Are you thinking about getting your child into tennis?
It’s no secret that it’s hard as parents to decide which activity is best for your child. I get it. You want to make sure the activity you introduce your child to will not only be fun, but that it will further their development.
I’m here to tell you that tennis is your answer.
Tennis is a fun activity that will help your child’s mental, social, and physical development.
Let me explain.
Tennis Is An Individual Sport
In the recent years tennis has become an increasingly more popular choice for parents with young children because it has many unique benefits that aren’t as prominent in team sports.
In tennis, your child is responsible for every move they make. There is no team, their success is their own, and so is their disappointment — a combination that can quickly build confidence and self-esteem along with coping skills and resilience. And because players are often left alone on the court without teammates, they are forced to develop independent thinking.
Mental Development
Have you ever heard someone say Tennis is 90% mental?
Think of a tennis court like a big chess board. The game is a bit more complicated than most sports and to have success it requires some strategic thinking. There’s no teammate to lean on, you’ve got to figure it out for yourself.
The necessity to build these basic independent strategic thinking skills on the tennis court often accelerates a child’s ability to problem solve.
As a result, many children that play individual sports show accelerated mental development in the frontal lobe of their brain – the section of the brain associated with reasoning, planning, and problem solving. In other words, tennis is good for your child’s mental development both on and off the tennis court.
Social Development
In addition to making your child smarter, what’s beautiful about tennis is that because it is an individual sport it refines their social skills through a lot of one on one human interaction.
Children who are shy often develop social skills quicker and become more outgoing through individual sports like tennis because the social interaction is a little more necessary. Having to call out the score and play against someone in a one-on-one format is a much more intimate setting that sparks social interaction compared to a team sport where you can blend into the crowd if you so desire.
Physical Development
Perhaps the most obvious benefit of tennis for your child is physical development.
Close to 1 in every 10 children have noticeable hand-eye coordination issues and, in most cases, these problems don’t go away on their own. Studies have shown that children who struggle with these issues at age 5 often still have similar issues at age 9.
The term hand-eye coordination is your body’s way of processing information through the eyes, then using it to direct the movements of the hands. Hand-eye coordination starts developing in infancy, and is needed for everyday tasks like getting dressed, eating, handwriting, and tying your shoes.
Good news, parents! You can aid in the development and progression of your child’s hand-eye coordination by engaging them in activities that require them to fine tune their basic motor skills. Tennis is one of the few sports that requires a lot of “moving parts” and can quickly excel a child’s hand-eye coordination at a very young age.
So in summary, if you’re looking for a fun activity for your child that will simultaneously further their development, tennis is a great solution. But how do you get started?
If you’re looking to get your child started with tennis, lessons are the logical next step.
When searching for lessons for your children it is extremely important to find the right instructor. Finding the right professional can be a difficult process and many parents waste a lot of time and money searching for the right instructor before they find a good fit for their child.
In some cases during this search, children can be turned off to the sport of tennis forever simply because their first instructor wasn’t fun or good with kids.
Parents, I know this isn’t an easy process and that finding a good instructor to ensure your child gets started out on the right foot is a delicate process.
I created PlayYourCourt six years ago to help solve this problem for you.
How did I do it? I setup a rating system. Just like Uber, Amazon or Yelp – if the lesson experience wasn’t amazing, parents wrote about it for all to see and the bad eggs were eventually filtered out.
Fast forward six years, PlayYourCourt is open nationwide and I’ve done all the heavy lifting of vetting out the best pros in the country for your child through our rating system. Of the nearly one thousand tennis pros I’ve hired in the last six years I’ve weeded out over 700 duds.
Today I only offer you pros that consistently deliver an amazing experience every time they walk on the court. Patient, encouraging, fun, knowledgeable tennis pros that are all AMAZING with kids.
But don’t take my word for it, give us a try.
