In which I realise, for the very first time, that I may not be welcome on account of my gender and make a choice: don’t get sad, get mad. Use it as rocket fuel for your determination, making sure your work is what improves, not anyone else’s ego.
ONCE AGAIN, WHEN I tried to reach towards that next professional goal, it was a woman who stuck her neck out for me and helped in ways I will never be able to thank her for. Having made the decision to commit to some further training, I enquired about what the next step was for me. The body in charge of such things is the Lawn Tennis Association, or the LTA, tennis’s governing body for the whole of Great Britain.
At the time, their top qualification was called the Professional Tennis Coach’s Award, a two-week residential course with a series of on- and off-court examinations at the end of it. But when I made the enquiry that day, the woman who headed up coach education at the LTA at the time took me aside and told me very specifically that they were putting together a new course called the Performance Coach Award, which would be a much more comprehensive qualification. It would be a bigger commitment though, with workshops and projects spread over the course of an entire year. She strongly advised me to wait and apply for that course. Her foresight resulted in a much better qualification for me.
I could never have undertaken the course without the encouragement of my husband and the help of my mum and dad. The boys were both at school by now, but there were still endless rounds of school pick-ups, activities to get to, dinners to be made and bedtimes. There was a huge amount to consider before I even had the guts to apply. First was the expense – the course was not cheap, especially for us at a time when we were still very strapped for cash. I saved for months, putting money aside wherever I could, and taking on any extra coaching I was offered. And then there was the travel. The ten workshops each lasted between two and four days and were dotted all around England, but never in Scotland. For a good year of my life I was traipsing up and down the country even more than I had been used to for tennis tournaments, and this time I was on my own. It was a feat entirely dependent on having a good support network.
I was more nervous than I had been for years when I attended that first workshop. There were twenty of us in the initial intake: eighteen men and two women. I had never done anything on this scale before. Would I be able to understand the content? Or manage the time commitment? Or cope with the coursework? These anxieties were compounded when, on the very first day, I was told by one of the tutors on the course that one of the male coaches who had applied for a place and not got one, had issued a formal complaint about me getting on the course instead of him. What could I, a woman with young children, possibly offer to performance coaching? he had written. The implication was very clear: this was not the place for me. A woman, indeed a mum, did not deserve a chance like this, particularly if she were taking the chance away from a man. It was the first time in my working life that a comment about my gender was made to me so openly. And I was shocked.
I didn’t even know if the lack of women in tennis was specific to Scotland or if it was a national – or international – trend. I had been busy being a mum, and as a coach this was the first time I had ventured out of Scotland to learn. When I had gone into coaching a couple of years earlier there was no one else doing it, so there hadn’t been anyone to run up against. I was making things happen where there had been a vacuum. When I took a team to a competition, as I had been doing over the last few months, it was usually the parents and grandparents who were there supporting the kids. I hadn’t had the chance to learn anything about the infrastructure of the various district or county set-ups across the UK, what organisation or individual was driving them, or their gender. When I was back at home in Scotland, the utter lack of coaches had overridden any sense of gender bias I might have noticed. Being in tennis was an anomaly, so being a woman in tennis might have been an anomaly within an anomaly. But now I’d had the temerity to put myself forward and effectively say, ‘Yes, I think I could be good at this. I think I have something of value to offer and I think I have every right to be here.’
Maybe this guy wanted to belittle me on behalf of his friend in the hope that I would quit. He didn’t. Instead, he made me angry. Angry and determined. Instead of being the first step towards crushing me, it served as rocket fuel for my resolution to be treated equally. Instead of backing away, I started to notice how few women there were in professional tennis. On that course alone, the ratio was eighteen men to two women, and the other woman there was only about twenty-two years old. She was lovely, glamorous and unthreatening – very different from me and where I was in my life. But a busy mother of two who didn’t care what she looked like and who already had plenty of her own unconventional ideas about how to teach kids – well, that was a different matter entirely.
Now I not only had to complete the course, but I felt I had to do it against the odds: despite my colleagues instead of alongside them. Quite a few of the guys on the course were pretty heavyweight sorts, either in terms of their loud personalities, the fact that they were big name ex-players or because they were industry people I had known by reputation for some time. They were intimidating, and I suspect they knew that, even though I had played at a good level myself for years.
