ABSTRACT
Competitive tennis is a mentally demanding sport (Loehr, 1990). For example, the untimed and “stop-start” nature of its play may cause performers' attention to wander during a match. While undesirable in any sport, lapses of attention are especially costly in tennis because its scoring system is such that the loser of a match could have won more games than the winner (e.g. 0-6, 7-6, 7-6). Not surprisingly, tennis psychologists have responded to its mental challenge by advocating a variety of psychological techniques which purport to improve the consistency and “mental toughness” of players on-court (e.g. see Loehr, 1990; Mackenzie, 1991; Weinberg, 1988; Winter & Martin, 1991). Indeed, some of these techniques have been marketed commercially as instructional videotapes (e.g. Loehr, 1989; Yandell, 1990) and audiotapes (Porter, 1990). But how effective are these performance-enhancement strategies? Unfortunately, apart from a few notable exceptions (e.g. Weinberg, Grove & Jackson, 1992), few studies have been conducted on the practical efficacy of psychological techniques to improve tennis performance. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to rectify this evaluative neglect by exploring one aspect of this field, namely, the issue of what expert tennis coaches think about mental skills training in tennis. This topic is important because sport psychology cannot make progress unless it receives regular feedback from its consumers, such as players and coaches, about the validity and utility of its theories. However, somewhat surprisingly, coaches have received relatively little research attention from sport pychologists (but see Chelladurai, 1993).
