Dropping Out of University to Become a Fulltime Tennis Coach

Here I cover my journey from Adelaide junior to US College Tennis before moving back to South Australia to attend university. After 6 months at the University of South Australia, I dropped out of university and moved to Darwin to become a tennis coach. 

This was the start of a lifetime of tennis coaching and building tennis coaching programs.

Transcript

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The art of tennis. The art of tennis, art of tennis. Coaches, Rick from the Art of Tennis here. Welcome back to episode two of the new The Art of Tennis YouTube channel. So on episode one, I spent a bit of time talking about my own journey from player to coach and how how I guess what sort of level I got to before I transferred to coaching and what made me get into coaching. Now it's one of the best decisions I've ever made was to get into tennis coaching. But what held me back initially was there was no belief that it could actually be a legitimate job. I was on a path of trying to go to uni. I was not overly academic, sort of a B student, the odd A, the odd C. But I was ambitious enough that I wanted to go to uni and follow through with some type of uh role post-uni. Now I quickly realized that I think I realized that I was mostly unemployable. Now what I mean by unemployable is that I'm really good when I can control what happens. Um I I'm a motivated self-starter, so I can make things happen. If I'm excited about something, I will make it happen. Um I can use my creativity and my energy to to really make something flourish. Now, the unemployable bit was if I was stuck in an office having to do the same meetings with some boss who just has got a little bit of an ego and power trip and needs you to grovel to keep them to keep their ego in check. They need uh a certain amount of suck up from you. Um, and I'm stuck in the the the four walls of an office in a cubicle. To me, that's that's almost like going to jail. Now that might sound extreme, for some people they're really quite comfortable and happy to be in uh in a in a cubicle, in an office and and doing some work, talking to people, water cooler conversations, um, getting the takeaway coffee, all of that sort of stuff. And that's great, that's for some people. For me, that was never, never gonna be right. So I guess for me, I wanted to go to uni to get some sort of job that I always should get. Um, my parents weren't pushy, they would have been happy for me to do whatever I liked, uh, whether that be, you know, as long as I was working, uh, they wouldn't have minded if uh if I got a if I got a trade, if I got any type of job really. I wasn't super practical as far as hands-on um trade type work. I think I wouldn't have been great at electrician, um, you know, uh plumber. Other trades like that, I don't think for quite for me either. So I really didn't want to work in the in the in the city, in the in the office type situation. I don't think I had the skills for a trade. Um, I have a real lack of attention to detail sometimes, if and especially if it's not something I'm really passionate about. And so I guess my my options were a little bit limited. So after dropping out of uni, um, as I talked about in my first episode, I went to college in America, um, did a year there, came back, did six months at uni in South Australia of what was it was international business marketing, um, which mostly I did that. I wanted to get into that because the fourth year was overseas, so you're allowed to go to you you go to Canada or England and do your fourth year overseas. So I think I really chose that because the option of going away sounded fun. Um, so I did drop out of uni and become a tennis coach, and I got a job in Darwin and went from Adelaide, drove up to Darwin, and started a new life. So, what gave me the belief that this was a legitimate job? Now, I knew tennis coaches who come to our town, our small town in your regular. We had coaches who come up each summer and they might have two days a week at your club, maybe, maybe even one day a week, where they would offer lessons and you know they might be there for three hours, they do some group lessons, and then they're done. So, for me, it was always seeing what I thought were part-time coaches. Now, I think some of those guys had quite a few different clubs, and they would make their life work between maybe three or four clubs like that, but it was very seasonal, and I couldn't really understand how people could make that work as a full-time job. So, what held me back was that belief in in tennis coaching as an industry. How how do you get enough hours to be to make it a full-time job? How do you how are you gonna get enough hours to to one day get a bank loan to get yourself a house? This seemed unrealistic. As I started doing the full-time coaching um at up at Darwin, and when I say full-time coaching, I started on 15 hours a week, like many coaching jobs. I was promised a certain amount of hours, certain amount of groups, and then effectively I had to build up from there, build private lessons, meet people, um, and and sell lessons to build further. And once you're in a place, you really will build, you should be able to build pretty quick once you're in a in a place. So it's that that that belief started to grow as I went to 25 and 30 hours a week. I think I was doing 35 to 40 hours a week when it