In which we head to Miami for a tournament and we discover that there are places where ambition is nothing to be ashamed of, but a positive mindset, a well of inspiration, and an asset. If only we could import it back home.
ACCOMPANYING THE GB girls’ team abroad was a fabulous opportunity for me professionally, but it was also a role I took seriously as a parent. It had only been the year before that I had waved my own boys off to their first tournament abroad, and I knew what a knot in the pit of your stomach that moment left you with for the first time. It was an Under 11s tournament, which meant that the boys were very young to be travelling without a parent.
But more importantly than that, I was very keen for the boys to get out of Dunblane that year and have some fun doing what they loved best. The tournament took place only a few months after the shootings at Dunblane Primary School, and every one of us in the town had been swamped by grief, or its nearby presence, ever since.
I remember moments of that day so clearly, and others are hazy with strange elastic patches of time. I had just dropped the boys off at school and had headed to Torags, where I had a call saying there had been a shooting at the primary school. I dropped everything, grabbed my car keys and ran. As I was driving the short distance to the school I kept thinking I might never see my children again. It was chaos, and there were too many cars on the road, everyone desperately trying to get to the school. Traffic was at a standstill, with the cars going nowhere, so I just got out, left my car and ran the last quarter mile.
It’s terrifying to think how close Andy was to what happened. His class was the next to go into the gym. They were on their way there when they heard an unfamiliar noise and were told to wait in the corridor. A teacher went to investigate and suddenly Andy’s class was being ushered into the headmaster’s study. They didn’t know what was going on – they were only eight – but they were told to sit down below the windows, or under the tables, and the teachers and dinner ladies got them singing songs to disguise the sound of the gunfire. I don’t know how the hell those adults managed not to fall apart. Jamie’s class was in a Portakabin classroom in the playground next to the gym when the shooting started. He remembers hearing a strange ‘pop pop pop’ sound but thought it was someone knocking on the roof of the cabin with a hammer, not gunfire. You would never think of gunfire, would you?
When I arrived at the school gates, everything was eerily quiet. The gates were closed and hoards of parents were standing there, in shock, terrified. It was before the age of mobile phones. We had no information, what could we do? We were moved to a small hotel close to the school and told to wait. And wait. We heard ambulance sirens and police cars arriving but we had no idea which class had been affected. We were so tightly packed in that room that I ended up sharing a chair with another mother, a woman I had been to primary school with, who had lived across the road from me when we were little.
It was ages until we knew which class had been in the gym. When they made the announcement I breathed a huge sigh of relief, just as the woman I was sitting with leapt up and gasped, ‘That’s my daughter’s class’. Her daughter was one of the sixteen who were killed that day. I was horrified and completely overwhelmed, torn between my monumental relief that the boys were safe, and beset by guilt at how fortunate we had been, when other parents had lost their children.
There is never a day when I don’t remind myself how lucky I am that my children survived. Even when they left the school premises they still had no idea what had happened in the gym, and although I told them that afternoon, it took some time for them to fully understand it, and longer still for them to be able to talk about it. This is why – no matter how hard it felt to say goodbye to them those first few times they went to tournaments abroad – I wanted them to relish every moment of fun, to seize joy wherever they could, and it is why to this day all of us feel a strong responsibility to show the world that the town of Dunblane is so much more than the memory of a horrific tragedy. It is survival, it is resilience, it is success.
That first event they went to on their own was in France, and was called Enfants de la Terre, part of a charity run by the former French player Yannick Noah. Great Britain was sending over a team of two boys and two girls, and the LTA picked both of my boys for the team. It was great news that they got to travel with each other, but a double whammy as far as the costs were concerned.
It was a great opportunity to go abroad as part of a team at that age, but still, my heart was in my mouth as I understood the wider implications of sending them. Transport was not mentioned at all in the letter that informed us that they had been selected; it was just a very calm, formal mention that: ‘The trip leaves from Bisham Abbey on x date, you will need to be there at x o’clock.’ Classic bureaucracy. Bisham Abbey, near Maidenhead in Berkshire, housed the GB National Tennis Centre. It was the home to many sports, and was the base from which the LTA ran all of its national age-group camps, from Under 12s to Under 18-year-olds. The trip was funded by the LTA because it was a GB team event, but we still had to pay for getting down to Bisham Abbey itself, which, with two pre-teen boys who would need adult supervision each way, was going to mean a minimum of eight flights to and from Scotland. After all, I couldn’t just take a mini-break in the Home Counties while they were away; I would have to head down to drop them off, and back down to collect them. It was going to cost a small fortune.
