In which I learn how much can be done with very little, as long as you have enthusiasm, imagination and a role model. From home-made pinãtas to bedroom wrestling bouts, the whole family discovers that if you want to play, you can find a way.
WHILE I WAS making this first foray into more structured coaching and club organisation, Jamie and Andy left their toddler years behind. They had developed great hand-eye and foot-eye coordination skills at a young age, simply by playing all sorts of home-made games around the house using pretty much anything we had lying around. Part of this compendium of fun was born out of my love of all things sporty, and partly out of necessity. The weather isn’t so good in Scotland and I had to invent things to tire out two active little boys without spending a fortune. Naturally, as they spent so much time down at the clubhouse surrounded by children playing tennis, they wanted to play almost as soon as they could walk.
Their first ‘game’ of tennis was bumping balloons across the sofa, swiftly followed by kitchen table tennis using biscuit tin lids as bats and cereal boxes for the net. Then they graduated to swingball in the back garden with their tiny rackets before making their first court from chalk lines, two chairs and a piece of rope in the driveway. There was never any shortage of kids to entertain them at the club, and before long they were comfortable on the proper courts and had moved on from sponge balls to grown-up tennis balls. You could now buy kid’s rackets (so much shorter than the junior sized one I had played at eleven) but pressureless balls and small courts hadn’t been invented yet. They’d use both hands to hit the ball initially, and stand as close to the net as they dared.
Things moved up a notch when Andy was almost six years old and barely as tall as the net was high. After a spirited afternoon of playing tennis down on the bottom courts at Dunblane with my mum and me – an afternoon I thought he was enjoying, by the way – he threw his (ridiculously big) racket to the ground and let out a huge sigh.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘I’m bored of playing with you and Gran,’ he said, looking at us. ‘I want to play a proper match.’
Once I’d got over my momentary fury that my precocious five-year-old had decided that I was not his perfect practice partner, it dawned on me that while watching the rest of us he had not only worked out what needed to be done on the court, but how to keep score and play a proper game. And now he was desperate to start playing properly himself.
If he had played against Jamie they would have just ended up fighting. They were always playing their own made-up games, or having kickabouts together, but if they had practised formally together, they’d have lasted ten minutes before it ended in dispute: ‘Don’t hit it so hard’, ‘Stop making me run’, and so on. Mercifully they had a supply of parents and grandparents who were happy to play with them, so we could usually implement a bit of ‘divide and conquer’ for informal playtime. But where proper matches were concerned, the youngest league at the time was for fourteen and under, and the youngest age allowed in the competition was twelve. Oh God, I thought, I can’t wait six years before he can start competing. We’ll all go mad.
So I called up five or six of the coaches I had met on my travels across Scotland and asked, ‘Do you fancy coming down to Dunblane if we put together a little Under 10s competition? Just a fun thing … lots of little mini matches, we’ll get the older kids to keep score and have a picnic afterwards? And water bombs? And swingball?’
I was pretty determined to persuade them.
And persuade them I did. A whole load of them, coaches, parents, kids, the lot, came down and we had a great day, our first ever Under 10s competition. It wasn’t an official tournament, just a fun event, but fun it certainly was. At the end of the day, the other coaches agreed that it had been a great success and decided to take on setting up a return event at their club. And so it started. In time, these events became official Under 10s competitions, but they began as just a good way to allow the smaller kids to play the game.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but there was an extraordinary little crop of talented young players taking part in that inaugural event. Elena Baltacha, the future British number 1 was there, aged nine. It was her first proper competition, and she was already a standout. She made the final which was umpired by one of the older club juniors. Play stopped at one stage and both players plus the umpire were stood on court with their hands up for help – I assumed they’d had some kind of dispute with the score, as they usually did at that age.
‘What’s wrong, girls?’ I asked, looking around.
‘We’ve run out of balls,’ explained the young girl from Aberdeen whom Elena was playing. ‘They’re all stuck in the fence and none of us can reach them.’
I looked across. They weren’t wrong. Elena had this unbelievable service action already and was so strong that the balls had been repeatedly served into the back fence – without bouncing first – and were lodged too high for small arms to reach. It was no surprise that she went on to make top 50 in the world.
