RECOMMENDED READING
Crosscourt Consulting Recommends the following reading list.
For Parents
Parenting Aces – Website Articles, podcast & Webinars (Founder Lisa Stone)
A comprehensive resource for parents. This site is a wealth of knowledge. Well worth the annual subscription fee.
The Tennis Parents Bible, Second Edition By Frank Giampaolo
The 2nd Edition of The Tennis Parent’s Bible delves even deeper than the original bestselling Tennis Parent’s Bible- an essential guide for the competitive junior tennis player, parent, and coach. The second edition opens the door to thousands of hours of athlete-coach specific instruction and parental job descriptions that will save thousands of dollars and hours of wasted time, tears, and anguish. Frank clearly spells out what tennis parents need to know and understand how to navigate their young tennis athletes through this maze of the highly competitive and performance-driven sport. Regardless of the stage of development, the ultimate goal of The Tennis Parent’s Bible is to maximize player potential at the quickest rate. The evolutionary state of tennis demands parents are more involved and informed. Specific roles and responsibilities of the player, coach and parent are outlined for greater synergy, team harmony, and accelerate athletic growth. The Tennis Parent’s Bible is essential reading for those interested in developing confident, self-reliant, and accomplished children.
The Talent Code By Daniel Coyle
What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? This groundbreaking work provides readers with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others. Whether you’re coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano, writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing, this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism. Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world’s talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything.
• Deep Practice Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn’t know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice.
• Ignition We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development.
• Master Coaching What are the secrets of the world’s most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these “talent whisperers” to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students.
These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness, from Michelangelo’s to Michael Jordan’s. The good news about myelin is that it isn’t fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished. Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness, this book will not only change the way you think about talent but equip you to reach your own highest potential.
Chump to Champ By David Benzel
Discover what it takes to be a Champ! Some organizations and families are healthier, more productive, and more successful than others. Look closely and you will see that the most common factor distinguishing good from great in either a company or a family is its individuals and their unique relationships. Are the individuals in your organization, or your family, eager for growth…but stuck without a plan; hungry for excellence…but wallowing in mediocrity? Is greatness just out of reach? In order for the group to move from good to great, the individuals within it must first move from Chump to Champ. It is a journey that must start on the individual level and requires persistence and direction every step of the way. Join David Benzel on one of the most significant and meaningful endeavors you or your team will ever take. David’s life story is an inspiration to athletes, corporations, and employees alike.
Learning How To Learn
For almost a century, educational theory and practice have been influenced by the view of behavioural psychologists that learning is synonymous with behaviour change. In this book, the authors argue for the practical importance of an alternate view, that learning is synonymous with a change in the meaning of experience. They develop their theory of the conceptual nature of knowledge and describe classroom-tested strategies for helping students to construct new and more powerful meanings and to integrate thinking, feeling, and acting. In their research, they have found consistently that standard educational practices that do not lead learners to grasp the meaning of tasks usually fail to give them confidence in their abilities. It is necessary to understand why and how new information is related to what one already knows. All those concerned with the improvement of education will find something of interest in Learning How to Learn.
Helping People Learn
Educational theory and practice are historically influenced by the view of behavioral psychologists that learning is synonymous with behavior change. Helping People Learn argues for the practical importance of an alternate view, that learning is synonymous with a change in the meaning of experience. Based on the foundations of cognitive psychology and constructivist epistemology, this book presents a science of education that can guide the development of successful and meaningful educational programs. It serves as a sequel to the best-selling Learning How to Learn and includes ideas developed through the author’s research and training programs conducted over the past thirty years. It emphasises the power of the knowledge representation tool ‘concept maps’, designed to facilitate meaningful learning and creativity. This book capitalises on the advances in technology and is of interest to students, professionals and researchers in educational psychology and learning theory.
FITNESS & CONDITIONING
Tennis Conditioning & Fitness Tennis Anatomy By E. Paul Roetert & Mark S. Kovacs
See your tennis game as you never have before. See what it takes to improve consistency and performance on the court. Tennis Anatomy will show you how to ace the competition by increasing strength, speed, and agility for more powerful serves and more accurate shots. Tennis Anatomy includes more than 72 of the most effective exercises, each with step-by-step descriptions and full-color anatomical illustrations highlighting muscles in action. Tennis Anatomy goes beyond exercises by placing you on the baseline, at the net, and on the service line. Illustrations of the active muscles for forehands, backhands, volleys, and serves to show you how each exercise is fundamentally linked to tennis performance. You’ll also learn how exercises can be modified to target specific areas, improve your skills, and minimize common tennis injuries. Best of all, you’ll learn how to put it all together to develop a training program based on your individual needs and goals. Whether you’re a serve and volleyer, baseliner, or all-court player, Tennis Anatomy will ensure that you step onto the court ready to dominate any opponent.
Complete Conditioning for Tennis Mark S. Kovacs, Paul Roetert & Todd S. Ellenbecker
Improve shot power, increase on-court speed and agility, and outlast the opposition with Complete Conditioning for Tennis, the most comprehensive tennis conditioning resource available!
