Wimbledon 2026: How not to be a tennis parent

Ellie-Rose Griffiths, aged nine, left school to train full-time. That’s when tennis stopped being just a game and became her life.

The former top-ranked junior player was burnt out competing against some of the biggest names in British tennis, including Katie Boulter, Emma Raducanu and Harriet Dart, before quitting at 19 and never enjoying it anymore.

Tennis isn’t the only thing the 27-year-old remembers now, looking back. It’s the pressure around, and especially one group of people can handle it better.

Parents.

Pushy parents are nothing new in a sport that offers the potential of millions of pounds in prize money – there are well-documented incidents at elite level involving the fathers of Jelena Dokic, Mary Pearce and Bernard Tomic, to name a few.

It all starts at a low level.

“You see parents yelling at kids all the time in tennis,” Griffiths told BBC Sport. “There’s a lack of understanding of how to be … how to help their child blossom into the athlete they should be.”

And it can get out of hand.

Chris Johnson, head coach at Sutton Coldfield Tennis Club, where he has worked for 36 years, said: “Unfortunately, we have had to call the police in the past because parents’ behavior has gotten out of hand.”

“They don’t listen, they think they can get away with anything, they don’t respect the judges, it can be a little ugly.”

It is clear that neither would behave this way in isolation, and it is the environmental protection that tennis creates that causes parents to act this way.

So why and what needs to change?

Tennis can be powerful for parents.

There’s transportation to arrange, financing to do, and a complex player route to navigate. In some cases, private tutoring is also available to allow their child to leave mainstream school and focus on sports.

“You go on a bit of a hamster wheel,” said John, from Derbyshire, whose son Harrison, 11, is a promising player. “There are 12 months of the year, indoor courts and outdoor courts.”

Children can start playing tennis on a modified court from the age of four. The Lawn Tennis Association’s (LTA) Most Promising Junior Performance Pathway supports players from the age of seven on their journey to becoming a Grand Slam champion.

The competition is divided into age groups starting at eight and under.

And the grades and ranks you get by doing them are one way to get noticed.

So when does it start being taken seriously?

“The minute you start playing your first tournament,” Johnson said.

Does he think he is right?

“no way.

“Many adults can’t handle the pressure of playing an individual sport and then expect young kids to be able to.”

Steve Whelan, a coach with almost three decades of experience at St Albans, agrees that the system places a strong emphasis on winning at a young age.

“It creates this race to the bottom because parents are chasing ratings and standards,” he says.

To the parents, “These are not tennis players, they are children playing tennis and there is a big difference.”

The LTA said it had conducted a comprehensive review of its ratings and rankings in 2018 to “address the problem of high pressure, particularly on young children”.

Now players cannot be ranked with their peers at the national level until they reach the age group of under 11, while younger children aged eight and above are organized into competitions based on the latest form – level.

When it comes to parenting behaviour, the LTA says that as with any sport, “there are instances where a minority of parents do not meet the expected standard of behaviour”. The governing body will soon launch a new initiative called Fair Play, to encourage good behavior from parents and support coaches.