Intelligence and personality; missing link in development?
Countries in our region never had so many world beaters in tennis. The number of players in globally recognised ranking from Asia, even now, extremely small and too low in ‘performing-ability’. This year only South Korea was in the Davis Cup final round. It is somewhat so in King’s Cup for women.
Performances in Davis Cup and King’s Cup reflect the success of nations’ tennis development; Asia does not come very high on this rating.
Even Australia has not won the Davis Cup in nearly 30 years. From stroke making to competition, success road is a long winding one even in developed countries. One of the junior pursuits of tennis in our region is to go into recognised ranking for overseas education pursuit -- road to America! A good few classifications serve this purpose, such as UTR and American rating serves as benchmark.
Davis Cup and King’s Cup
In tennis, the inter-nation competition, the Davis Cup and the renamed Fed Cup, King’s Cup, have turned out to be the mother platform for the global player development of the game. The first Davis Cup happened in 1900. That is 35 five years after lawn tennis surfaced in the public realm. However, the idea of tennis as game in the European royal courts was already over 200 years old in 1850s.
A good 50 years after the first Wimbledon, the first Davis Cup tie between England and USA staged in 1900. In 1915 ITF, the International Tennis Federation formed mostly with British Commonwealth countries in the forefront of global tennis administration. By then tennis was in public realm for over 75 years. These administrations evolved[D1] to be what we have even today as National Tennis Associations.
Professionalism
In the 1970s, professionalism in tennis gave birth to ATP, WTA and crept into the ITF too. As things stand in 2023, they have carved out the areas of interest and enhanced it to their need and benefits of their players. This is the tennis story and as such every sport today have a history of its own. From then on, personal straits of individuals began to make the difference in performing ability.
Notion of prominent tennis nations
Nations in the top end of Davis Cup and the King’s Cup world group are the prominent tennis nations. These two platforms fuel tennis in more than 200 countries for young women and men to take up tennis and play regularly.
Today, even with large number of players taking to tennis in every continent, players are finding their development at the age of 15 serves reasonably well only in the precinct of their own home environment. The missing link is the sports intelligence. This has turned out to be a fatal error that has cost life and money the players and their families.
The way out of this error, demands players and their parents are well aware not to fall into popular trends but to know the ‘effective’ road. In other words application of sports intelligence in every aspect of development.
Of all the knowledge needed for the utility in sport career, the availability and application of sports intelligence on the playing field and in development pursuit will decide the success rate of a player.
Exhibition tennis a dropout realm?
True not all tennis starters get into the
Top 10 of the world ranking to own expensive villas and fancy cars. Many sport persons face the eventuality of being below the success rate requirement in their prime. That is physically broken are stranded without direction. This is where exhibition format comes to the rescue. Indian state team competitions provide TV requirements. In this, players auctioned for bids from Indian state teams. They are betting platforms, in the similar lines of franchise cricket.
Defect of the exhibition format is they are outside the known tennis scoring formats. They are teams playing a few points and counted together to determine the winning team. [in tennis this is strange] they have women’s and men’s Singles, Doubles and Mixed Doubles and prominent old players as non-playing captain as a team.
[Laver Cup to Indian interstate this is popular] The playing intensity being low and having to play mere 10 points, retirement age is pushes well past 40 plus. Advantage tennis?
The shortfall
To an individual exhibition provides TV requirements and others but does not provide the road to personality and physical needs acquiring road through tennis. There is a difference between playing an abbreviated format of any sport to time evolved full-fledged version requiring mental and physical attributes of original premise. These sustained sports for centuries in our world.
All the very best in 2024, wish very best for a fruitful sporting year.
--George Paldano, European and Asian competition player; coach German Tennis Federation; National coach Brunei and Sri Lanka; Davis Cup, Federation Cup coach, coached ATP, WTA and ITF ranked players in Europe and Asia; WhatsApp +94775448880-- [D1]