came uh including the schools and what was going around the Northern Territory visiting schools and being paid from tennis NT to run to run this uh it was called tennis in schools, so it's a participation program to get kids into tennis. I do remember a little side story when I was out in or I was out of the out of Darwin. Uh it was oh the name escapes me, but we're heading, we're heading Humpty Doo, I think it was Humpty Doo. Those who know the NT, Humpty Doo, and I think it was Humpty Doo primary school, and I had you know 30 kids in year six or seven, and tough kids, um, you know, tough NT kids, some indigenous, some not. And the lesson that I was doing was was going okay, but their their energy levels were were almost too high for me to go through the instructional stuff of oh let's do this and let's hit it to a partner. And and so in the end, I remember just getting the balls and playing a form of marks up with them. Uh for those who don't know, marks up, it's a I guess an Aussie rules football activity where you have a group of people and they try to take the the mark, someone kicks it to them, and they try to take the mark, and then they become the kicker who kicks to the group. So I effectively made a tennis version uh of marks up where someone had a racket, had the ball, smacked it as far as they can, and the group would try to catch it, and then they would come back in and have a go. Now that worked really well. They loved it. They played marks up tennis, and that got me through a lesson or two. The teachers didn't care. I think they were pretty happy to be able to sip on their coffee and and let me take responsibility for their for their crew. So this was all part of me learning about the full spectrum of coaching, uh, the spectrum of school participation coaching, being paid by the government body, which was tennis and t to go around and promote participation in schools. So you had that, and then you had the club coaching, which is private group lessons, private lessons, squads, adult lessons, adult competitions, restringing, and it started to all add up to becoming a decent, decent, you know, decent job. Now I wasn't paid too highly on my first job, but I also didn't have any coaching qualifications, so I was really like effectively an apprentice starting out with my coaching. But it wasn't until I went to the Australian Tennis Coaches Conference, and this would have been in year 2001, I think. 2001, 2002, around there, my first coaching conference. And I went there, and there's speakers and all these tennis coaches, and I was like, wow! And I knew a bunch in the NT, it's not a big population, so I knew a few coaches there, a lot of really, really good tennis people there at the time. I knew coaches in Adelaide, not all of them were full-time. And to actually go to Melbourne, and it was held before the Australian Open, and see all these coaches looking and listening to people lecture and chat about, you know, whether it's uh technical improvements, tactical improvements, physical, mental, uh or just the life of a life of a tennis coach. That really was the point. I went, okay, cool. This is this is a legitimate industry, a legitimate job, and I want to learn as much as I can to become as good as I can at this. Because I guess like when you drop out of uni, um I was concerned that I was concerned that I a little bit of a failure. Uh, I had concerns that I really wasn't gonna find something, you know, whether tennis coaching was really gonna be enough, or was I just heading up to Darwin to to have fun, go to the markets barefoot, swim in waterfalls, um check out backpacker girls, and and and really just I had to question whether I was there for the right reasons or whether I was just doing it because I didn't know what else to do. But as I got there and and understood that there was a legitimate industry, that coaching conference really, really helped. And it made me commit to the to the job. And I think a lot of coaches don't don't don't fully commit. You know, maybe they're part-time coaches in year 12, maybe they're at uni and they do a few hours, and really all they're doing is passing the time to get a little bit of money, but they're not really learning about how to become better at it, they're not learning about what do coaches need to do, what's uh what's gonna be pathways to help their player over a 10-year journey? What are some things coaches need to consider, like things like massage and keeping their body in good condition? Um, and then on the business side, of course, how do you how do you how do you build clients? Right? There's a sales component to building clients. And so the conference was really a really great step towards believing in the industry and coaching 25, 30, 35, 40 hours a week, suddenly I was earning okay money and enough to pay rent and and and save a little bit and spend a little bit, and it became a legitimate industry in my own head. And once once I discovered that it was a legitimate industry, or once I come to that conclusion in my mind, then I really went to town with trying to learn more about it. Now that started with what was called the level one coaching course up in the NT, which I was doing, uh which was really interesting. There was, I think, three of us doing the course. So we had, you know, a very good tennis coach who effectively over a kitchen table we would talk about different parts of coaching. Um, and