I worried about having to demonstrate strokes or do presentations in front of the group, refusing to let myself give up, but shaken by the knowledge that there was no one else like me on the course. Your normal instinct in these sorts of environments is to gravitate towards the people who are more like-minded, but I was never sure who that might be in this crowd. So I kept my head down and elected to focus on learning as much as I possibly could. The course tutors from the LTA were nevertheless a supportive team. Indeed, the head of the Coach Education Department was a woman, and she had stuck her neck out for me with her advice to wait for this course. But I remained dogged by a dread of being singled out, and every demonstration took place with an accompaniment of my inner voice whispering ‘don’t pick me don’t pick me don’t pick me’, as my arms, hands and fingers pointed down as far as I could get them – the very opposite of the keen child in class who shoots their hand up at every opportunity.
So much of what we were learning was entirely new to me: the sports science, the psychology, the physical training, the biomechanics. I had no idea what biomechanics even were the first time the tutor started talking about it – it’s just the mechanics of how living things move! Why has no one ever even mentioned this stuff to me before? I thought, as the lesson progressed. And why are they making it sound so complicated now? And as I sat there, trying to get my head round talk of ‘upper body rotation’ or similar, I realised that what they were actually talking about was simply what I called ‘turning your shoulders’. If you’re working with a child and you start throwing out biomechanical terms, they’re going to have no idea what you’re on about, of that I was quite sure. I’ll carry on saying ‘turn your shoulders’, I quietly decided.
The more big words or complicated theory they threw at me, the more I was trying to process in my head what I could actually tell a seven-year-old. Of course, I needed to know a lot of this detail if I were going to operate on a professional level, but there was little or no allowance made for how to communicate it to our students, especially if they were under ten. That was the key factor missing from the course: everything we discussed was among us adults, and in adult terminology. We did not see any young players or talk about how to communicate with them, yet at the end of the course we were expected to produce a junior pupil and deliver a session with them on a specific topic.
When I got back from each training workshop I was absolutely exhausted. There was so much information for me to take in, along with the added task of sifting through it and working out what I could practically apply to my own coaching. I would sit on the train with my head spinning. It felt like attending endless university lectures – taking reams of notes to reassure yourself that you were taking it all on board, and then ending up with an enormously fat file of data that was all theory and no real insight.
Further down the line I would often think back and wish that someone had talked me through some of the more pragmatic elements of working with international juniors and professional players: what is the best way to deal with jet lag? What do you need to know about playing at altitude, or even about altitude sickness? What are the basics of racket stringing, and how to adjust the tension according to the weather conditions or court surfaces at different events? This is just some of the essential information that any coach training and travelling with a player at international level needs to know.
I wanted to learn from people who had actually been out there and done it, who could tell me what it was like to work with a player at a junior Grand Slam tournament or what the developmental stages of a stand-out little twelve-year-old were, but that type of experience and expertise just wasn’t there. Just as Jamie and Andy had such easy confidence in their ability to play WWF because they saw it in front of them every weekend on TV, I wanted to see myself in my teachers, to imagine myself forging a path that they themselves had forged before me. I wanted someone to copy. Once again, I found myself muttering about how if you can see it, you can be it. But in this instance, there was no one and nothing to see. I was just going to have to convince myself that I could be it.
Right at the start of the course we were set a project that proved my biggest challenge yet. We had to film a lesson with a ‘performance’ player and submit it for presentation and review. During the lesson we needed to demonstrate our ability to look at the student’s strokes and movement, and discuss what we planned to improve in the coming months and show them how. Sounds relatively simple, doesn’t it? But this was over twenty years ago, a long time before mobile phone cameras and instantly uploadable videos. It involved actually buying a video camera, setting it up on a tripod or attaching it to the court fencing, making sure that the shot was framed properly and then filming the lesson.
A couple of weeks later, there I was, trying to set up the camera on the fencing of the soggy artificial grass courts at Dunblane, desperate to capture the perfect one-hour session with my guinea pig: seven-year-old Andy. It took ages to get the camera at the right height, and with a wide enough shot that the viewer could see where the balls landed. Eventually, we filmed our lesson and I went home to check out the finished version. I sat on the sofa, watching it with a growing sense of horror, imagining myself presenting it to the rest of the class and thought, Oh God, it just looks so amateur. It’s going to seem utterly terrible compared to what that lot come up with.
So the next evening, I persuaded Andy to trek back out to the courts and do it all over again with me. He was less than impressed with the news that I wanted a reshoot, but was more patient with me that I’d imagined he might be. When you’re that age you just want to play; you don’t want to be hanging around with your mum while she faffs about to see if her work video is filming properly. And of course when you know someone’s filming you it makes you a little bit self-conscious. Andy was no different. Tennis or no tennis, all this standing around doing a favour for his mum was boring.
