How to be a good tennis parent

By the time Ellie-Rose Griffiths was nine, she had left school to train full-time. That was when tennis stopped being just a game and became her life.

The former top-ranked junior player would go on to compete alongside some of the top names in British tennis including Katie Boulter, Emma Raducanu and Harriet Dart before stopping playing at 19 because she was burned out and not enjoying it any more.

When the 27-year-old looks back now, it is not just the tennis she remembers. It is the pressure around it, and in particular one group of people she believes could deal with it better.

Parents.

Pushy parents are nothing new in a sport offering the potential of millions of pounds in prize money at the very top - at elite level there are well-documented incidents involving the dads of Jelena Dokic, Mary Pierce and Bernard Tomic to name a few.

It all starts at junior level.

"You see parents shouting at children all the time in tennis," says Griffiths, whose criticism is not for her own supportive parents but for what she has seen in the game.

"There's a lack of understanding on how they should behave... on how they could help their child to blossom into the athlete that they should become."

And it can get out of hand.

"We've had situations here before where unfortunately we've had to call the police because the parents' behaviour is getting that far out of control," says Chris Johnson, head coach at Sutton Coldfield Tennis Club, where he has worked for 36 years.

"They won't listen, they think they can get away with anything, they don't respect the referees, it can get a bit ugly."

Both are clear that behaviour like that does not happen in isolation and that it is the environment tennis creates that makes parents behave this way.

So, why is that and what needs to change?

Tennis can be intense for parents.

There is transport to arrange, coaching to fund, and a complicated player pathway to navigate. In some cases there's even private tutoring to arrange if their child has left mainstream school to focus on the sport.

"You do get on a bit of a hamster wheel", says John from Derbyshire, whose 11-year-old son Harrison is a promising player. "It's 12 months of the year, indoor courts and outdoor courts."

Children can start a form of tennis from the age of four on a modified court. The Lawn Tennis Association's (LTA) performance pathway for the most promising juniors supports players from the age of seven on their journey to potentially becoming a Grand Slam champion.

Competitions are grouped according to age and start aged eight and under.

And the ratings and rankings you get from doing them are one way to get noticed.

So when does it start to get serious?

"The minute they start playing their first competition," according to Johnson.

Does he think that is right?

"Absolutely not.

"A lot of adults can't cope with the pressures of playing an individual sport and then they're expecting young children to be able to do so."

Steve Whelan, a coach working in St Albans with nearly three decades of experience, agrees that the system places too much emphasis on winning at a young age.

"It just creates this race to the bottom because parents are chasing ratings and rankings," he says.

He tells parents: "These are not tennis players. They are kids who play tennis and there's a big difference."

The LTA says it undertook a "comprehensive review" of its rating and ranking system in 2018 "specifically to address the issue of putting too much pressure on children at too young an age."

Now players can't be ranked nationally against their peers until they reach the under-11 age group, with younger children from eight and up organised into competition based on recent form - a rating.

When it comes to parental behaviour the LTA says like any sport "there are occasions when a small minority of parents do not uphold the standards of behaviour expected". The governing body will soon be launching a new initiative called Fair Play, to promote positive parent behaviour and support coaches.

For parents, the pressure is not only emotional. It can also be financial.

"It just gets more and more: lessons, travel, flights, tournament fees..." one parent explains.

Griffiths puts numbers on it.

"If you want to play four hours a day with a coach... that's £1,000 a week... £4,000 a month... that's more than people's salaries," she says.

The LTA says it "supports talented junior players through access to world-class coaching and facilities across our network of Regional Performance Development Centres".

The governing body also offers grants to young players on its performance pathway who are facing financial barriers to training, travel or competition, through its foundation.

But Griffiths says parents investing to bring their children to the next level can alter behaviour.

"The financial support comes from the winning and the losing," she says.

"If my child wins, I might get some more funding; if my child loses, we might not - so we don't want them to lose."

Johnson recognises the shift.

"They are almost expecting a return on their investment, and it shouldn't be like that."

"A 10-year-old isn't expected to do a job, but it does become that," Griffiths says.