Jamie and Andy were playing competitively for the first time as well, and so were Jamie Baker and Colin Fleming. All of these kids went on to play in the Davis Cup – the World Cup of tennis – and yet that day I think I was probably more worried about the parking and whether we had enough sausages for the hot dogs. When you run a big junior tournament like this you get all of the mums and dads and grannies and granddads coming along, too, so if you have thirty kids you’ve got at least sixty adults in attendance who want toasties, hot dogs, jumbo ketchup, chocolate biscuits, paper towels and plenty of tea and coffee all day. Of course, this was a great opportunity for us to make a little bit of money for the club to keep the whole programme of activities going. So on tournament mornings I’d be up at the crack of dawn, heading for the supermarket in time for opening, loading up my car with trolleys full of food to last the whole day, and then off to the clubhouse where some of the other mums would take care of the cooking, the serving and the rest of it while I tried to get my focus back on the tennis.
Well, I say the tennis … I also had a water balloon masterplan. Just in case any kids came off court dejected by losing a match, I would keep a supply of filled water balloons behind the clubhouse all day, ready to distract and cheer up those who needed a boost. And that of course meant finding a couple of discreet, diligent older kids who were prepared to fill them without causing chaos at the beginning of the day. Keeping a sense of fun about the whole event was an essential part of getting everyone from grannies to little sisters to keep on turning up. But this was the first time, and I had no idea if I could pull it off … until I had.
The whole event galvanised me. Not for the first time, I realised that where I saw an opportunity for something, other people saw hurdles and complications. I knew it probably wasn’t going to happen unless I got up and did something about it. Scotland just wasn’t ready for tennis as a national sport back then, and there were no real links between schools and clubs in terms of community building either. It was up to volunteers to drive activity.
I discovered that there was a Midland Bank primary school tennis championship – a UK-wide event – but the schools that took part in it were the ones with tennis courts on their premises: private schools. That wouldn’t do. So I set up my own Dunblane primary school team, entered it in the Midland Bank competition, and used the club courts for the matches. It was quicker to sort something out myself than to search around for someone else to do it, so I got used to the idea that if I wanted opportunities for my kids and my town’s kids, I was going to have to create them myself.
As part of this move to try and make more happen for the club and the junior players, I decided to take my second coaching qualification. It was a week-long residential course at the same sports centre in Inverclyde where I had gone for my national squad training weekends as a teenager. My mum came to the rescue and looked after the boys during the daytime while Will was at work and I was busy learning. There were a few people on the course who I knew from my own playing days, so it was great fun, but I ended the week a little disappointed by its actual content.
I passed the course with relative ease, but once again I felt that nagging feeling that I hadn’t really been taught what I actually needed to know. I probably passed the course because I was clever enough and had played to a high level – it wasn’t because I had learned how to be a better coach. Yes, there was certain useful information – mainly technical and tactical – that I had picked up, but what I desperately needed help and advice on was how to practically apply the knowledge in a teaching environment. What I really wanted to see was a great coach in action, working with various age groups and levels of kids. I knew how much I had to learn and I wanted someone to emulate.
This kind of pragmatism was rarely addressed. We barely saw a child the entire week, so there was precious little practical experience or training. We practiced on each other, but we were all adults, all coaches and all decent players already. It felt as if I was being taught to be a dentist by being shown a lot of images of teeth, and being allowed to touch lots of the little metal implements … but going nowhere near a mouth. We discussed ‘the tooth’, but not the nerve system attached to it.
Nevertheless, the course gave me the confidence to carry on building the tennis community at Dunblane. It was still a rather low-key operation. I barely charged anything for my lessons as I felt that I wasn’t as qualified as some of the other ‘proper’ coaches who worked at the big clubs in Glasgow or Edinburgh. It was a sort of vicious circle; I didn’t charge much as I wasn’t sure I was worth it, therefore I didn’t earn much, which in turn reinforced my anxieties around other, slicker coaches. And of course the main result was that as a family, we were skint. Everything we did was on a shoestring, or in some cases, a bit of an embarrassment.
