Is my child falling behind in tennis?

“Other kids train five days a week. Are we falling behind?”

You see it at the club and in the tournament results. A child who started a year earlier. A child who trains twice as much. A child who just moved up a level. And you start doing the math on your own child: more lessons, a second coach, maybe an academy.

Before you add another training day, it’s worth knowing what research says about early starts and fast progress. It might change which question you ask.

Part of the gap is a calendar

Edgar and O’Donoghue (2005) looked at the birth dates of 476 elite junior and 448 elite senior tennis players. In both groups, almost six in ten were born in the first half of the year:

The authors conclude that the cut-off date of the junior competition year, which starts on January 1, is responsible for the skew, rather than regional or climatic factors. My reading: if your child has a birthday late in the year, part of the gap you see at the club may be age, not ability. That’s my interpretation, not a finding from the study.

A fast start isn’t the same as a long career

Barth et al. (2022) combined 71 study reports on 9,241 athletes from many sports and compared what predicted success as a junior with what predicted success as an adult world-class athlete. The patterns pointed in opposite directions.

Higher-performing juniors had started their main sport earlier, practiced it more, practiced other sports less, and progressed faster at first. Adult world-class athletes, compared with national-class ones, had started their main sport later, practiced it less, did more multi-sport coached practice in childhood, and progressed more slowly at first.

An earlier meta-analysis by Güllich et al. (2022) of 6,096 athletes, including 772 of the world’s top performers, found the same split.

Two honest caveats. This is evidence from many sports, not tennis alone. And these are averages: they don’t say every child who specializes early will stall.

What starting too hard can cost

Jayanthi et al. (2013) reviewed the evidence on specialization in young athletes. For most sports, they found no evidence that intense training and specialization before puberty are necessary to reach elite status. The risks of early specialization they list:

Their conclusion: some specialization is needed for elite skill, but for most sports, intense single-sport training should be delayed until late adolescence to optimize success while minimizing injury, psychological stress, and burnout. That last risk is the one I wrote about in why kids quit tennis.