It is a view echoed by Australian Todd Ley, who was once touted as the best junior player in the world and at 12 became the youngest athlete ever signed by global sports agency IMG before quitting the sport at 17.

He trained at the Nick Bollettieri academy in Florida, where the Williams sisters, Andre Agassi and Maria Sharapova were among the famous names associated with the programme.

Andy Murray and Juan Martin Del Potro were some of the junior players he measured himself against.

Tennis quickly became all-consuming, says Ley, and "tennis went from enjoyment to employment". He ended up "hating" tennis and still does.

His dad Max was his coach and manager. From Ley's perspective, tennis came first for his dad, and his son came second.

"Realistically, it was tennis from, you know, breakfast to bedtime," says Ley, who has written about his experiences in Smashed: Tennis Prodigies, Parents and Parasites.

"Very quickly, the child isn't looked at as a person. They are a commodity and a stock."

Ley believes early success in tennis can create incentives that push families, coaches and systems towards doing more, earlier.

"If you have very good results early then you're going to get a better ride and you're going to get better management companies, sponsors," he says.

"Very early it becomes a contest about who can do more.

"People forget completely that they're dealing with children."

Not everyone minds having pushy parents - or at least not in hindsight. Emma Raducanu has previously described hers as "so pushy" when she was younger.

In an interview with the Times in 2024 she said: "I've seen some great people who I was playing with in the juniors who had way more lenient parents, who were like, 'It's OK if you lost', and those players don't play tennis any more, so I don't blame my parents for it."

And former British number one Kyle Edmund says that while his parents were not pushy, they did push him to improve things like attitude and work ethic.

He said he once told his dad he wanted to quit and his dad just said, "OK, let's just stop then". At that point Edmund realised he actually loved the game and wanted to work hard to succeed.

"There's definitely times where you see almost like the parent wants it more, and that's when I think it becomes toxic," he told BBC Sport. "It's got to come from the son or daughter to really want to do it.

"And I think the best way is when the parents provide an amazing support system to be there for them and encourage them to do better and want to have ambition."

For many parents, the shift happens gradually.

Rob is watching his son in a group training session, quietly, from a distance. "Your child goes from going along on a Saturday morning to a fun session and before you know it everything's got very serious at a very young age," he says.

"You started playing something because of the joy of playing it and that should be what it's all about. But within the system it can be easy to forget that."

Ramesh, another parent, says he looks back on his older children's tennis journeys with regret and that he put too much emphasis on results. Now he tells his youngest son to "forget about the winning or losing".

Griffiths doesn't criticise her own parents. She is clear her mother, a single parent bringing up three children, was central to everything she achieved.

"My mum would admit she wasn't perfect," Griffiths says.

"But there was no support there in place for her to know how to be the best tennis parent.

"They're ultimately the second most important person in this journey."

Liya Jacob has two sons who play tennis and says most parents are trying to do the right thing:

"I'm a doctor, I'm a life coach, and I think I'm quite emotionally intelligent, but even I was finding myself, on occasion, slipping into unhelpful behaviours.

"It's not that we've got bad parents out there. Parents don't have a framework to help them deal with the challenges of sports."

Together with Griffiths and Johnson she set up an online course called Winning Parents, aimed at helping parents understand how they can support their children before, during and after matches.

Dr Jacob says parents often fall into two patterns.

"One is over-helping," she says. "So what I see a lot of parents do is over-coaching from the sidelines or interfering during matches. Another pattern is that people can get overly critical of their child.

"Kids often describe dreading the car ride home after a poor performance, after poor results. Parents don't mean to create these environments but it can easily happen under pressure."

The LTA says it offers "a range of resources to parents to educate and inform them about each stage of the pathway".

Online they run the Parent Support Programme, developed by leading academic experts. It covers parents' roles at competitions, communication before, during and after matches, and managing the emotional demands of competition.

Despite the challenges, Griffiths still has a love for the game.

She says tennis gave her skills that have shaped her life beyond the sport, but believes parents need help to understand the power they hold.

"I want parents to see that tennis is such an incredible avenue to develop your child's character if you do it in a supportive way," she says.

"It can damage your child's character if you do it in the wrong way."