As for me, watching myself back on the small video screen made my toes curl. I could immediately tell that I wasn’t being myself; I wasn’t being as natural as I would be when teaching unmonitored, with kids I knew and taught regularly, not a son I was trying to appease! I was so conscious that I was trying to put on a show, wondering if the video was catching us and how long I had left of Andy’s patience, that I was far from my best. Still, as I watched it again the next evening, I thought that even though it didn’t look great, we just had to go with it.
‘This is the reality,’ I said in the little pep talk I gave myself in an attempt to drum up a bit of confidence. ‘This is the reality for me. I don’t have sunshine, or indoor courts or anyone to learn from. I work by myself up here, and I have just as much right to learn as the others do.’
I had to force myself to stop focusing on what I didn’t have. ‘Think about what you have got,’ I kept telling myself. What I didn’t tell myself was that I had the future World number 1 as my guinea pig. Because I didn’t know it then. As if anyone would have believed me twenty-odd years ago anyway – he was just standing around on the other side of the court saying, ‘Hurry up, Mum, I’m getting cold.’
When the next training workshop rolled round and it was time to present our videos, I had my heart in my mouth as I presented mine, but was secretly quite chuffed with what Andy and I had achieved. I was expected to present the video to the tutor group of four or five of us, and then talk through what I was currently working on, and where I planned to be with my player in three months’ time. Those parts I could do. But once we had all finished presenting, our tutor for this module came up to me and said, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to do this with another pupil, because your player is only seven years old. You can’t say at seven that a child is a performance player.’
I was aghast. Not because of any apparent slight on Andy’s ability, but because he clearly was exceptional for his age.
‘Have you seen any other seven-year-olds who can play like that?’ I asked the tutor.
‘That’s not the point,’ she replied. ‘He’s far too young to be considered a “performance player”.’
These days there is no convincing me that a ‘performance coach’ only needs to be able to work with older teenagers. It’s actually someone who can take the seven- or eight-year-olds up to fourteen- or fifteen-year old national or international competitors. The skill development, the commitment, the nurturing, the passion, the understanding of what tennis demands of a player, the care. It is also worth noting that since about 2010, it has been the LTA’s specific strategy to try and identify talented seven-year-olds. We are now a nation obsessed by spotting talent at that age. But it wasn’t the case then. Back to the drawing board for me.
In the end, I am fairly sure that I passed the course because I was clever and could write good, logical projects on time. No matter how much I wanted it to be, it wasn’t a course that focused on practicalities, so the final exams and project work were very ‘schooly’. There were probably a few people on that course who were fantastic players but not especially academic in that particular grades-focused way.
I already have a degree, I would think to myself as more paperwork piled up for the projects. What I need are practical ideas on how to nurture people and how to get the best out of my players. I need to know how to organise and communicate better, to be able to look at someone and know: What is the absolute best way to help you right now?
I was pretty sure that my portfolio was good enough, but I was also aware that there was a final hurdle I had to pass which others might not break a sweat in passing. I had to complete a 45-minute lesson with a seventeen-year-old male player, and then take a group session with four pupils, all boys. There were no girls on the assessments. There were no girls even mentioned.
I was given a theme, I composed my lesson, and then I was monitored as I worked with the pupil. I am sure my lesson was deeply average, at best, because I was so nervous. Nowadays, I wouldn’t find it so nerve-wracking. But that day I realised the most important thing wasn’t what we’d been taught on the course, but what we did with it: how we could experiment and learn how to practically apply all of this knowledge. Anyone can understand the what and the why, but how to do it and how to be as a coach were the skills we could only learn once the course had finished. Mercifully, I passed. I was delighted that I had, but was still painfully aware of how much I still needed to know to be a decent coach.
Being a coach is not about swagger or bravado. It’s not just about how well you can play or the knowledge and information you have accrued; it’s about how you communicate it to your player and tailor it to their needs. And it’s about your passion, commitment and emotional resilience. It only took me a few more years to realise that there was where my skills lay, and that we had more than enough of that emotional resilience in Dunblane.
Now I had the qualification to prove that I could stand alongside all these men and move to the next level with my own coaching. As the first woman to pass the LTA Performance Coach Award I headed back to Dunblane with renewed confidence. I carried on coaching in my district, working largely from the new tennis centre on the Stirling University campus. I would bring bigger and bigger pools of kids together, creating little matches further and further afield – almost at a national level!