he opened up different things in my mind, like what's your philosophy on coaching, and and things like this. And but it didn't stop there for me. The course was great, but there were books, there were books to read, and and I remember reading, I was reading books on on coaches, not just tennis coaches, but what about all the great coaches in in the world, and a lot of them were NFL coaches, basketball coaches, um, and what what makes the great great coaches. So I was reading those type of books. I remember getting around that time the Bolettiera Bolottieri book. And Bolotieri, like all good Americans, know how to know how to hype things up, get the most out of something. I'm not saying this in a bad way, actually. They take something, they know how to hype it up to make it look and sound as good as possible. Where sometimes Australians, definitely the British, almost do the opposite, almost take something and dampen it down a little bit to make it not sound too braggy or too uh too cringe or whatever you want to say. So ballistic backhands. I remember Nick's ballistic backhands, and I remember Nick Bolottieri's Sonic Serves. And for me, my brain really, really loved that, and I was like, ballistic backhands, sonic serve, and he had his methods on how to do it and you know what had worked for him with all his players. So I was reading about reading about these coaches, reading Bolotieri books, other tennis coaching books, I can't remember them all, but this study really did work, and having the practical application of putting it straight on the court the next day, that's how I could turbocharge my learning. I'd mentioned in the first episode that the counselor at my uni told me that maybe I'm the type of person to get a job and then study for that job so you have the practical, practical part. So it's it's not so theoretical and it's study that you can apply straight away. And I think the counselor was was right. And for me, my coaching got better, it got better and better, and I watched players get better and better, and everything I was learning, maybe I was making some mistakes, but I was applying it, and as a coach, I was growing at a at a rapid rate. Okay, I went from being someone who really didn't understand much to to really at least I was experimenting with different things to try technically, tactically, uh, physically, mentally. So that was that was when I first started going, okay, this is a legitimate industry, and I want to be I want to be the best. I want to be as good as I can be. Now, coming from my playing background, I had some insecurities to be honest, that I wasn't a good enough player to become a good tennis coach. I'd played Division II college tennis, I had some junior, I got to nationals at a 14-year-old level, but just didn't play many tournaments, 15, 16, 17. Uh I was a good player, but I really wasn't ever in that tier one of players in in my state for you know kids my age. And that gave me some insecur. I had some insecurities around that. So I guess I had to get over the fact that of those insecurities. And I was good enough. I was good enough to be a coach. But it's you just need to understand that there's different levels of coaching. Now, to introduce tennis to a three or four-year-old, you do not need to be a tour player. To introduce tennis to an eight-year-old, you do not need to be a tour player. To train a tour player, I think it helps if you have tour player experience. So I started to get some perspective on how I could help a lot of people who were certainly kids, adults up to intermediate, um, kids up to competition level, you know, uh club or pennants, whatever you want to call it. I could help get them to that level because I had some experience. And I think in your early days of coaching, you do draw a lot on your playing, all right, because you you haven't you haven't got enough hours of coaching on the court to draw on that. So you draw on your own playing experience and maybe your own uh training experience as a as a kid and through that. But the belief in myself that I am good enough to become a good tennis coach, the belief in the industry that this is a legitimate industry, I'd already traveled from Adelaide to Darwin, I had a job, and potentially I could work anywhere in the world as a tennis coach, and that that was exciting to me. Again, as I mentioned in episode one, I had the travel bug, I'd I'd been to America and I wanted to I wanted to keep traveling. I at that point in time I was happy to do a year in every country in the world. So that was the point 21, 22, around that age, where I committed to becoming the best coach I could be. And I remember setting a little goal that for the next five years I'm going to learn as much as I can about becoming the best tennis coach I can be. And that involved the courses, that involved reading. Uh, at the time, there were even CDs that you could listen to with different information. Um, not as easy as as it is now, where you can go onto YouTube and get an unlimited amount of resources. It's just mind-blowingly different now. And not that I'm exactly ancient, but born in 1981, you know, we were tapes to CDs and books. So that was it. That was when uh I legit really knuckled down to committing to my committing to my craft is the best way I can put it. So I think that's enough. Um thanks for listening, and we'll uh we'll chat again soon. Cheers. The art of the art of it.