My love hate relationship with the internet

December 23 in Oscar Wegner's Blog by Mark Carruthers No Comments

I love the internet.

It gave us youtube which in turn gave us the crazy nasty ass honey badger; the opportunity to waste copious amounts of time re-watching the Michael Jordan years Chicago Bulls pre-game introductions; old school tennis matches as well as eztv.it which allows me to download English speaking shows which in turn preserves my sanity and therefore my marriage.

On the downside, the internet has also led to thousands of in our case instructional tennis sites popping up. These sites tend to breed like rabbits and often end up joining forces into some giant evil super rabbit.

If you are stupid enough to give even one site your email address then once they join forces with one of their friends who is hawking some trifle about the 17 step process that will lead you down the yellow brick road to Federer’s forehand, you end up getting bombarded with email after email extolling the virtues of this and that and every other ‘secret’ of the pro’s.

It’s a waterfall of crap.

Now, I don’t happen to pay any attention to 99% of it but wouldn’t you know it, parents of kids I teach certainly do. In fact, the internet has become a minefield for coaches.

I could count on one hand the amount of weeks this year that I haven’t had to deal with some hair brained theory about this and that or the need to dramatically change the direction of said son or daughters training because Mummy/Daddy/Grandma or Grandma subscribes to this site and this week they got three emails about the newest way to do whatever.

I recently went back to my home country of New Zealand for two weeks of surfing, sleeping on the beach and too much partying only to return to a scene straight out of a tennis horror show.

You see, I live in an area of Europe where it seems like I am one of the only people who teachers open stance on both the forehand and two handed backhand. Seriously, I’m not kidding. It’s like living in the middle ages of tennis.

I encourage kids to wait and stalk the ball and would rather eat a bowl of worms then see someone take their racket back early and turn sideways. But, one particular boy I coach has a relative who is also a coach but would rather eat a bowl of worms than see his nephew wait for the ball, hit from an open stance and god forbid, try and hit the ball 3-4 feet over the net.

Every time I go away, coach X takes advantage of my absence – and he’s not the only one.

I battle for 3 months to build good habits only to get them shredded in 2 weeks.

I know this is a bit of a rant but everyone needs to get things off their chest. So this is my turn and you’re just gonna have to deal with it. Europe may produce the world’s best tennis players right now but after having lived and coached at a high level here for over 18 months, it’s more because of luck/access to competition/kids telling their coaches to leave them the eff alone/or something else than tons of good coaching.

Quite frankly, I’m baffled by the whole thing.

The internet is also a massive pain in the proverbial. More information is not better. Better is better and as my Dad used to say when I was about to go and play a game of rugby, keep it simple stupid.

So in conclusion, I know that was not the most coordinated piece of writing I’ve ever done, but I think people need to constantly be reminded that often the best way to progress is to ignore the latest biggest and best piece of information that comes your way.

Find a path, build momentum and stick to it. And if that doesn’t work then there’s always youtube and ‘The Story of Festivus’ to fall back on.

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