Around this time another of my tennis fairy godmothers appeared in the picture. Her name was Gloria Grosset, and she was the secretary of the Scottish Lawn Tennis Association, the equivalent of a Chief Executive now. She called me up one day, and drew my attention to the fact that there was an advertisement in the paper for the role of Scottish National Coach. It had been vacant for about eighteen months, but they were recruiting again and she encouraged me to apply.
The role had a huge remit: from talent spotting the best under tens to putting together the senior (adult) teams in home international matches between the four UK countries, and everything in between. There was the added complication that you can’t actually play tennis ‘for Scotland’ at international level; it is always team GB that is sent to events like the Olympics or the Davis and Fed Cups. The International Tennis Federation (ITF) rules that to be considered ‘a nation’ you have to have your own government. And as Scotland has its own parliament but not its own government, for ITF events Scots play as part of a GB team. We had friendly Home Internationals, but that was it. Team building aside, the other parts of the national coach’s remit were to create a talent identification programme, and player pathway, set up and run the coaches’ conference, and of course the district and national squad programmes. The role was financed by Sport Scotland and it presented more or less a blank canvas: perfect for me.
Six months earlier, I would never have even considered myself qualified for the role. But a combination of this woman encouraging me, calling me specifically to say, ‘Why don’t you go for this?’ and the fact that I had now finished my course and had that extra bit of authority made me wonder if it just might be the time to try. Gloria really pushed me to believe that I could do it, so I took a deep breath and sorted out an application.
Part of the recruitment process also involved going for a full, formal interview, completing an on-court presentation (i.e. giving a lesson), and making a presentation about what you would change at Tennis Scotland, the country’s governing body. Well, I had the Scottish bit and the tennis bit in the bag, but these were the days before PowerPoint and flash laptops and so the thought of giving a presentation left me about as excited as it had done while I was taking the coaching qualification. It was going to be tricky. I just hated presenting or performing at any level. Now that I had the benefit of hindsight, I could see that part of what had kept me from pursuing life as a professional player had been the game’s essential need to be viewed. I loved the sport, I loved the strategy, the tactics and I loved the competing, but I was far less keen on putting on a performance for a crowd, which some players do instinctively. By now, I was as sure as I had been when I had sought that duff teacher’s advice as a teenager: my role in tennis was as a coach, a confidence-giver, a talent-spotter, a skill-developer and a creator of opportunities.
To fulfil this renewed dream, I knew I needed something professional – a tool that would give me absolutely the best chance, so I went into town and got myself a little mini flipchart. I didn’t have the money for anything more upmarket so I had to make do with this tabletop flipchart and some really, really neat handwriting. When I moved house recently, I found this flipchart again in an old packing box and had a good flick through it. I was quite proud of myself actually and found myself thinking: Do you know what, there’s a lot of stuff here that I would still do today. It was twenty-two years ago, but most of it has either been put into practice nationally or is something I would still develop in strategy planning today.
There were three of us up for the job in the end. Me, a guy from Poland and one from Australia. On the morning of the interviews, I realised that I had met the guy from Poland before at a coaching conference, which instantly made me worry about how much more experience he had than me, given that he’d worked all over the world. As we got chatting, I found out that the Australian guy had a similarly high level of experience. They were two really strong candidates in terms of international experience and worldliness. But – as I kept telling myself – they didn’t know Scotland.
I had a couple of other aces up my sleeve. The other two candidates knew no players locally, so they had to do their demonstration lesson with kids who were provided by the interviewers. However, I took two players who I was working with at the time. They both lived in Edinburgh, where the interview was being held, and their parents got them out of school and brought them up to the venue for me. I told them that it was just a demonstration, not that I was applying for the role of National Coach, to ease the pressure on them.
In addition, the other two candidates simply didn’t know that much about the tennis scene in Scotland. These were pre-internet days, and Tennis Scotland wasn’t in the press much at that time, so it must have been hard for them to build a picture of what was going on. But for me, well, it was my life. It was what I had devoted the last couple of years to, after a lifetime of playing myself. The more I looked into the role and what I could do with it, the more I realised how much the job would mean to me.
I’d only ever had two job interviews since I’d left university, and as I researched I stoked both my nerves and my excitement with thoughts of how much potential there was for me to really get something done in the role. Saying what I would do ‘if only I could get my teeth into the Scottish National Coach’s job’ was the kind of conversation I’d have over a glass of wine with my old playing friends, so having to formalise that and put forward a clear case for what I’d do with the role was both exhilarating and terrifying and showed me how much I wanted the job … and how devastated I would be if I didn’t get it.
