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 Photographer: None / Not Applicable
Date: 07 Mar 2008 |  Photographer: None / Not Applicable
Date: 08 Mar 2008 |  Photographer: None / Not Applicable
Date: 07 Mar 2008 |  Photographer: None / Not Applicable
Date: 07 Mar 2008 |  Photographer: None / Not Applicable
Date: 08 Mar 2008 | |
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| 07 Mar 2008 - Seoul, Korea | |
| Diary of a Play Tennis Course: Korea |
The Play Tennis course is part of the Play and Stay campaign which aims to increase participation worldwide (visit www.tennisplayandstay.com for more information).
To give readers of ITFTennis.com a taste of what the Play Tennis course is all about we are providing a diary with different contributors from the course each day.
9 MARCH - FEDERATION OFFICIAL - CHAHOON IM (Korea Tennis Association)
I'm Chahoon and I work for the Korea Tennis Association (KTA). I was involved in organising and running the Play Tennis course with my colleagues, and have acted as the translator between the tutors and the participants, though this isn't my everyday job!
The President of KTA, Mr Dong-Kil Cho, assigned 2008 as an important year for focusing on junior development in Korea. We want to increase the pool of participants and the President asked us to find ways to do that, which is where the Play Tennis course comes in. We wanted to run the course to help improve how tennis is introduced to players in Korea.
Now the course if finished and I'm happy to say I think it was excellent. We need to update the system in Korea and we can help to do this by giving our coaches more information and new perspectives, so having them learn about the Play and Stay program is an important step.
From here we plan to run more Play Tennis courses, but hopefully the KTA can run futures ones ourself, with perhaps some more of our coaches training to become the tutors. We are also going to organise the purchase the Red, Orange and Green balls for our coaches so that they don't have to wait long to start using the ideas from the course.
8 MARCH - COACH - HONG-SEOK KANG (Sungnam City, Korea)
Hi, I am a coach taking part in the Play Tennis course. I work in a members club with 95 members, all adults. The club is near Seoul in a district called Bundang. I’ve been a coach for 15 years.
I wanted to do this course because I wanted to learn about working with children as I want to work more with children as well as adults. From the course, I have learned more about using tactics in a game-situation which is opposite to my programme which is based on working on technique first then playing the game. I think the way tennis is presented in Play and Stay is better than the way I have taught. It is a better way to work with beginners.
The sessions working with tactics within the games situation have been the best part of the course. I think the different balls are a good idea and give a very good step-by-step approach for beginners. If it is possible (to access them), I will use the different balls within my programme both with adults and juniors.
In the course I would like to see more chances to work in group sessions and to learn more practices, because in Korea many lessons are individual lessons and I want to work more with groups. Because kids needs group lessons not individual lessons. We have lack of courts so we need more people to use one court.
We played a competition at the end of today, it was good because it featured short matches, which is good for young people taking part in competition and lots of people could play on one court. Having two teams made it competitive and everyone got to play for the team.
Thanks for reading!
6-7 MARCH – ITF – SURESH MENON (ITF Development Officer Asia) & JAMES NEWMAN (Tennis…Play and Stay Coordinator)
JAMES NEWMAN:
I arrived at the course, held at the Olympic Tennis Court in Seoul, about 19 hours after leaving my London home. For the first afternoon, Suresh gave the coaches an introduction to coach education and Play and Stay. It became clear that there was a great deal of enthusiasm from the coaches and the staff from the Korean federation. Suresh and I were kindly taken to dinner in the evening by three officials from the federation at a traditional Korean restaurant. The food was fantastic and I slowly got better at mastering chopsticks, I’ll keep trying!
This is my first Play Tennis course and it is special to me because it covers the area of tennis that I consider most important. So much of tennis education is aimed at, or aspires to, an elite level. Of course there are exceptions. The issue is that well under 1% of the playing population can be considered elite, which leaves the 99% that often do not get the attention they deserve. Play and Stay and the Play Tennis course aim to take the same level of professionalism and expertise shown in elite coaching, but directed at providing tennis suitable for the 99%, whilst also showing options for the young players in the 1%. If tennis continues to focus on the 1% to the detriment of the 99%, then tennis is in trouble, and when the 99% falls down, the 1% will inevitably fall with it.
Tennis needs to be an easy, fun and quick game to play. This course seeks to banish the traditional coaching practices of heavy technical instruction and instead replace it with a game-based approach that focuses on getting players to play the game from the first lesson and introducing RELEVANT tactical and technical instruction.
I’ll steal an analogy that Suresh used on Day 1. When you buy a new stereo, you get the manual with 127 pages on how to use it. Now, do you read the whole manual or just plug the stereo in and try it out? I try it out, and then when I’ve played a few CD’s I want to see a few of the extra features, so I look at the relevant part of the manual. This is Tennis. Starter players want to play from the first lesson, they don’t want to read the manual.
I especially don’t want to read the manual now, I only slept 3 hours until 2am last night, unfortunately I’m still on UK time (9 hours behind Korea) and I’m not sure how much longer my eyes can stay open, so it’s farewell from me but I’ll let Suresh take over (he probably won’t mention that he slacked off and missed the gym this morning, I was in there before 6am so I’m happy to expose him!)…
SURESH MENON:
I’ll pick up from where James (or ‘Newbie’ as he’s now called) left off by starting from Day 2.
We took the coaches straight on court this afternoon and showed them the proof of what slower balls can do. I got two complete beginner players and had them try rallying with a normal, yellow ball. Although they showed some natural talent, they couldn’t rally for long and tended just to push the ball. When we introduced the slower red balls and smaller courts - straight away they could rally longer and developed to hitting the ball harder but with control. This allowed them to introduce over-arm serve, consistent return as well as top-spin on both forehand and backhand. The balls really give the players more time and control and once they had played with the red ball, they were able to move on to the slightly quicker orange ball on the orange court. Within 1 hour they were rallying consistently from the baseline.
This is what Play and Stay is all about. Here were two players who could not have gone together on a court and just played a match, but with the slower balls they can and they’ll develop quicker so that they can rally with the full, yellow ball on a full court better than players who do not use the slower balls. Once the starter players had tried the balls, we let the coaches have a go at playing with them and set them the task of organising practices for their groups.
After lunch, James and I got the coaches to run more group practices that provided 3 elements: activity for all participants, fun and purpose, focusing more on tactics in the final sessions. This was a very important exercise as, initially, a lot of the practices shown did not always show a good purpose with a clear tactical goal. Practices must always have a purpose, we’ll work more on this tomorrow.
There is a lot of work to do but I really think the coaches, federation and the ITF will make some important improvements over these next few days.
Following the course I sat with Young-Mi Park from the Korean Tennis Association to talk about their 5-year plan for the development of tennis. I hope to add in a gym session after missing this morning, I’ll run Newbie off the treadmill for telling on me!
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