This was the first moment where I stopped thinking about my national programme budget and realised that our own family budget was going to have to develop hitherto unknown levels of elasticity. I remember standing there at the kitchen counter that day, staring at the kettle as it boiled, the letter still in my hand, thinking, Oh, okay, this is what the next few years are going to feel like.
It’s a moment that most parents of talented children will have at some point. You hit a stage where the children start competing all over the country and beyond if they are going to reach their full potential, but as they are still minors they need constant supervision. And all of this without the backup of prize money. In short, you have to start paying for experience, and in tennis, experience costs a lot. Unlike potential professional football players, who are whisked into an academy, provided with training, transported to matches and garlanded with kit – all the while sharing one ball between twenty-two of them for a single match – the tennis players of the future are funding their own coaching and competition, kit, and endless rackets, balls and re-strings.
The re-strings in particular were the bane of my life at this point: yet what was a money pit for me was a badge of honour for the boys. Every time they snapped a string on court, I would hear the whoop from the other side of the tennis centre, or they would come running towards the car that evening grinning from ear to ear. ‘Mum, check it out, I broke another string!’ they’d say, bubbling with excitement, fizzing with pride at their on-court prowess. I would do my best to smile back but it was really a grimace as I silently thought to myself, There goes another tenner. I’d grip the steering wheel hard, willing myself not to beg them to not break any more. Mercifully, in time they learned to string their own rackets and we even invested in a stringing machine for the garage where they would set themselves up and learn the intricacies of string types and tensions. If only there had been such a practical solution to all of the travelling costs.
I couldn’t say no to them though, and of course we found a way to get them to Bisham Abbey for that first tournament abroad. It sounded like such an adventure and I knew that if I’d been their age I would have been desperate to go, but I still worried about them being safe. They were so little, and they had only ever been abroad with us for family holidays in the past. But every mum has to deal with that first sleepover and this was really just a slightly bigger version of that.
After copious warnings to brush their teeth, look after each other, and to keep their travel bags zipped up tightly at all times, I waved them off at Bisham Abbey as they headed to the LTA minibus, their little bodies weighed down by heavy racket bags and luggage. I had a lump in my throat, torn between pride and missing them already, but they didn’t even look back.
They had a great time in France. It was a perfect little starter tournament, where they played in lots of matches, mainly at one central club but also at several satellite venues like school halls as well. Andy made the semi-final and lost to Gaël Monfils, a French player who is now one of the top players in the world and a great athlete. It was Jamie who won the tournament though, beating Monfils in the final, 6–0, 6–1. All I heard for about three months after their return was Andy telling him, ‘You only won because I tired him out for you.’ Sibling rivalry was perhaps the only thing that tormented me more than re-strings did back then …
The main thing I learned from their experience in France was that, because they’d had such a great time, winning matches and being accompanied by an encouraging, fun, LTA chaperone who understood both tennis and kids, they never feared going abroad in the future. There was no anxiety about the unknown; only a ‘we can conquer the world’ mentality, which was a huge step for them psychologically. I’m not sure I fully appreciated it at the time, as I was more focused on them having a fun experience and the practicalities from my end, but it was an enormous thing to do at such a young age – especially to also be successful and return feeling that they had survived a big adventure together. It was brilliantly handled by the LTA and they were never anxious, homesick or fretting about the language barrier or the food. For me, it was a moment of realisation: you have to let your kids go off and have their own adventures. It gave them confidence and a desire to do it again, but it also inspired me to try and create the same sorts of opportunities for the kids under my wing as the Scottish National Coach.
One of the things I found frustrating at the time was trying to explain to the team of administrators and people in charge of schedules at the LTA how difficult the travel was for parents on a limited budget – particularly for parents with two kids on the programme. It was amazing to see Andy and Jamie progress but the logistics were a nightmare. What if one child is going to Nottingham one weekend and the other has to be in Birmingham, or London? It can’t be done! You can’t be in both places! Especially difficult as Will and I had separated around that time. Yet what I came to realise was that many of the people back then making the decisions about the junior circuit and training camps had never gone through the experience as either a coach or as a parent. They just didn’t know what it was like. Trying to explain these things to the layers of administrators was as much of a workout as any I did on the court!