The very same evening I was telephoned by the President of Tennis Scotland and formally offered the job. I was thrilled and so excited at having my first formal job in tennis. The new role, and a permanent salary, were a mixture of exciting and intimidating, especially as it happened at a time when the boys, aged eight and nine respectively, were just getting good enough to be looking further afield for their own playing.
It was a big change though. I had to make a swift shift from being an independent soul, doing pretty much what I wanted when I wanted, to working for a formal, government-funded organisation. And with that came responsibilities. When you work for yourself you can say what you want, but I quickly learned that you have to bite your tongue when you are representing a big organisation. There is so much more accountability: a specified aim, a budget, a strategy. Trying to make kids have fun running around all day no longer qualified as a valid goal.
My office was located at the Scottish Tennis HQ at Craiglockhart on the outskirts of Edinburgh. I would drive up there during the day to deal with the admin side of things, although any teaching I did was still at the tennis centre in Stirling, and as with anyone involved in sport with children, a lot of the crucial work I did was at weekends and in the evenings after school. Once I had got the boys to school I would often go to Edinburgh for a few hours before driving back in time for them to finish school and then heading out to Stirling for coaching. The days were longer and more hectic, and there was so much more travel than when I’d just popped to Torags or the Dunblane Tennis Club, but for as long as I felt that I was making a difference, I didn’t mind. And it wasn’t as if I were a music teacher with two sporty kids – it worked well that the boys were often training where I was teaching, or being taken care of playing other sports when I had obligations with other kids. We were busy, but we slotted around each other pretty comfortably.
There were other challenges, though. Scotland is a country with a land mass about the same as England’s, but we had only one indoor tennis centre, and only 1 per cent of the population played tennis. As far as funding was concerned, this meant it was a real challenge being taken seriously in comparison to other, more established Scottish sports, but it also meant that simply covering the entire country fairly was a stretch. Once again, I told myself not to panic. Just because no ‘mum’ had taken on this role before, and just because there had been no one in the role for some time, didn’t mean it couldn’t be done. I had a £25,000 salary, an annual budget of £90,000 and no staff as yet. But I had energy, drive and an amazing taste of freedom. It was very exciting. The key was to start small and break the project into separate, manageable chunks and see what was feasible. Where could I actually make changes? Where could I have a genuine impact? And where would it count most? For the first time I realised that I was in a position to really make a difference. I would find the most promising kids, and the most motivated young coaches and create a team. It sounds so noble now, but I just wanted to surround myself with as much talent and enthusiasm as I could, in the hope that the positivity would spread, and we could build a fantastic workforce to grow the game.
One of the crucial elements of building a proper team was keeping the kids playing throughout the winter – if I really wanted to have an impact I couldn’t lose half the group to other sports the minute the evenings got dark, damp and chilly. This meant keeping them training and competing throughout the winter months, but that in turn meant travelling year round, which of course stretched my meagre budget. I was the only person who seemed to have made the connection between consistent competitions and keeping the kids’ attention, so of course it was down to me to make the finances elastic enough to accommodate this. At first, I just had to use parents wherever I could, but after a while I would beg friends to lend a hand. We’d hire a minibus and I would persuade a buddy to share the driving with me – this not only meant another adult pair of hands that I could trust, but if it was a mate I could share a room with it saved on costs and we’d have a laugh. Having someone I knew to help – and of course keep me company – also enabled me to keep in touch with friends when I was working all hours.
Another motivation for me was that I spotted the chance to give the women around me more opportunities and more of a voice. By now it was becoming crystal clear to me that women in tennis were rare, to say the very least, but the women who were there were diamonds. I knew that the two biggest career opportunities I had benefitted from were both made possible by other women, and within a relatively short amount of time came a third. There had been Anne Pankhurst, the woman who had persuaded me to take the bigger coaching course; Gloria who had persuaded me to apply for the national coach job; and now, within weeks, my friend Ellinore Lightbody, who had been running the national tennis scene in Wales and was now captain of the British Under 14 girls team, gave me my first opportunity to take a GB team to an overseas tournament. I had taken some of the Scottish kids to an occasional event abroad in the past year, but this would be a GB trip, a proper international LTA-funded trip, and a real step up for me.
Ellinore had offered this opportunity to me because I was a woman, and she, rightly, thought it was a good idea for the girls to have a female coach to accompany them. Again, the gender mismatch in the sport was made clear to me, and in grabbing this fantastic opportunity, I promised myself that I would create just as many for women in the future, whenever I could.