PGASOFEUROPE JUDY MURRAY
IGPN: Out of mental (off-court) and physical (on-court) preparation, what would you say is the focus of time for tennis players?
JM: I think that’s always a difficult one to answer because no two individuals are the same – one of the skills of coaching is to recognise what’s in front of you and where the priority areas are. As a player develops and gets better, the things you’re looking to add to the game become tiny little margins and often the difference between getting to the very top, and being one of the rest of the pack, is what’s between the ears.
IGPN: As a parent of two high-achieving tennis-playing sons, how did you manage to let them pursue their dreams whilst also maintaining a relatively normal childhood?
IGPN: How did your involvement in coaching come about?
JM: Well, I’ve been coaching for about 25 years now – I started out as a volunteer coach at my local club when my children were very small…so I went along and started to coach some of the older juniors. Because there wasn’t very much really for the older juniors at the club at the time, I started to get a bit more involved in coaching, setting up junior teams, school teams, and it just snowballed from there. I’ve worked from volunteer level through club coach to county coach to national coach and ended up as the GB Women’s Fed Cup Captain, so I kind of know my sport and the coaching requirements right from starters up to the top end of the game.
GAVIN HASTINGS
IGPN: What were the positive influences of your coaches and was it different for you as it would be to another of your teammates?
GH: From my experiences what made a good coach was somebody that was on the same sort of wavelength as you and ultimately, when you get to a level of playing rugby for your country or playing in a Ryder Cup, you don’t need coaching in the true sense of the word. What you’re trying to do is make sure that everything is geared towards you performing to the best of your abilities. Coaches that are organised and make things simple, not trying to do stuff last minute and change things – it’s the same as when you listen to business leaders…the strategy is not massively complicated…it’s getting [it] across using simple communication. ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ is the mantra isn’t it, so you know I don’t think it will be any different for Ryder Cup teams than it was for rugby teams.
IGPN: When playing golf and getting coaching along the way was it similar to the coaching that you received for rugby?
GH: You obviously have a certain ability, I have been a single-figure handicapper my whole life, so I think that it comes from experience. I’m a great believer that you don’t make the same mistakes twice. You play on your experiences and you just learn from that – ultimately if you don’t make mistakes on a regular basis then you’re going to improve, and it’s the same for coaches as well.
IGPN: Did you ever consider going into coaching when you stopped your playing career and passing your experiences on to others?
GH: You know what, I would love to, maybe not be a full-blown coach, but more a mentor. I would like to have mentored some youngsters – I have son that’s doing pretty well in his role, so in my own way I feel I’ve mentored him and just tried to pass on some tips that I thought would be useful. You don’t need to be there all the time, it’s like golf coaches, you can hear them at the end of the telephone and they’ve seen players in action and have just spotted something that they should do differently…you’re capable of making a necessary change just by doing something very simple.
JM: When Jamie and Andy were children I recognised that it was becoming far too stressful to try and become the coach and the mum at the same time – for me it was more important to be the mum. What I did was to find a rookie coach, a young guy who was 21 with bleach-blonde hair and curtains with that sort of centre parting and a diamond in each ear. He was a county level player, a decent player, but he was a great fun guy to be around. He’d just dropped out of college and he wanted to learn how to coach. He’s 37 now and is the head of men’s tennis at the LTA and he’s the Davis Cup Captain, so I think that has always been the thing for me when they were young to try to find the right people at the right time to lead them to the next stage.
www.pgae.com
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