There was a massive advantage to being up in Scotland. As we were so reliant on each other for endless lifts, minibus rides and hours of company and laughs, criss-crossing the country’s motorways, we became like a big family, closer than so many other regional teams, which was the glue that held it all together when finances were tight or tempers were frayed. It was great fun and everybody looked out for each other, and I strongly suspect that those happy times have a lot to do with why so many of the kids who started at around the same time are still involved in tennis in some way today. Whether they’re playing like my boys, whether they’re coaching like Alan MacDonald, who was one of the older juniors back then and now travels as part of Jamie’s coaching team, or whether they’re captaining the GB Davis Cup team as Leon Smith does these days, the vast majority of that original gang are still playing tennis or working in the game now. And I believe there is one simple reason behind that: they learned to love what they were doing.
It was informal, recreational fun, and that emotional connection stuck. The sense of belonging was huge. I guess that is why it is second nature to me to try and make everyone feel as if they are all a part of one big team, whatever capacity I am working in now. People still come and talk to me about those days at Stirling in the nineties. ‘I remember the day when you came down to the Doncaster tournament in the minibus, and you climbing over the fence to get into the courts so we could practise early in the morning.’ It wasn’t a high fence … we weren’t doing any harm. We would just turn up before everyone else and if the courts were locked we would find a way in somehow.
I do think all of those hijinks have a lot to do with how the boys feel about the game now. They built an emotional and psychological resilience over those years. Being in Scotland and not having very much makes you appreciate what you do have. The distances we’d have to travel and the limited amount of time we could actually get on court made it feel like a treat not a chore. And having a slim budget and restrictive court time for me as a coach made me think carefully about what I wanted to get out of each session. I’d plan it and manage it meticulously. For example, I would think: If I only have these four kids for an hour, I need to max out on this hour. It also forced me to become good at dealing with big numbers on just one court. If it cost £12 an hour to book a court and I could get eight kids on it, it would only cost them £1.50 each. If it was one child, that was £12 gone – whoosh! – on that one person. So I learned to devise good quality sessions for multiple kids. Perhaps those hardships were the making of us after all.
The new job, the travel, the sense of community within our whole tennis group … by the end of the 1990s I was learning so much and we were all improving so fast that it slightly escaped my attention just how good my own boys were getting. They were aged ten and eleven by now, but by this point we weren’t thinking: These could be once in a generation players for Scotland and the UK, we were still thinking that it was a hobby with huge benefits that was starting to get really expensive, but that we didn’t want to stop them if they were doing well and having fun.
My philosophy had been to take things one tournament at a time – for all of us on the Scottish squad, not just Jamie and Andy. Over the previous couple of years I had started to think, Okay, what do the best Under 12s look like nationally? What do I need to know to be able to help my lot?
So that by the time they reached the Under 12 category, I knew what the circuit looked like and what the expectations were likely to be both nationally and internationally. The older kids in the group were forging a path for the rest of them, showing me what we were going to need for the younger children further down the line, as well as what I needed to put aside in terms of our budget as a squad, and as a family. Meanwhile, it was part of my remit as National Coach to keep trying to identify future talent, as well as nurturing what we already had. It was for this reason that in around 1996 I set up a further venture which I loftily named the Scottish National Development Schools programme, when more indoor centres started to open beyond Stirling. Another centre opened at Scotstoun in Glasgow, which gave us a further venue from which we could deliver training, so I set up another squad programme for Under 10s there. SNDS sounds quite grand, but they only really operated on a Saturday morning.
As National Coach, my philosophy was to invest in people and develop a team of excellent coaches, because more good coaches equals more good players. Right? And a couple of years into my stint as National Coach an opportunity arose to do just that and draw experts to Scotland after the summer. The idea was to create a Performance Development Programme in conjunction with SportScotland. We had a number of very keen – and very part-time – regional coaches then, all operating at county level. Nothing national and certainly nothing international. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do all the coaching and travelling myself, so I set about applying for the £10,000 funding. The remit of a national coach is broad and elastic: you are the strategist, the managing director, the keeper of the books, as well as the coach courtside, doing the hands-on work. I knew I didn’t have all these skills and I found myself regularly in situations where I needed advice from experts.