One bleak winter’s night around this time I had parked outside the clubhouse and gone to take a group lesson when I saw some guy reverse straight into the driver’s side of my car. I saw it all from the court and was shouting at him to stop but it was too dark, too foggy and he obviously couldn’t hear or see me. The damage was done. I had excess on my car insurance but it was something like £200 at the time and there was no way I could afford to pay that in those days, so I had to wait for his insurance to come through before I could get it fixed. The driver’s door was jammed, so for weeks I had to climb over to the driver’s seat via the passenger door, clambering over the gearbox. During this wait I drove down to watch some of the kids at the new indoor courts that had recently opened at Stirling University in 1994. As I was hauling myself out of my car, a tennis coach I knew from Glasgow pulled up in a great big shiny Audi estate next to me.
‘What are you doing, Judy?’ he asked.
‘Oh, somebody bashed into my car!’ I said, trying to laugh it off.
‘Why don’t you just get it fixed?’ he said, grinning as if this was a great big joke.
I tried to laugh along, secretly mortified at the truth behind why I hadn’t got it sorted yet. He popped his flash boot and got out a brand new hopper filled with brand new balls. I quietly sighed, and wondered if I should start charging proper money for what I was doing.
It took another car door situation before I had the courage to take things up a level. I was at the ATM at the Bank of Scotland in Dunblane and bumped into a boy who had been the reserve for our school team the year that Dunblane High School had won the schools’ tennis championships. He was a footballer now – one of those kids who was good at everything: tennis club champion, golf club champion, squash club champion, and a great footballer to boot. He actually went on to play for Scotland, but at that time he had just signed for his first club.
‘Congratulations!’ I said. ‘I heard you have just signed for Leicester City!’
He seemed pleased to see me, this eighteen-year-old who had been such a big part of my first coaching triumph. But he let on that he was a little dejected as he had been injured lately and not able to play. Then came the stinger.
‘It’s okay though,’ he confessed, ‘I’m still on six grand a week.’
I walked away, inhaling sharply. Six grand! I was lucky if I managed to make that in six months! From time to time I would wonder if I should be doing something else, to make a better salary. But the thought always passed. Perhaps it was to my long-term advantage that tennis coaching as a decent career was really only in its infancy; I was able to be a part of it from the very start. Scotland has long been a golfing nation, and all the golf clubs had pros employed to work in them, giving lessons, running competitions and selling equipment in their pro shops. But Scotland was still getting to grips with the idea of a professional set-up in tennis. Maybe the relative innocence of the sport back then helped me make the right choices. The culture of volunteers has faded away a bit now, and many parents have sadly lost confidence in playing with their kids themselves and opt to pay others to do it instead. A culture of obsession with excellence has diminished the value of the sort of fun that can be had in families and in the community with small-scale local events.
I must have been influenced by the relaxed, inclusive attitude towards sport that my own parents had demonstrated. They firmly believed in its ability to build communities and they passed that legacy on to me. I just refused to be put off by the idea that tennis was for privileged kids, or places with fancy facilities. I think there may well be a few people out there who still think that I brought my boys up to be tennis players out of some sort of frustrated ambition, simply because I was a player myself who might have been able to go further. But I didn’t: I approached their playing as the daughter of two keen tennis players, not as the wannabe mother of two tennis stars. And the thought that I restricted them to just tennis back then is hilarious – they did absolutely everything when they were little!
They adored swimming, especially if it involved me bundling them and a group of their friends into the car to go to the water slides. Andy was fanatical about football and for Jamie it was golf. These were sports they did mainly with their dad but this was on top of the tennis, and an endless amount of general running around and trashing the garden, too. This constant sense of play meant that they became pretty good at their various activities, not because they were being ‘trained’ but because they enjoyed it, wanted to win and so worked out the best ways to do so. Whatever new games they were playing or making up, they invented a scoring system and followed it rigorously. I really don’t buy into the idea that it needs to be all about top-notch coaches, expensive programmes, individual lessons and strength and conditioning sessions from childhood if you want to succeed.
When I think about what Andy did when he was younger, he didn’t have any sort of individual fitness training programmes the way that twelve-year-olds do now if they are ‘identified’ by the system as a future star. He played football and football provided his ‘strength and conditioning training’. He ran around for an hour or so, changing direction, learning how to be quick off the mark, honing his anticipation skills, using and strengthening muscles tennis might not employ and resting others. All of the things that come with playing another sport weren’t holding him back; they were an advantage.
