Disclaimer
This blog contains junior tennis, parental over-analysis, FAST4 mathematics, relentless sunshine and an eight-year-old who regards losing as a temporary administrative error. No children were harmed in the production of this article, although several parents may have developed sympathetic tachycardia. Any resemblance between junior tennis tournaments and prolonged Upper GI operating lists is entirely intentional: both involve waiting around for hours before suddenly becoming extremely stressful. Clinical advice should still be obtained from somebody appropriately qualified, while tennis advice should probably be obtained from somebody who can actually serve.
After our German visitors had departed, Cornwall had been conquered and approximately two weeks had passed without the Richardt household being completely dominated by organised sport, normal service resumed.
For me, that meant going back to work on Monday.
For our son, it meant going back onto a tennis court.
I am still uncertain which of us had the easier transition.
Over late spring and early summer, tennis tournaments had taken something of a back seat.
Not tennis practice, I should add.
He has continued hitting balls, working on his serve and generally attempting to make yellow felt objects travel across nets with increasing levels of menace.
But tournaments?
Cricket had taken over.
There are only so many weekends in a British summer, and apparently our son intends to occupy all of them competitively. Once the cricket season started properly, tennis tournaments became increasingly difficult to squeeze between league matches, cup games, cricket festivals and the occasional other activity that normal families probably refer to as having a weekend.
Now, however, the junior cricket season is slowly coming towards its conclusion.
Which can mean only one thing.
Tennis tournaments are back.
And naturally, after a relatively quiet couple of weeks, we decided to ease him gently back into competitive tennis by entering him into a Grade 3 U10 tournament in Taunton.
Because nothing says gentle reintroduction quite like throwing your eight-year-old into one of the stronger levels of county junior tennis.
Welcome to Grade 3
Grade 3 tennis is where things start becoming considerably more serious.
At Grade 5 you will encounter plenty of good club players, developing county players and children finding their way around competitive tennis.
Grade 3 is different.
This is where, to use an entirely inappropriate but traditional phrase, things start separating the boys from the men.
Or perhaps more accurately, the very good eight- and nine-year-olds from the frighteningly good eight- and nine-year-olds.
The draws start filling with established county players, children travelling considerable distances to compete and youngsters for whom hitting a forehand winner appears to be less an occasional accident and more part of a carefully developed strategy.
Some Grade 3 tournaments can also have implications for qualification or progression towards higher regional levels.
This particular one was technically just a Grade 3.
I use the word just very loosely.
Because when I looked through the entry list the evening before, it rapidly became apparent that this was an extremely strong tournament.
I had a brief discussion with my wife, Olga, about our son’s realistic prospects.
He has played Grade 3 events at U9 before and struggled at times, although he has also produced some excellent wins at that level. He certainly isn’t a pushover.
The problem is that U10 represents another significant jump.
So far, his U10 tournament experience has mainly been Grade 5, which has felt about right.
And there is another factor which our son doesn’t particularly appreciate.
Age.
At U10 level, some opponents can be nearly two years older than him.
Twenty-three months doesn’t sound particularly dramatic when you’re an adult.
When you’re eight, twenty-three months is practically an entire geological era.
It can mean almost two additional years of tennis practice, physical development, match experience, emotional maturity and strength.
Adults understand this.
Eight-year-olds apparently do not.
Our son simply sees another child standing on the opposite side of the net.
And there are only two possible outcomes.
Win.
Or lose.
The concept of excellent performance against a significantly older and more experienced player doesn’t appear anywhere in his internal scoring system.
Neither does valuable developmental experience.
Those are phrases invented by parents during the drive home.
So when Olga and I looked at the draw the night before, there was a small part of us wondering whether this was perhaps a step too far.
Were we being cruel?
Were we entering him into tournaments before he was physically ready for that level?
Would he eventually appreciate the experience?
Or, at the age of 25, would he bring it up during Christmas dinner while explaining how his childhood was essentially one long FAST4 qualifying event?
Only the future will answer that one.
The Richardt Competitive Gene
What our son does possess, however, is grit.
Lots of it.
Possibly an unreasonable amount.
And, looking at his parents, this probably shouldn’t come as a major surprise.
I know reasonably well what it takes not to be a pushover in competition.
I started playing chess when I was six years old and spent much of my childhood competing in tournaments around Germany and later across Europe.
Chess might not look particularly athletic.
Nobody is sprinting down a touchline.
Nobody is diving for a ball.
The biggest physical exertion is occasionally walking to the toilet while your opponent is thinking.
But competitive chess requires a fairly specific personality.
You need stubbornness.
You need patience.
You need resilience.
You need the ability to sit opposite somebody older, stronger and considerably more experienced and somehow convince yourself that you are still capable of beating them.
And above all, you need grit.
Losing is unavoidable.
Losing repeatedly is also unavoidable.
The important bit is coming back the following morning, sitting down again and trying to beat the next person.