Building anything – a talented child, team, business, yourself – demands investment and expertise. Learning how to go about building that expertise was one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned as a coach, and here I was being given the opportunity to invest in our team. I grasped it wholeheartedly. The funding for the programme enabled me to bring in experts from abroad and from down south on a regular basis to help the coaches: we had Ivo Van Aken, the technical director of a Belgian team, to work on technique; Istvan Balyi from Canada to discuss periodisation – segmenting an athlete’s year wisely – and long-term athlete development; Doug Gould, a tennis-specific sports psychologist came from the States; and Steve Green, fitness trainer to Tim Henman, flew up from London. This programme not only helped me build my skills but also to mentor and develop several coaches who have since had a significant impact on British tennis. Not least Leon Smith, Davis Cup captain, and Karen Ross, head of GB Disability Tennis and coach to Scotland’s World number 1 wheelchair player, Gordon Reid. Once again, the team, and investment in the team, was what brought success. In turn, this reflected well on the junior players themselves.
My plan must have worked: by 1998 we had some players who were ready to be part of Great Britain’s team heading to a huge Miami-based tournament called the Orange Bowl. Included were my Jamie and Jamie Baker, a lad from Glasgow who was part of the Scottish squad, having come out of the Scottish National Development Schools programme. The GB team was made up of two boys and two girls, and the entire trip was to be funded by the Lawn Tennis Association. I was asked again to captain the girls and seized the opportunity. The boys’ captain was a guy called Andrew Lewandowski, who I got on very well with. He had done these trips before so he knew exactly what to expect and what all of the logistics entailed, which was reassuring to say the least.
It couldn’t have been more perfect for me – a chance to take an intercontinental trip with a trusted colleague, and the added pride of the two GB lads, one of which was my son, being from my programmes in Scotland. To attend an event on that scale, to see the world standard of Under 12 players, and to meet other coaches and tennis professionals from one of tennis’s key states, was a fabulous opportunity. I wanted to learn and the best way to learn is to keep speaking to people who have done it all before, so in this respect there really wasn’t anywhere I’d have rather been at this stage. And while the professional experience alone was gold dust, the chance to see my Jamie play on this world stage was also a big incentive – as well as a huge gear change for us.
Jamie was of course beyond excited to be going. He was by now one of the best Under 12 players in the country – and he knew it – so getting selected in itself was not such a huge surprise, but the chance to go to America to play tennis was a huge deal and he was excited about every aspect, from the matches themselves to simply seeing the country that was already so familiar to him from TV and movies.
First, there was the seven-hour flight with four pre-teens to get through, and it was about as much work for us adults as it sounds. These were the days where there was no quick WhatsApp to parents to let them know we were fine, no FaceTime before bed and no instant bank transfers in case of emergency: it was a full three-week trip with all the attendant anxieties. These kids really were entirely in our charge and I felt a huge responsibility. Luckily, the previous few years of almost ceaseless travel in a minibus full of kids had left me with a keen understanding of what keeps them distracted. By this time I rarely left the house without a bag full of puzzle books, quizzes, pens, card games, whatever. There might be one slim magazine for me at the bottom, but mostly I wanted to keep them entertained, to keep nerves and homesickness at bay, to keep everyone calm and happy. Mercifully by the time we took this flight, Game Boys had been invented, and there was also the distraction of in-flight movies.
When we arrived in Miami, I was left speechless at the size and scale of almost everything we came across. I had never been to the US before and nor had any of the kids; it felt as if were in a different universe, not merely a different country. Just the drive from the airport seemed like an adventure, on those enormous roads filled with huge, stately cars. We were just staying in a simple Holiday Inn near to the competition venue, but it was still massive, and when we reached the tournament venue the next day, our eyes were on stalks.