The opening of the first indoor tennis centre in Scotland at Stirling University – only a couple of miles away – also made a difference in edging tennis to the top of the boys’ interests. There is so much research to show that if anyone – especially a child – has to travel for longer than forty minutes to get to play their sport the chances are there will be a limit in how long they will keep it up. If your parents are doggedly taking you on two-hour drives each way to train, your chosen sport will lose its charms pretty sharpish, particularly if you don’t have a social group training and playing with you. Any devotion has to be driven by your own passion for the sport, not an adult’s ambition for you. The Stirling courts were ten minutes away. The fact that these facilities turned up almost on our doorstep when they did, enabling me to run my district programme from that base from such an early stage, played a crucial part in all of our careers unfolding the way that they have. You don’t just need natural ability to reach the top in a discipline, you need opportunity as well, and it was a stroke of good luck for all of us that the tennis centre opened when it did.
As a family we were so fortunate to have those facilities at Stirling, but the boys were even more fortunate to have people around them eager to support their interests. They had grandparents who were always happy to have a kickabout or take them out to the golf course, or the play park or engage with their latest invented game. When we had the cash, it was off to the pool for the water slides and wave machines, or an occasional Hibs football match, and Will was brilliant at playing football with them for hours on end. And of course, they had me for tennis.
Well, they had me and all the other kids at the tennis courts. Older kids that I was working with were always willing to play with them, especially as the boys got better. And if there wasn’t a spare court then there was table tennis, swingball or carpet bowls. This mix of ages and abilities didn’t just improve their skills and knowledge of the game, it also gave them an emotional resilience that comes from having to experience winning and losing among your peer group, again and again – and face to face.
These days kids spend less time being physical and more time sitting at a computer. They learn to win or lose to the sound of a screen trilling at them. Developmentally, it isn’t the same because the hurt never feels quite as bad; it’s entirely private. You don’t develop that ability to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, restore your pride and have another bash at it. A computer doesn’t force you to work out a way to emotionally navigate a path through its response, sportsmanlike or otherwise. A computer might beep ‘ta-da’ at you, but then … well, you can just turn it off.
These were tough lessons for me to learn as well, because I was so often present when they were winning or losing these games, in a way that parents rarely are these days. I took four kids down to an Under 10s tournament in Wrexham. It was an Adidas Challenge, one of many which took place all over the UK. Andy was only about seven. He was still holding the racket with two hands, bless him! He was due to play a boy much older than him – probably about ten years old – and much bigger than him. I was watching from the café and trying to keep score from a distance, just to keep an eye out for any funny business as I suspected that a child so much bigger might be disconcerted by being beaten by a sprat Andy’s size.
I was pretty sure that they had made it to match point and Andy played a perfect drop shot. The boy ran to hit it but only made it at the third bounce, so Andy went to shake hands. The boy wasn’t having any of it though, and insisted that he had got to the ball in time. From a distance, I could see that the tournament referee was then called and it was each child’s word against the other. Of course, presumably based on size alone, the referee assumed that the older boy was correct about the scoring, awarded him the point and a distraught Andy went on to lose the match.
Nothing like that had ever happened to him before and Andy was inconsolable. More angry than tearful. Obviously, I was furious, and wanted to storm over there and throttle this other tyke as I watched Andy trying to deal with the unfairness of the situation. But it doesn’t do any good to create a fuss or behave inappropriately in front of your child. I slowly ground my back teeth and kept my mouth shut.
I’ve seen parents leap onto court after matches to call the opponent a cheat. The parent may have the best of intentions, but the child learns nothing of value. They see their parent shouting in anger, and absorb little beyond the fact that to lose a match is to prompt frightening behaviour in their loved ones. I have held my tongue many times, despite how painful it can be seeing your child slighted. I have seen kids not wanting to go home in the car with their parents when they’ve lost a match because the response it provokes in their parents makes the child feel they’ve failed. Tennis is a tough sport for a little kid – out there on their own on this huge court, with a complicated scoring system, without an umpire and no team support – but I came to understand that no child ever enjoyed it more because their parents kept forcing the issue. Again and again it was clear as a bell: the passion must come from the player not the parent.
