With the curtains closed on 2023, tennis players around the globe are gearing up with fresh ambitions and meticulous plans to elevate their game in the new year. It’s natural to nurture positive expectations, but translating them into reality demands deliberate actions. One such pivotal action is proper analysis. Coach Marcin Bieniek explains how to analyze the past year and become a much better tennis player in 2024.
Transitioning to 2024: Reflecting on the past
From an athletic standpoint, each day represents an opportunity for growth. Thus, understanding where to direct focus and identifying the essential elements crucial for progression and heightened performance is imperative. The tennis career trajectory, riddled with peaks and valleys, necessitates maintaining a balanced perspective to sustain efforts yielding positive outcomes while also upholding motivation during less favorable times.
The expression “knowledge is power” resonates across all spheres of life and rings especially true for tennis players contemplating their future. With the conclusion of 2023, the dawn of 2024 marks a renewed focus. Regardless of the previous year’s triumphs or tribulations, deriving conclusions from those experiences serves as a cornerstone for becoming a more proficient and effective tennis player in the coming 12 months.
Actionable steps: Your path to success
Here are the steps that will allow you to achieve success:
1. Assess your skill set
A tennis player must vigilantly attend to their skills. While numerous factors remain beyond one’s control, personal preparation and abilities lie firmly within the player’s grasp. Reflecting on one’s skills over the past year precisely outlines the journey and current position.
If you put your best effort almost every day, you will see a big change in your possibilities to perform at high level. It is not just about saying “I am better” or “I am worse.” It is about knowing exact areas that you improved and getting information about skills that are still not good enough to win prestigious tournaments.
2. Learn from the setbacks
Adverse moments are an inherent part of the journey, both on the court and in daily endeavors. Embracing the learning process involves deriving insights from both victories and defeats.
While learning from victories is straightforward, it is definitely more challenging to digest and learn from painful situations. However, these situations hide a lot of valuable information that can be your missing puzzles to get your game to the next level. Analyze and strategize to ensure that past errors do not recur in similar situations.
3. Identify necessary changes
You can do a lot of things well, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t do them better. Think about the priorities for this year and the necessary alterations required to achieve superior results. Having this in mind, you can understand what changes you have to implement to have a chance to finish the year as a much better tennis player. All ambitious athletes always aim higher — even when they are the best, they know that it is not the ultimate level they can exhibit to outshine opponents.
Conclusion
On the tennis court, you don’t have too much time before every shot but off the court, you have unlimited possibility to think about your past and plan your future effectively. Keep in mind what happened in 2023 and make sure that these experiences bring positive results in 2024.
To learn more from coach Marcin Bieniek, visit our Tennis Tips page.
