By the time Ellie-Rose Griffiths was 9, she had dropped out of school to train full-time. It was then that tennis stopped being just a game and became his life.
The former junior would go on to compete against some of the best players in British tennis including Katie Boulter, Emma Raducanu and Harriet Dart before she quit playing at the age of 19 because she was burnt out and no longer enjoying it.
When the 27-year-old looks back now, it’s not just tennis that she remembers. The pressure around you, and especially one group of people he believes can handle it better.
Parents.
Pushy parents are nothing new in a sport that offers the potential of multi-million pound prize money at the very top – at the highest level there are well-documented incidents involving the fathers of Jelena Dokic, Mary Pierce and Bernard Tomic to name a few.
It all starts at the junior level.
“You see parents yelling at kids all the time in tennis,” Griffiths told BBC Sport. “There is a lack of understanding of how they should behave… how they can help their child grow up to be the athlete they should be.”
And it can get out of hand.
“We’ve had situations here in the past where unfortunately we’ve had to call the police because parents’ behavior is getting out of hand,” said Chris Johnson, coach of Sutton Coldfield Tennis Club, who has worked at the club for 36 years.
“They won’t listen, they think they can get away with anything, they don’t respect the referees, it can be a little bad.”
It is both clear that such behavior does not occur in isolation and that it is the nature of tennis that causes parents to behave this way.
So, why is that and what needs to change?
Tennis can be difficult for parents.
There’s transportation to plan, training to fund, and a complicated player path to navigate. In some cases, there is even private tuition to plan if their child has dropped out of regular school to focus on sports.
“He’s on a bit of a hamster wheel”, says John from Derbyshire, whose 11-year-old son Harrison is a promising player. “12 months of the year, internal courts and external courts.”
Children can start playing tennis from the age of four on a prepared court. The Lawn Tennis Association’s (LTA) most promising youth program supports players as young as seven on their journey to becoming a Grand Slam champion.
Competitions are organized by age and start at eight and under.
And the ratings and rankings you get for doing them are one way to get recognized.
So when does it start to get serious?
“The minute they start playing their first tournament,” said Johnson.
Do you think that is correct?
“It’s not like that.
“Most adults can’t handle the pressure of playing each game and expect young kids to be able to do that.”
Steve Whelan, a coach at St Albans with three decades of experience, agrees that the system puts too much emphasis on winning at a young age.
“This race is going down because the parents are rushing to be measured and ranked,” he said.
He tells the parents: “These are not tennis players. They are children playing tennis and there is a big difference.”
The LTA says it carried out a “comprehensive review” of its rating system and rankings in 2018 “specifically to address the problem of placing too much pressure on children at a very young age.”
Now players cannot be ranked nationally against their peers until they reach the under-11 age group, and the youngest children from eight and over are ranked in the competition based on the latest form – average.
When it comes to parental behavior the LTA says that like any sport “there are times when a number of parents do not uphold the standards of expected behaviour”. The governing body will soon launch a new program called Fair Play, to encourage good behavior from parents and support coaches.
