A Conversation to Be Avoided at All Costs

Make Sure Never to Bring Up This Topic with College Coaches

There’s no getting around it - if you play junior tennis, you’re going to have to deal with questionable line calls.  Maybe your opponent makes an honest mistake.  Maybe she so wants that last shot to be wide that she convinces herself she saw it out.  Or maybe you even have to play someone willing to stoop to intentionally bad calls as a way to get an edge in a match.

None of these things are going to magically disappear once you get to college.  Depending on the level, most college matches won’t have enough officials to cover every court.  And even where there is an official on every court, that official may not be in a position to overrule a particular call.  So you’re going to have to be able to handle questionable line calls in college tennis as well.  Which means that during the recruiting process, coaches want to know that you’re able to handle questionable line calls in junior tennis.

One of the fastest ways to get a coach to doubt your ability to handle questionable line calls is to bring those calls up in discussing your results.  When I was a college coach, I always found it to be a major turnoff when a recruit would recap a tournament to me and use poor line calls from an opponent or the lack of quality officiating as the reason for a loss.  It suggested to me that the recruit didn’t have a plan for dealing with bad calls.  More broadly, if coaches think you’re an excuse maker, they’ll worry that you’re not accountable and will be a liability for the team.

Feeling like you’re having points that you won taken away from you is obviously very frustrating, and sometimes you’re going to want to vent.  If you need to do so in private with your parents or junior tennis coach, fine.  But pretty quickly you need to transition from venting to making sure you have a plan in place for dealing with future questionable line calls.  Because you know it’s going to happen again.  You’re not going to be able to fix that problem, but you can control your response to it.  If you don’t control your response, you’re making the damage caused by the bad call even worse.  Now, you’ve not only lost the point, you’ve also allowed your opponent to get inside your head.

Below are some tips for dealing with questionable line calls.