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Comment by drchiu | Hacker News Reader

As a parent with kids who play junior tennis, I remind them after every loss (and win) that this is just a hobby.

But the number of parents who take this so seriously would surprise anyone not part of this culture.

The travelling, the hotel rooms, the large number of tournaments played every week -- all these things start early (7-8 years old). School? Forget about it. They're superficially home-schooled. Tennis is all they do, and if they're lucky (at least by the standards of the article), they don't get good enough to be a low-level "pro" and get a chance to go to school for a proper education and get a regular job that pays well.

If they're unlucky, they get a D1 school, on a full-ride scholarship, and then waste a few years of their lives continuuing to damage their bodies in pursuit of "making it" as a pro tennis player.

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My young son is really getting into tennis and I grew up playing as well so I’m excited.

It’s hard not to let my imagination run wild about him walking out center court at Wimbledon (okay fine I’d take the French Open too), with me in the stands cheering him on.

But then I see what it takes to even get to a D1 level (private coaching, academies where he’s fodder for the golden goose, et al) let alone making it to The Show and I would never in a million years want to subject my child to that kind of torture.

I’ve come to accept it’s most likely he might play in high school and him and I can enjoy playing together as a fun bonding activity.

Serena said in that HBO documentary about her that she’d never put her kids into the Tennis machine and that’s about as much validation as I’ll ever need.

I hold the unpopular opinion that serious child sports are child labour, and parents should be punished as such. The same goes for chess, dancing, acting or any other such pursuit.

Any child activity that resembles a job if you squint is going too far. I don't care if we never see another Mozart, Federer or Michael Jackson. It's abuse to squeeze a child into such a narrow life. It produces broken adults.

Let kids be kids.

Maybe even if you don't make it, you'd look back fondly on your time as a competitor as a formative period. I'm sure you'd gain lots of skills by having such discipline and rigor.

But then you've wasted all the time you could've applied all that "discipline and rigor" to

I've never regretted having fun in the sun.

You don’t need discipline and rigor for the fun parts, and you won’t get them there either. You develop them through the grind and the sacrifice, which may or may not be something you’ll want your child to endure.

Meh, I was in the "Tennis Machine".

I did not learn any discipline because everything was scheduled for me. I really didn't like most of my experience.

Two positives:

1. I kept a lot my agility, muscle, and flexibility. Even after ceasing all physical activity for over 10 years.

2. Sharpened the connection between my mind and body. I'm really good at learning new physical skills that require fine motor control.

Though I'm sure many, many other activities can provide these benefits as well.

If I could go back, I would spend less time in those tennis camps, less time playing WoW, and more time in shop class, and hanging with the robotics people.

Something I grapple with as someone who washed out of the classical music pipeline and recreationally participate in an Olympic sport: if my future child gets identified as Talented, will I let them go down the Path? Because What-If they’re actually world-dominating talent? Will it be right of me to derail that in the name of risk-adversity?

I say this because I got washed out during a critical development phase (I was 10 years old) due to some poorly timed family crises and an abusive teacher. I think I’ve done okay for myself and still play as a hobby but the what-ifs do enter my daydreams from time to time…

> Will I let them go down the Path?

A serious training regime in any enjoyable skill between 5 and 20 can be a very rewarding thing once you reach adulthood. If you're not an elite musician, you can still be in a very popular local band or ensemble and play festivals and gatherings. If you're a varsity high school athlete you can play at a high level in clubs through adulthood and maybe teach on the side.

I think Talented children should be shown the path, and if they have the natural drive and competitiveness then you can meet them at that level and encourage it.

The mandolin player in my band is a talented mandolinist, singer, pianist, and guitarist. He told me once that his parents made him practice 3 hours of classical piano every day for many years and he absolutely hated it. I asked him if he wished he hadn't been made to do that, and he said no, he wouldn't voluntarily give up the musical advantages that training conferred on him. He's perfectly happy as a 21 year old CS student that plays in a band.

Parents need to, pardon my French, wake the fuck up.

As a former us division III track athlete I am well aware of the many many tiers of pure athletic ability that exists.

#200 in the world at any sport has astounding superhuman abilities. Pros are born with 80-95%of the raw ability and the rest is training.

There is a 99.9999% chance or worse your Olympian in training won't make it. If they do, 99% of them will last a year or two at most.

10000 hours only gets you to competence.

Michael Jordan famously was cut from his high school bball team, but he had a 40 inch vertical even back then.

>Pros are born with 80-95% of the raw ability and the rest is training.

The difficulty with this statement is trying to get it to override the glaring anecdotal counterexample staring every parent-child pair in the face.

