Walk onto any court in South Florida on a Saturday morning and watch the warm-up. Not the forehands — the faces. The shoulders. The walk between the baseline and the towel. Inside ten seconds I can usually tell you who is going to fold when the match gets tight, and it has almost nothing to do with how clean the strokes look.
That sounds arrogant. It isn’t. It’s pattern recognition built over decades of coaching players from juniors to the professional tour. The player who is about to lose a close match is broadcasting it before the first ball is struck. The tells are physical, but the cause is mental — and that’s the good news, because mental patterns are learnable and fixable. Choking is not a character flaw. It’s an untrained skill.
The Myth That’s Costing You Matches
Most players believe confidence is something you either have or you don’t on the day. You “feel it” or you don’t. So, when the nerves arrive at 4-4 in the third, they treat the feelings as uncontrollable — and this is actually true, but what is not true is that they are unmanageable. There are tools you can use that help you play better nervous tennis. NOT BETTER TENNIS — BETTER NERVOUS TENNIS! This is the essence of becoming a great competitor. For most, when the body tightens, the feet stop, the second serve shortens, and the scoreline simply confirms a decision the player already made in their head: “I don’t have it today.”
Above: Liam Broady with me after winning the $100K Challenger in Vilnius without dropping a set.* Photo courtesy of David Sammel
Here is a truth elite performers understand and club players miss: nerves are not the problem. Everyone feels them. The difference between the player who wins the tight one and the player who donates it is not the absence of pressure — it’s what they do in the 20-25 seconds between points when no one is watching the scoreboard but everyone is watching them.
Locker Room Power: Composure Is a Choice You Rehearse
In Locker Room Power, I call this owning your “Locker Room” — the internal space where you decide who you are under pressure before the pressure arrives. Champions don’t wait to feel calm. They behave calmly on purpose, and the feeling follows the behavior. It’s the opposite order to what most people assume.
You can train it. Three things, starting with your next practice:
1. Build a between-point routine and guard it like your serve. Email me for a free copy of the 4-step reset. Watch the best players and you’ll see the same ritual after every single point, won or lost: a turn to the back fence, a look at the strings, a breath, a reset, then a deliberate walk to the line. That routine isn’t superstition. It’s a circuit-breaker that stops one bad point becoming three. If you only have a routine when you’re ahead, you don’t have a routine.
2. Control your walk and shoulders. Your body talks to your brain as much as your brain talks to your body. Lift the shoulders and the chest, slow the walk — and you send your nervous system the signal that you are fine, even when the inner voice is screaming. Your opponent reads it too. A composed walk to the baseline at 4-5, 15-30 is one of the most underrated weapons in the game.
3. Play the next point, not the last one. Pressure lives in the past — the point you blew — and the future — the match you might lose. It cannot survive in the present point. The skill is dragging your attention back to the only thing you can actually play: this ball, this serve, this contact.
For the Parents on the Fence
If you’re watching your child, the most powerful thing you can do is take the verdict out of their head. Praise the reset, not the result. “Great recovery after that double fault” trains a champion. “How did you lose to him?” trains a quitter. The mind your child builds at twelve is the one they’ll compete with at twenty.
The Sixty Seconds You Can Change
So yes, I can often read the result in the first sixty seconds. But the only reason that’s true is that most players never train the inner game at all. They hit thousands of forehands and zero reps of composure. Flip that ratio, even slightly, and you become the player nobody wants to draw in a tournament: the one whose body language rarely changes, win or lose the point.
That’s not talent. That’s a trained mind. And it’s available to every player reading this, on every court in Florida, starting with your very next match.
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David Sammel is a performance coach and author of Locker Room Power: Building an Athlete’s Mind, available on Amazon and Audiobooks. He works with elite athletes and high-performing leaders, applying the same mental-performance principles on the court and in the boardroom. Learn more at davidsammel.com or contact him directly at david@davidsammel.com.
*Liam Broady learnt over years how to manage very strong emotions and became a champion. Anyone who masters their approach to how they will think on court and implements it the majority of the time is a champion, and who knows what you can achieve at any level. That is the challenge and beauty of tennis — the personal battle that needs to be won in order to beat others, and this journey never ends.
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