits and Tennis on the Road, and obviously the Judy Murray Foundation too. So where are those initiatives now? How are things progressing in those various areas?
JM: Miss-Hits I started off in order to get more little girls getting into tennis. So creating a girl-friendly environment so activities – an environment that was just for girls. So it’s all the skill-building activities that you would typically find in starter programmes that we plotted around it. Girly things like music and dance and cuddly toys, cartoon characters and so forth because we wanted it to be something that they could really engage with and develop. Create a friendship group, develop the skills that you needed to be able to play tennis and learn a bit about tennis through the cartoon characters who all kind of represented tennis shots – back hands, valentina volley etc, etc.
That’s a great wee programme and last year, FIFA and English Cricket both told me that that programme had inspired what they were doing with girls and I was like so thrilled to bits because I created that about 6 years ago. Lots of the things that had been done I’ve been ahead of my time and I was so happy to hear them saying that. The cartoon characters, the all-girl environment, perfect for female coaches or young teenagers or mums who want to assist in delivering tennis but aren’t confident enough to deliver the full game.
[0:58:29]
So it did everything that I wanted it to do. And yes, She Rallies was a programme I created for the LTA which was all about building a bigger female workforce, bigger and stronger female work force. We’ve got 52 ambassadors now – we started with 26 - and they go out into their own back yards and they create female activator groups around them, they help them grow the game and build their own businesses. But it’s a kind of a mentoring, training type of programme. It’s quite a simple concept but it’s worked really well. So it’s women for women.
And the Foundation just operates in Scotland and it takes tennis into rural and deprived areas and that’s a big thing for me is opening tennis up in my country to people and places that wouldn’t normally have the chance to try it. So I’ve got a team of 11 ambassadors, part-time ambassadors and a part-time project manager. I’ve got a CEO now so we’re growing, I don’t want it to be too big, I want to be good at what we do but I want to do it well. But this is all about, it’s equal opportunity again. I’ve always hated tennis’s kind of elitist tag and so we actually get off our butts and we go into areas that wouldn’t normally see tennis or sometimes they don’t even have tennis courts but we show them how to play starter tennis in whatever space they’ve got available.
So barrier tapes and chairs, chalk lines, whatever it is, but we built a massive army of people across the country who can deliver in their own back yard. So it’s all about investing in local people so I’ve done a lot with that in lockdown because we had videoed all of our content so we just turned it into on-line workshops and it increased our reach significantly . The LTA furloughed most of their staff but they were unable to deliver anything during lockdown. Tennis Scotland don’t do anything like that anyway, so we were actually able to make a whole lot happen for teachers, students, parents - the whole family tennis concept - things you could do at home. It was absolutely brilliant. But I get a lot of satisfaction and enjoyment from my Foundation.
SA: Excellent, that’s fantastic to hear. And just finally, reading your autobiography, there seems to be many points during your career where other women having encouraged you to kind of believe in yourself and step forward – you talked about being brave – so what advice do you give to younger women who are perhaps progressing or wanting to progress in the sport sector today?
JM: The best pieces of advice I could give is to try to find somebody to work alongside or to mentor you because the quickest and easiest way to get good at something is to work alongside somebody who has already done it before. And it doesn’t matter what sport you are working in, what bit of sport you want to do and how much you want to do, there will be somebody in your community or in your local area who has done that before and can pass on that experience. Even if they are just a voice at the end of the phone or on a Zoom call or if it’s somebody who you can actively go and assist, get the working experience with, to learn about how to do and how to be as well as the what to do and why to do it.
And I think that is what would have made the biggest difference to me when I was starting out was to have had somebody that I could actually see how they did it and somebody who I could pick up the phone to.
[1:02:01]
So if you can find somebody – another female preferably if you can just because they see the world with the same eyes and hear it with the same ears as us - but you’ll find a lot of good guys out there as well. So yeah, that would be my number one piece of advice is find somebody who is excellent at what they do within your area and try and organise some work experience or to be somebody that is a voice for you or an arm round you and encourage you to and so forth because it’s very tough ploughing your own furrow.
SA: That is brilliant. Thank you so much. I like to finish on a point where I’ve got a nice point to finish. I could have talked to you forever, sorry, that did go on a while. Thank you so much.
CHAT
[1:02:46]
END OF TRANSCRIPT