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Focus Control:

Staying in the Present

This is the fourth of several columns analyzing the Do You Think Like a Winner?: Competitors' Questionnaire for measuring the psychological dimension of your tennis game. This column analyzes your score for questions 13-18.

by Jim McLennan, Senior Editor, TennisONE (Former President, USPTA, Northern California), and Carol Blackman

The Focus Control section (questions 13-18) of the Competitors' Questionnaire examines how well you control your focus and stay in the present.

Focus Control

Focus can be directed inward or outward. When you focus on your breath during yoga or relaxation exercises, your focus is inward. Outward focus might be looking for a familiar face in a crowd. Further, focus can be narrowed to a specific cue. For example, exactly what does my opponent do with the return of serve when down break point? And finally, focus can be applied more broadly, as when you continually assess your opponent's style of play.

Now re-reading the questions in the Competitors' Questionnaire, the recurring threads are the ability to stay in the present and not be influenced by past errors or winners, and the ability to narrow the focus to specific external cues without regard to the spectators, and without regard to the score. This narrowing of focus is needed in order to build and own the will to win. It will be impossible to gain information about your opponent if you are not specifically focused on the task at hand. The more you come to believe the need for this type of focus, the easier it will be to achieve.

Staying in the Present

The ability to stay in the present is a little trickier. Remember McEnroe at the 1984 French Open? Mac has a big lead over Lendl but fails to close out the match and must play the remaining 10 or 12 games remembering that he could have won. When you have had a big opportunity and have not converted, can you block out that memory and burrow back into the present? Champions can--even though in that instance McEnroe could not regain his confidence and concentration and eventually lost to Lendl.

This "present centered-ness" can be practiced in a number of ways. Arrange for practice matches on courts where distractions are common fare, and then school yourself in blocking out interfering stimuli. Another way to train in present centered-ness is play what are known as conversion sets. In a conversion set the unusual scoring method places extreme pressure on the leader and punishes the player who squanders their lead. In normal scoring, if the score is 40-15 and on the next point the server double faults, the score would now be 40-30. In conversion scoring, the player who had game point goes back to 0 and the player who won the point is now in the lead at 0-30. In conversion sets, whenever you have game point and do not convert the game you go back to zero. So when the set score is 5-2 and you fail to close out the set, the score would become 0-3. Conversion sets will train you to play in the present, to forget missed opportunities, and to focus on the specific task at hand at this exact moment in time.

And now for an affirmation to take with you on the court. My favorite is, "As the match grows tighter, my concentration improves." Remember, when you talk to yourself you are listening, so speak in direct, positive, and affirming phrases. The body can achieve what the mind can conceive.

Copyright 1993 "Competitors' Questionnaire," by Jim McLennan and Carol Blackman. All rights reserved 1993.

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