That mentality stayed with me throughout decades of competitive chess and, to a fairly significant degree, our son seems to have inherited it nicely.
Possibly too nicely.
My wife is equally competitive, although she hasn’t accumulated quite the same mileage in organised sporting competition.
She does, however, bring something else to the genetic package.
She grew up behind the Iron Curtain, where life didn’t necessarily hand out participation medals for simply turning up.
There was a certain expectation that you got on with things.
You needed to be robust.
Stubborn.
Resourceful.
And preferably capable of surviving whatever bureaucracy, weather, school system or queue had been placed in front of you that particular morning.
Weak negotiation skills were probably not an evolutionary advantage.
So if you combine my childhood of sitting at chessboards around Europe trying desperately not to get demolished by adults with my wife’s Eastern European school of stop complaining and get on with it, you probably arrive somewhere remarkably close to our son.
A perfect combination.
Or a dangerous experiment.
Time will tell.
I have written about his competitiveness numerous times before, but whether he steps onto a tennis court, a Taekwondo mat, a cricket pitch or starts a junior parkrun, something changes.
He wants to win.
Badly.
Within the rules, naturally.
He will do everything legally possible to squeeze every last drop out of himself.
If somebody is better than him, fine.
But they are going to have to prove it.
Preferably repeatedly.
That mentality is something I recognise very well.
When I was the youngest chess player in a tournament, I didn’t particularly care that the person opposite me had played chess for twenty years longer than I had.
They had sixteen pieces.
I had sixteen pieces.
Game on.
Our son appears to have adopted approximately the same approach to sport.
He doesn’t particularly care that another U10 tennis player might be nearly two years older, stronger or considerably more experienced.
There is a net between them.
They both have rackets.
Therefore, as far as he is concerned, the matter is entirely negotiable.
Sometimes this stubbornness is one of his greatest strengths.
Sometimes the emotional rollercoaster accompanying that determination gets in his way and actually prevents him from performing at his best.
That particular subject has been extensively documented on this blog and probably deserves its own ICD-10 code by now.
So the evening before the tournament, Olga and I found ourselves asking the slightly uncomfortable parental question:
Are we pushing him too far?
Is playing Grade 3 U10 tennis at eight years old useful?
Or are we simply setting him up for a morning where somebody older, stronger and technically better repeatedly hits tennis balls past him?
We don’t know.
Perhaps when he is 18 he will tell us we did exactly the right thing.
Perhaps he will send us an invoice for counselling.
Although, given the combination of inherited stubbornness on both sides of the family, he’ll probably negotiate the invoice first.
8:45am – Because Children Don’t Need Lie-Ins
Thankfully, the tournament was in Taunton, so despite his first match being scheduled for 8:45am, there was no major expedition required.
Nine players had entered and were divided into three groups of three, playing a round-robin format.
Matches were best of three FAST4 sets.
For anyone unfamiliar with FAST4, sets are played to four games rather than six, meaning matches are theoretically shorter.
I say theoretically because junior tennis has a remarkable ability to turn four games into an event lasting approximately the same length as Lawrence of Arabia.
If players reach one set each, the deciding set is replaced by a match tie-break to ten points, with a two-point winning margin.
Simple.
Until you’re watching your child play one.
Then basic arithmetic becomes surprisingly difficult.
Our son entered the tournament as the lowest-ranked player and was drawn in a group with Kit Williamson from Devon and Danny Richmond from South Wales.
Not exactly the group you would design if your objective was to gently increase confidence.
First up was Danny.
Danny is the same age as our son.
That particular excuse was therefore unavailable.
And Danny was excellent.
Our son lost 4–0, 4–0.
A comprehensive defeat on paper.
According to Olga, however, the score didn’t quite tell the whole story. Several games were much closer than the result suggests, but whenever they reached the important points, Danny was simply stronger, more consistent, and better.
Which, inconveniently, is rather important in tennis.
Danny didn’t merely beat our son.
He proceeded to beat pretty much everyone else as well and eventually won the tournament convincingly.
So at least there was some comfort in discovering that the child who had just dismantled our son was spending the rest of the day dismantling everybody else too.
Kit Happens
Next came Kit Williamson.
Our son has played Kit before.
Their head-to-head record isn’t particularly flattering from our perspective.
This match did nothing to improve it.
Another 4–0, 4–0 defeat.
Two matches.
Four sets lost.
Sixteen games conceded.
Zero games won.
Excellent.
At this stage, tournament victory had become statistically challenging.
The two defeats meant our son wouldn’t progress into the main compass draw and would instead move into the additional positional matches.
This is where junior tournaments become particularly useful.
You’re out of contention for the trophy, but you’re not finished.
Instead of packing up the racket, finding the nearest McDonald’s and pretending tennis doesn’t exist, you continue playing against others who have found the morning similarly character-building.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere in Somerset…
There were two other Somerset boys in the tournament: Reggie O’Sullivan and Tommy Harrigan, both from the older U10 age group.