The Orange Bowl was held at a five-star hotel called The Biltmore, which had a huge tennis complex and enormous, gorgeous grounds. The sort of place they invented the word ‘sprawling’ for. It was without doubt the most beautiful hotel I had ever seen in my life, let alone had business being in. It was proper, old-world luxury – the sort of environment where it was totally normal for a milkshake to cost $15. Surrounding the hotel, the luxury didn’t stop. There were monster houses sitting on vast plots of land surrounded by ornate white fences and gleaming Doric columns. The opulence was compounded by the fantastical Christmas decorations everywhere. It was December, and despite being confusingly sun-drenched, Florida was very much in the swing of the festivities. These houses were not just festooned with lights and decorations, but liberally covered in fake snow as well – particularly disorientating for this group of visitors who were only just getting used to being away from real Scottish snow at home. There was one house in particular which fascinated us; we simply couldn’t work out what the decorations were meant to be. They were white – fair enough, that’s pretty Christmassy – but the main decoration on the roof was an incomprehensibly weird shape. It was a few days before we found out what it was.
Meanwhile, the draw for the tournament was enormous. The qualifying event had 128 competitors, made up largely of American kids, and was played the week before. The main draw – in which our boys and girls were competing – was made up of players who had earned a place on account of their national rankings or results in overseas tournaments throughout the year. There were 256 kids in qualifying and a further 256 in the main draw all over the world. That first morning as we walked around the tennis complex taking everything in, I could barely believe my eyes, and there was one thing in particular that seemed utterly foreign. The whole place was outdoors, in December! They could rely on the fact that the rows upon rows of tennis courts would be useable all year round because of the beaming Florida sunshine. What a bonus!
Around the corner there were yet more courts, and then between the hotel and Miami University, another of the tournament’s hubs, was a further area called Flamingo Park which was teeming with, you guessed it, more tennis courts. There were probably more courts in those three areas than there were in the whole central belt of Scotland. It took a while for it to sink in. The weather is so good, people can play outside year round; it’s a big country, and loads of people want to play tennis. It was a revelation after years in Scotland fighting to find a decent court to play on, fighting to be taken seriously as a coach, and fighting for scraps of enthusiasm or funding from governing bodies.
Even the practice week before the Orange Bowl began highlighted the different attitude here. There was a small warm-up tournament for a few days before the main event began, for the kids to get used to the heat, to get over any jet lag and to find their feet a bit. On the morning of day three we went to practise at a park near our Holiday Inn. It had perhaps six courts and a designated park keeper in charge of them. When he heard our accents and asked if we were over for the Orange Bowl, he could not have been more welcoming. He was almost cartoonishly jolly, this great big backslapping chap with a booming voice. Everything he said exuded positivity, warmth and enthusiasm for what these kids were doing.
So of course we ended up going back a few times and getting to know him quite well – he came to be our go-to guy for weird and wonderful questions about Miami. It was he who explained to us what the bizarre Christmas decorations were on that mansion near to the hotel. ‘Oh that guy!’ he boomed. ‘He’s a big-shot dentist! That’s a tooth!’
After a week or so the endless white-toothed smiles, the beaming sunshine and the radiating positivity began to rub off on us, too. The main tournament began and to my utter delight all four of the children did really well. I had such a wonderful time watching each of them progress, round after round, and seeing two of them reach the final. This was a huge deal and very unexpected. Out of over 250 competitors, one of my girls and my Jamie had reached their respective final.
The boys’ final and the girls’ final were at different venues so I didn’t get to see Jamie’s big game, nor did I see him during the tournament as much I would have if I had gone as a parent rather than as a coach. But there was the added advantage of him being able to just get on with things. And of course we were all staying in the same hotel so in the evenings we could all eat together, catch up and play endless games of cards.
We all learned a lot in Miami, but more than anything we learned that there were places in the world where loving the game and wanting to win were not strange or shameful concepts. Instead, perhaps, they could be encouraged and that encouragement could breed success. In Scotland we were used to frosty referees with lots of extra rules and the mantra that you should all ‘know your place’. In America all we heard was: ‘You guys are gonna smash this tournament! You go out there and have a great time! Be proud!’ The idea that it was okay to have a sense of ambition ignited the children’s imagination.
It is okay to want to be better and to do better. This was the first time they’d heard this attitude. And it was the first time that I saw something I had been trying so hard to impress upon them emphasised on such an epic scale. Of course, getting up almost every morning in December to blue skies and fantastic facilities helped to sweeten the message, but the point remained: wanting to win wasn’t impudence; it could merely be positivity.