Was that when anxiety first appeared?

I remember watching a documentary in my Master’s course, Psychological Aspects of Sport, about the influence of parents on their children’s athletic experiences. It made me reflect on my own journey. I was introduced to tennis because my parents believed it could become a career and provide me with a future. At just nine years old, I was told that tennis would be my job. No pressure, right???

I LOVE tennis, and it will always hold a special place in my heart, but I have carried the pressure of needing to be good at it for as long as I can remember. There was little room for error—no losses against players ranked below me, and certainly no tournaments where I finished outside the top three. At the time, I believed this was simply what I needed to do in order to become a professional tennis player. With every misstep, the pressure grew, the feeling of not being enough became louder, and the expectations placed on me to be perfect increased in order to avoid failure. That is when anxiety began to take hold of me, although I was far too young to understand it.

I continued to improve and became better at managing pressure, but there was always a lingering fear of failure—fear of disappointing my parents and fear of not being good enough to reach the top. Those feelings followed me into my college career, and I would be dishonest to say they did not affect some of my matches, even at that stage in my life.

What helped me most was working with a sport psychologist, who helped me understand how deeply rooted my anxiety around failure in tennis had become. That anxiety had developed over years of feeling the weight of my parents’ expectations and the belief that I needed to become a professional tennis player.

After college, when I became a tennis coach, I found myself in a position where I could help young athletes dealing with similar pressures. I shared my own experiences with them and tried to listen without adding extra pressure when they struggled. It made me realize how much of a difference it would have made if I had had a coach who helped relieve some of the pressure I felt growing up.

I will always be grateful to my parents for introducing me to tennis and giving me the opportunity to play the sport at a high level. I am also grateful to my coach for teaching me everything he knew and helping me reach my full potential. What I am not grateful for is the pressure placed on me at a very young age, the playdates I missed, and the anxiety that built over the years, which often made me question whether I was good enough.

If I could offer advice to any parent with a child in sports, it would be to truly listen to them. Do not push them into a path based on your own past dreams or experiences. Instead, pay attention to what excites them and allow them to develop their passion on their own terms.