Is My Child The Next Tennis Star?; The Right Way to Stretch
Last week, TennisWeek provided an excellent look at the development of a junior player by Dr. Sophie Woorons-Johnston, who is now a club owner and pro in South Carolina. Woorons-Johnston describes her interaction with aspiring juniors and their parents, and provides advice on how to negotiate the stages of development. She uses her own junior career as illustration, and my only caveat is that she doesn't provide any cautions about trying a pro career as it relates to amateur status. Woorons-Johnson did play college tennis for Clemson, but that was before there was an NCAA amateur clearinghouse, and players now should be mindful of the point of no return when testing the professional level. But aside from that small objection, I found the article to be very sensible, practical and informative.
The New York Times Play magazine featured a great article on stretching that is definitely relevant to tennis players. I hope there aren't many juniors out there still doing pre-game static stretching that has been proven to be counterproductive, but even if this is old news to everyone, this feature still provides a valuable in-depth look at the science behind the preferred dynamic stretching. USTA High Performance Coach Mark Merklein is quoted in the story, and the exercises recommended are from the USTA. The USTA's Marc Kovacs explains the best exercises in the video, shot at the Boca Raton facility, that can be found in the lower left-hand side of the page.
1 comments:
It's good to see so many of our top juniors playing the hawaii futures. it's good to see that chase buchanan won his first round match. too bad devin britton and johannes van overbeek have to play first round, with the winner getting ignatik.
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