Client-centered tennis coaching survey
Marcin Bieniek explains the benefits of being client-centered in your coaching approach and the information to collect from your client to help you adjust the training to meet your client's needs.
All coaches have personal goals and motivating factors, and we develop our skills and knowledge by practicing on-court, by reading books, or by participating in tennis conferences. In most cases, we care about our clients and players but why we care depends on personality and coaching factors. It may be because we want to have a dozen clients, or perhaps because we want to pass on our knowledge, or a combination of these two factors.
Should the training we provide be based on what we think the client needs (coach-centered), or should we find out what the client wants from the training (client-centered)? By getting feedback (survey) from the client, we can find out how they perceive the training, how they learn best, what they enjoy & do not enjoy the training, etc. A client-centered approach is perhaps more demanding as you will have to adjust your coaching approach for each client. All clients want to develop their skills, but they also like to enjoy the training - if they enjoy the training they will keep coming back.
Survey
The following is a simple survey for your client to complete that will provide you with valuable information about how they perceive the training, which will enable you to match the coaching sessions with your client's needs.
| 1. What was your primary goal of starting to play tennis? |
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| 2. What is your current goal of playing tennis? |
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| 3. What are your favourite drills? | Basket drills | |
| Combined drills (basket + coach) | ||
| Live-ball drills (rallying, patterns) | ||
| Other |
| 4. Which is the most efficient way for you to receive information? | Verbal | |
| Visual | ||
| Kinesthetic |
5. Do you think that practice is a good one?
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| 6. You learn easier by: | Getting information | |
| Getting questions | ||
| Self-correcting | ||
| Other |
| 7. Is self-correcting information similar to correcting information from the coach? | Yes | |
| No | ||
| 8. Is information passed and understandably? | Yes | |
| No | ||
| 9. Is intensity too high? | Yes | |
| No | ||
| 10. Is intensity too low? | Yes | |
| No | ||
| 11. Are drills too difficult? | Yes | |
| No | ||
| 12. Are drills too easy? | Yes | |
| No | ||
| 13. Do you share your information about strokes with a coach? | Yes | |
| No | ||
| 14. Do you suggest any modification to the coach's drills? | Yes | |
| No | ||
| 15. Do you understand the goal of each exercise? | Yes | |
| No | ||
| 16. Do you have your goals in each exercise? | Yes | |
| No |
Page Reference
If you quote information from this page in your work, then the reference for this page is:
- BIENIEK, M. (2012) Client centred coaching survey [WWW] Available from: https://www.brianmac.co.uk/articles/article099.htm [Accessed
About the Author
Marcin Bieniek is a tennis coach from Poland and a former professional player (Polish National Juniors Team). He is a certificated tennis coach by the Polish Tennis Coaching Association and the Professional Tennis Registry. Marcin has worked with many of the top 20 Polish Juniors and the top 150 players in the world.