Over the years that my kids have been taking tennis lessons, I have wanted to find ways to extract more value from each and every lesson. First, tennis lessons are expensive (up to $200 per hour in our family’s case) — can we achieve a higher return on investment for each lesson? Second, since I consider myself a product of cheap Chinese parents 🙄, raised with middle-class values such as shopping at Marshalls and packing lunch to go to Disneyland, I believe I ought to still strive to get the best value for every dollar I spend.
To benefit my own students, I thought I could share our own family’s learnings on how to squeeze more value from each tennis lesson.
Like other families, our family has experienced tennis lessons that were truly breakthrough for our kids; however, we also have experienced other tennis lessons that have been more akin to “checking-the-box”. With our kids' coaches' insight, we started to think about the root causes of “tennis lesson fails”. If together we could figure out how to more consistently experience the “omg-wow-geewiz” tennis lessons, wouldn’t that be an amazing unlock for all? After years of toiling away as tennis parents ourselves, we believe we have distilled some Chow-Sheu family learnings that I now call ancient Chinese secrets (the tennis version)? We have some answers to share, but you may not like the answers (mwahhh…hahahaha…evil cackle).
To my kids’ chagrin, I often like to play the part of an ancient Chinese philosopher. What are the necessary conditions that allow a seedling to grow into a gigantic & strong redwood tree? We all seem to know that a tiny seedling requires (1) good sunlight (2) adequate water (3) fertile soil. A tiny seedling needs to have these 3 factors over months and years to optimize its growth. Missing just one of these key factors will stunt its growth.
Using this analogy, what are the necessary pre-conditions that a tennis student needs to have before each and every lesson to optimize their growth? Unfortunately, a tennis student is a little bit more complicated than a plant; but, I think I have figured out a list of items that are important preconditions for a great lesson. And I would like to share our magical secrets with all my tennis students/parents (since parents still do much of the plant watering 😆).
One of the biggest unlocks that we have discovered as a family is the importance of (1) at least 8 hrs sleep (2) proper meals. These two things may seem obvious, but as all parents know, it’s so hard to do this 99% of the time. Better control over these 2 factors has resulted in substantial gains for our kids’ tennis. Sleep impacts their mood and emotional control greatly, which in turn impacts their ability to be coachable during lessons. Similarly, ensuring your kids eat healthy meals, at least 1 hr prior to a lesson, is a non-negotiable. Many times I have seen kids, including our own, throw up or feel ill on the tennis court because of poorly timed or inappropriate meals.
Here is a more comprehensive list of secrets in the following Gsheet (link to Gsheet). If you find this list valuable, please email me and share with me 3-4 sentences of feedback. If you do share feedback with me, I will share 1 important secret that I have not shared in this list as your reward.
Of course, there's a big difference between knowing vs. doing. Like anyone in Silicon Valley knows, excellently written business plans are one thing but tactical execution is a completely separate matter. What I like about my list is that you can/should actually track your habits over time and quantify your results with a score. My challenge to all my students/parents is to track their habits for just 4 weeks and see what happens to your tennis lessons. Do you find them turbo-charged or just identical to before? Try it and find out for yourself in just 4 weeks.