Reggie progressed into the stronger side of the draw and eventually finished an excellent third, losing his semi-final to Danny Richmond before beating Kit Williamson in the third-place match.
Which rather confirmed that our son’s original group hadn’t exactly been assembled from volunteers found wandering through Vivary Park.
Tommy, meanwhile, dropped into the same positional group as our son and Hugo Yee.
By this point, it was early afternoon.
They had been at the tennis centre for something approaching six hours.
This is another wonderful feature of junior sport.
Children play perhaps an hour of actual tennis.
Parents complete an entire working shift.
The Comeback
Our son’s next match was against Tommy.
And suddenly things changed.
After two rather painful opening matches, he produced an excellent performance and won:
4–0, 4–3.
That was a significant result.
Not merely because he had finally won.
But because he had responded.
After being beaten 4–0, 4–0 twice that morning, it would have been extremely easy to mentally disappear.
Eight years old.
Hot day.
Long tournament.
Six hours at the venue.
Two heavy defeats already behind him.
Nobody would have been particularly surprised if he had simply gone through the motions.
Instead, he reset.
And won.
That, for me, was probably the most important part of the tournament.
Not the technical tennis.
Not the score.
Not the ranking points.
The response.
Tommy then played Hugo and won a close three-set match, taking the deciding match tie-break 10–5.
Which meant our son’s final match against Hugo suddenly mattered.
A Familiar Opponent
Our son knows Hugo Yee well.
They have played each other several times, with Hugo’s only victory over him coming last year at the U9 regional tournament in Bath.
By now, fatigue could easily have become a factor.
But according to Olga, our son was completely focused.
And when he is focused, without the emotional side becoming involved, he can be extremely difficult to play against.
He made relatively light work of the match.
4–1, 4–0.
Another convincing win.
Two defeats to start the day.
Two wins to finish it.
Top of his positional group.
Seventh overall.
Not bad for the lowest-ranked player in the draw.
Remote Parenting
Unfortunately, I missed all of this because I was at work.
Instead, I spent the day relying on messages from Olga and repeatedly checking the online tournament results whenever clinical activity permitted.
There is something slightly surreal about working in hospital whilst periodically looking at a phone screen to discover whether your child has just won a FAST4 set.
One minute you’re discussing Upper GI patients.
The next you’re refreshing a junior tennis webpage.
Modern parenting.
Eventually, around 5:30pm, they arrived home.
Our son was exhausted.
Hardly surprising.
They had spent virtually the entire day at the tennis centre, much of it outdoors underneath relentless sunshine.
Apparently, Britain has now officially abandoned its previous climate model of grey cloud and drizzle and has decided to become southern Spain.
Nobody appears to have been consulted.
So, Was It a Successful Tournament?
Absolutely.
Did he win the tournament?
No.
Did he finish on the podium?
No.
Did he spend the morning discovering exactly how strong Grade 3 U10 tennis can be?
Very much yes.
But he also demonstrated that he can compete at that level.
Not yet consistently.
Not against everyone.
And certainly not without difficult matches.
But after being comprehensively beaten twice, he stayed in the tournament mentally, regrouped and finished with two convincing victories.
That is probably considerably more useful for his development than entering a weaker competition and winning every match 4–0.
Although I strongly suspect our son would disagree with this sophisticated developmental analysis and simply prefer the trophy.
And perhaps that’s exactly how an eight-year-old competitor should think.
Parents can worry about development.
Coaches can worry about technique.
Children can worry about winning the next point.
There was also something rather satisfying about the shape of the day.
He started by being shown, fairly brutally, what the top end of Grade 3 U10 tennis looks like.
He then had a choice.
He could let those defeats define the rest of his tournament.
Or he could carry on.
He carried on.
That stubborn refusal to disappear when things are going badly is probably the part Olga and I recognise most.
Maybe that is the Richardt competitive gene.
Or perhaps simply the natural response of a child who doesn’t particularly like losing.
Either way, he’ll probably need it.
Because junior tennis doesn’t get easier from here.
And Next…
There is now a brief return to cricket before tennis takes over again on the weekend of 22–23 August.
First comes a Grade 5 U10 tournament in Cheddar.
Then, the following day, the Somerset Championships begin.
Our son particularly wanted to enter the U9 event this year after missing last year’s championships because of his well-documented facial injury.
A couple of days later comes the U10 Championship, including doubles, where we have managed to convince Henry to team up with him.
That should be interesting.
Two young tennis players.
One side of the court.
Shared responsibility.
What could possibly go wrong?
For now, however, it’s back to some cricket, tennis practice, piano lessons and all the other activities filling the Richardt family calendar.
Because apparently those two relatively quiet weeks were not the start of a calmer lifestyle.
They were merely the rain delay.
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