The Parent Role

Before tennis, your child

Before you learn a single thing about UTR ratings, tournament schedules, or college recruiting, Frank Giampaolo would tell you to learn something about your own child. After thirty years of coaching — including a daughter who reached #1 nationally and the top 250 WTA by age 15 — he begins every engagement with personality profiling. The lesson isn’t about personality tests. It’s about recognizing that your child is wired differently than you are.

"A point is maybe four or five seconds long. Then they get twenty-five seconds for software — problem solving, self-awareness, opponent awareness, score management. The vast majority of tennis is played between the points." — Frank Giampaolo, Psychology of Tennis Parenting (Jan 2023)

And if you want your child to make better decisions on court? “Have them lead the way next time you travel,” Giampaolo says. “Have them navigate. Find the airport, the parking, the gate, the baggage claim. The more kids are used to doing that themselves, the more they get used to problem solving.”

The car ride home

Mark and Britt McKinney devoted an entire episode to the twenty minutes after a match ends. The drive home is the moment most parents undo whatever progress the practice week made. The McKinneys’ rule is simple and unbearably hard to follow: don’t talk about the match unless your child opens the door first. Then listen — don’t coach.

The car ride sits at the intersection of every theme on this page: identification, body language, vicariousness, the parent’s own unmet needs. It is also, almost universally, where families tell us they wish they had done something differently.

The body at the fence

Josh Burger, who works with juniors on tournament-day mental performance, returns to one observation across his appearances: kids read their parents’ faces between every point. A sigh, a head-shake, a turn-away — the player sees it, and the next ball comes off the strings differently. “If you can’t be neutral,” he tells parents, “be invisible. Stand where they can’t see you. The best gift is the absence of your reaction.”

"The dreaded car ride home isn't really about the car. It's about whether your kid believes your love is contingent on the score." — Nick Buonocore, Why Youth Sports Need Reforming (2022)

Modeling the next point

Damon Valentino’s argument is that mental training for tennis parents starts with the parent practicing the very mindset they want their child to play with. “It’s a ‘next point’ game,” Valentino says. “But parents stay stuck on the last one — the missed call, the bad break, the loss. If you can’t model letting go, don’t be surprised when your kid can’t either.”

Peter Scales reframes the whole project around three words: Compete, Learn, Honor. Parents who orient around those three words — every car ride, every scoreline, every conversation with the coach — produce the kids who make it to college tennis with their love of the game still intact. Parents who orient around results produce the kids who quit at sixteen.

When the role ends

Hernan Chousa’s episode is the one many parents skip and shouldn’t. He is direct about the identity crisis that follows when a child quits or ages out. The parent role you’ve been playing for a decade — the driver, the funder, the strategist — simply stops, and there is no script for what comes next. The archive contains a quiet sub-genre of episodes about this moment. They are some of Lisa’s most-replayed.