When Sir Andy Murray said farewell to his tennis career at Wimbledon last night he thanked his parents for their continued support
Here, tennis coach and mother to the champion tennis player shares her top tips for encouraging children to get engaged with the sport. As the mother of a double-Wimbledon champion, Judy Murray certainly knows her way around a tennis court. Here are some of her top tennis tips for children.
Judy Murray’s Top Tennis Tips for Kids
What are the benefits of introducing tennis to children?
Tennis is a sport that you can play from age four, right into your 80s! It doesn’t favour men more than women – it’s a sport that can be enjoyed by the whole family. It can also be played both indoors and outdoors, but getting children outside and enjoying the fresh air can only be a good thing.
How can parents encourage their children to get involved in tennis?
The most important thing is that you love the sport, and that you engage with it – not just play it, but follow it on television. Watching the best, most exciting tournaments and the top players helps develop a real passion for the sport, in the way that many people do with football. The aim is to get children to understand the world of tennis, as well as play it.
Tennis is competing with so many other things for children’s attention, that we have to make our sport fun, stimulating and as easy as possible. We should help them to develop the skills that they need to be able to improve because if children are good at something, they grow in confidence and are more likely to stick with it.
How do you keep your motivation going during the dark winter months when playing outside can be challenging?
That is certainly one of the challenges, as tennis is traditionally a summer sport. This said, there are now a lot more indoor courts around than there used to be. You can also improve on the skills that you need for tennis by playing other sports, such as badminton or squash.
When I was young, there weren’t any indoor courts and we played tennis in the summer and badminton in the winter. There is nothing wrong with going outside and playing in the rain – a little bit of water doesn’t hurt. My advice would be to get out and play, whatever the weather!
How do you overcome barriers in sport, such as money and getting girls interested?
It doesn’t cost a lot of money to play at the local park, but most outdoor tennis clubs are not that expensive to join.
When it comes to encouraging girls, we have four times as many boys coming into tennis as girls, and we have probably five times as many male coaches, compared to female.
So, one of the things we need to work on is having more female tennis coaches, more female support coaches and more female PE teachers. They can all be role models for the girls and they better understand how the girls tick, and I think that is an important thing.