You have one dude who had no cultivated knowledge of the sport and took a couple of tennis lessons from "Old Whiskey" then wrote a 85 page plan and then will-powered the shit out of getting his physically non-alike non-identical twin daughters to be pro tennis athletes.

The idea that the guy who had a tennis idea just happened to come by two daughters who were already possesing 85-90% god given talent for the sport he just happened to specifically pick is hard for a human to wrap their mind around I think.

Don't get be wrong, it could still be true. But if it's true, some should still test it.

It's bound to happen because you don't hear about all the scenarios like this that failed.

Serena and Venus were clearly phenomenal pure athletes. Serena is arguably the strongest womens player ever.

The Williams dad basically coached Venus and Serena. Think about it, he's not even a professional coach. Think about all the thousands of privileged tennis players that get unlimited professional coaching, facilities, Boletteri academy, etc.

I will grant you that tennis is a sport where overwhelming athleticism is not the primary attribute. But right after hand-eye coordination comes athleticism, and after that is top-tier endurance.

There is no shortage of athletes in high-revenue sports that will literally run through walls (see: rugby, american football) to succeed. And the vast majority of them don't. Look at Division I college sports: full of totally dedicated elite athletes receiving top level coaching. How many of them move onto the lower tiers of pro tennis?

Don't be fooled by the lottery winners / survivor bias of the top players. Yes they worked hard to get where they were. Yes they may work harder or smarter than some of their near-peers with equally flaggergasting natural talents. Yes it fits into a popular American narrative of hard work == success.

But look at Nick Krygios. I don't follow the guy's training, but it's pretty clear that he is as apathetic a top player as there is. Every tennis observer knows he has the physical gifts of an all-time great, almost naturally given.

Donovan Bailey was a Canadian sprinter that won the 100m in the Olympics in the 90s (no, not the steroid guy Ben Johnson). He was basically not training and goofing off a year before the Olympics and someone finally got through to him to actually train for it and got him focused, and boom a year later he was Olympic champ in the most selective, widely contested, pure athletic event in existence.

A lot of my frustration with the youth coaching sports pipeline is that they tell the parents to focus on one sport to exclusion. There is a racket where the high school teams will only have players coached by the coach in the offseason, "paid his dues".

So kids don't get a wide variety of sports exposure and don't have fun. Which is dumb. Sure there are these youth sports coach vampires making a buck off of the hopes and dreams of the parents, but it comes down to the idiot parents not realizing how things really work.

>Serena and Venus were clearly phenomenal pure athletes

I don't think it's helpful to assert true the point that's trying to proven. The point is Richard Williams made a decision before it could possible be known that both daughters just happened to be pure phenomenal athletes at that young an age for that specific sport. There is no evidence that this is not s case of nuture overcoming nature since the absence of similar successes could just as easily be chalked up to shitty coaching of what were incredibly talented youths who were more pure athletes than either of the Willams sisters instead of an indictment of the lack of god given talent those other failed youths originally possessed.

>But look at Nick Krygios. I don't follow the guy's training, but it's pretty clear that he is as apathetic a top player as there is.

The point of contention is not whether naturally talented athletes can become pro with minimal effort, which I think hardly anyone would disagree with in theory. The contested point is whether the parent is condemning their children to failure if they do not rack up successes at a very young age.

There was a piece a while back ago attributing the success of notable famous people like Einstein to the presence of all consuming private tutors, where the tutor in question was either a very close family friend, a family member, or a relative. These people just didn't quit when other tutors with less skin in the game would. How do we know 50% natural talent is not enough and the rest cannot be overcome by nuture, and that it has to be 90% natural talent from the get go?

I agree that regardless of success such a life might be subpar. But whether a parent should subject their kid to such a life is a related but a separate issue to the question of their potential success.

> The idea that the guy who had a tennis idea just happened to come by two daughters who were already possesing 85-90% god given talent for the sport he just happened to specifically pick is hard for a human to wrap their mind around I think.

1) You've got it backward. If that hadn't been true, you'd never have heard about them.

You could drop the Williams sisters in practically ANY power sport given their size and build (Venus is REALLY BIG for a woman--she's 6' 1" and could likely play in the WNBA--Serena isn't exactly tiny--she's 5' 9"--that puts them at 3 and 2 standard deviations out, repectively) and they would dominate very quickly.

If the Williams sisters played basketball or soccer, for example, they'd be a hugely dominant force there, instead.

2) Training did a big shift right about the 1990s when people like the Williams sisters were coming up--especially for female training.

Navratilova was really the first female tennis player to adopt more scientific power training and reap the benefits. The players in the next generation (which includes the Williams sisters) that were steeped in that idea and put it into practice did very well in a LOT of different sports. They also easily blew through competitors who didn't do that--and at that point in the 1990s there were still a lot who didn't.

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