Still, no matter how much I tried to step back, Andy developed the same competitive streak that had shone in my father and which I recognised in myself. Jamie was much more like my mum, happy to play and to play as much as the opportunities would let him. But Andy wanted to win everything, and if he didn’t he would stomp off in a fury even from about three or four when he was playing cards or dominoes. I think the reason for this competitiveness was because he had grown up with an older sibling who was always slightly bigger and slightly better than him, for as long as he could possibly remember. They were close in age, so not everyone could immediately tell who was the older child, but Jamie still had that edge for at least a decade.
This constant availability of a willing and very able adversary contributed significantly to make Andy the mega-competitor he is today. He could never be the oldest, so he was forced – day in, day out – to find ways to be just as good. And he leapt at the challenge. Jamie would ride it out calmly if Andy flipped up a board game in his face, puce with fury. I think his brother’s equilibrium actually enraged him even more. We used to say Andy had a witching hour between about 6.30 and 7.30 p.m. where he would just … blow. But as soon as it was over, he was fine again and it was time for bed.
Witching hour aside, it was of course a source of huge pride to watch them grow into such wonderful little sportsmen, and to enjoy spending so much time in each other’s company. But there were times, and there were games, that nearly tipped me over the edge.
One such obsession was WWF: the World Wrestling Federation, which was big on TV at the time. Andy was absolutely mad about The Rock and Jamie loved Stone Cold Steve Austin. But it wasn’t enough for the boys just to watch; so great was their passion that they had to take part. So they set about creating their own arena and their own bouts.
The first stage was – obviously – the crafting of their wrestling belts. This was the quietest part of the entire process, and it didn’t take me long to realise that I should cherish this relative peace before the action began. They would sit at the kitchen table with some old breakfast cereal boxes, cutting the cardboard into the shape of large cummerbunds. Out came the felt pens, the glitter, the glue and the stickers, and the belts would be decorated ornately in a manner befitting a WWF wrestler from Dunblane. It was the full Blue Peter, as they measured each other up, got out the Sellotape for repeated fittings and eventually decided that they were ready.
At this point they would take off their tops for ‘authenticity’ and set about laying out the ‘arena’ – the two single duvets from their bunk beds laid together to form a square. Then, in their tracksuit bottoms and home-made glitter belts, on a floor made up of two identical Manchester United duvet covers, combat would commence. They would use loud American voices, announcing the contestants, and they would stand and bow before attacking each other with a viciousness I could barely believe siblings could ever have for each other.
As I sat downstairs at the kitchen table, my spreadsheets and semi-formed tournament plans laid out in front of me, I could hear the ceiling shudder above me. There was one occasion when the living-room ceiling actually appeared to bounce, and small showers of dust began to rain down in front of the TV I was trying to watch. I went upstairs to see what on earth they were up to. I opened the bedroom door – with difficulty – because the Manchester United arena was down on the floor again, wedged against the door. There was a stepladder from the cupboard downstairs in the corner of the room. And the lampshade was swinging wildly.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked.
‘We’re having a ladder match,’ came the answer.
‘What on earth is a ladder match?’ They looked at me as if it was shameful that I didn’t already know.
‘Well, you have to pin someone down for the count of three, and then climb to the top of the ladder and ding the bell.’
‘The bell?’
They pointed up to the lampshade, now swaying as if complicit in trying to make the game sound reasonable. It was apparently playing the part of a large, boxing-ring style bell for the duration of this game.
‘Could you try and keep it down please?’ I asked, before closing the door again. I wanted to be furious, but I was actually chuckling to myself, secretly proud of their apparently limitless imaginations.
Children learn by example. They are inspired by what they see. The boys had watched the wrestling, and seen the bell and created their own game, just as they had improvised tennis or badminton using balloons or bean bags over the washing line, or two chairs and a piece of rope with a balloon when no courts or balls were available. As well as an example, kids need someone to spar with. You can do all the training drills you want, but it will never replace the emotional landscape that is created by play, and play was the fabric of their life.
Later, when I started working exclusively with girls, I often thought back to the WWF belts and the ladder game. The boys had seen men playing like this on telly, and they had no hesitation in believing that they could play those games too. They never doubted themselves. If you can see it, you can be it. And they could see male sportsmen all around them, so they believed it was within their grasp to be sportsmen. Were there many women playing sport on TV at that time? Very, very few.
But however much the boys were enjoying play, my mind was turning to what else I could achieve at work.