The only strength and conditioning resource endorsed by the United States Tennis Association, Complete Conditioning for Tennis details how to maximize your training with exercises, drills, and programs that
• assess physical strengths and deficiencies
• improve footwork and agility
• increase speed and quickness
• enhance stamina
• increase flexibility
• reduce recovery time
• prevent common injuries.
Throughout, you will have access to the same recommendations and routines used by today’s top professional players. From increasing the speed and power of your serve and groundstrokes to enhancing on-court agility and stamina, you will be ready to take the court with confidence and endure even the most grueling matches. Off the court, you’ll learn recovery techniques and preventive exercises for keeping shoulder and elbow injuries at bay. Featuring more than 200 on- and off-court drills and exercises combined with exclusive online access to 56 video clips, Complete Conditioning for Tennis is an essential resource for players, coaches, instructors, and anyone serious about the sport.
MORE
Practice Perfect — Doug Lomov, Erica Woolway & Katie Yezzi
The Playmakers Advantage — Leonard Zaichkowsky, PHD Outliers — Malcom Gladwell
Talent is Never Enough — John C. Maxwell
Range — David Epstein
Developing Talent In Young People – Lauren Sosniak
Instruction
Maximum Tennis By Nick Saviano
Few players can serve like Andy Roddick or Venus Williams, and rifle returns as quickly as Andre Agassi, but all the game’s elite athletes have 10 characteristics in common that enable them to play their best possible tennis. As a professional player, an elite coach, and a coach of top coaches, author Nick Saviano has seen the difference that mindset can make. Now, in Maximum Tennis, Saviano draws together the common links shared by the best players—elements you can use to reach your full potential. Play from the heart. Simplify your stroke. Focus on the elements you control. Play to your personal strengths. Maximum Tennis distills the nature of championship play into its essence, helping you play to your strengths and enjoy the game every time you step on the court. Some of the best to ever play and coach adds their own examples to each of Saviano’s lessons. Contributors include Jim Courier, Chris Evert, Nick Bollettieri, Billie Jean King, Stan Smith, and many more. According to Saviano, great players aren’t born; they’re made. In Maximum Tennis, this internationally recognized coach draws from his experience on the courts and behind the scenes with some of the sport’s top names. He reveals concepts any player can learn—and every coach can teach—to help you reach your full potential and enhance your love of the game.
Mental Training
The Inner Game of Tennis By W. Timothy Gallwey
Master your game from the inside out! With more than 800,000 copies sold since it was first published thirty years ago, this phenomenally successful guide has become a touchstone for hundreds of thousands of people. Not just for tennis players, or even just for athletes in general, this handbook works for anybody who wants to improve his or her performance in any activity, from playing music to getting ahead at work. W. Timothy Gallwey, a leading innovator in sports psychology, reveals how to
• Focus your mind to overcome nervousness, self-doubt, and distractions
• Find the state of “relaxed concentration” that allows you to play at your best
• Build skills by smart practice, then put it all together in match play
Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, Gallwey’s engaging voice, clear examples, and illuminating anecdotes will give you the tools you need to succeed. “Introduced to The Inner Game of Tennis as a graduate student years ago, I recognized the obvious benefits of [W. Timothy] Gallwey’s teachings. . . . Whether we are preparing for an inter-squad scrimmage or the National Championship Game, these principles lie at the foundation of our program.”—from the Foreword by Pete Carroll
The Mentally Tough Competitor: Mindsets & Perspectives to Achieve Excellence By Brian Lomax
Anyone can be an athlete, but not everyone is a great competitor. Mentally tough competitors are the ones who stand out in the big moments and come through in the clutch. They know how to compete, and the ability to compete is a mental game. Nerves, anger, fear, pressure, challenges, and failure are issues that all athletes face in competition. To become a mentally tough competitor, athletes must learn and adopt the mindsets of the world’s best. In this collection of perspectives, Brian Lomax, M Ed, describes the philosophies of great competitors and gives you advice on how you can adopt these mindsets. As you navigate your journey toward becoming a great competitor, the perspectives presented in this book will be your constant companion. They will become the foundation of your unbreakable mental game.
The book includes perspectives on:
•The Competitive Mindset
•Competing & Performance
•Focus & Confidence
Lockerroom Power: Building and Athletes Mind By David Sammel
“Locker Room Power is a powerful book! It will help you gain a mental edge and a mind tough enough to face life’s challenges. Locker Room Power is an aura you can create and is a major factor in the achievement of consistent success.
“We all know this aura exists. What I like about this book is that you give it an identity.” – Tim Henman
“This is a top book by a top coach.” – Judy Murray
Learn the:
– Difference between belief and confidence
– Desire and how it grows and understand levels of desire
– Weapons – the key to success
– Locker-room power – how to build it and how to keep it through identity
– Humour, and enthusiasm the food energy of champions
– Difference between men and women in building self-esteem – practical ideas to use Think of the most successful athletes of all time and almost every one of them has certain invincibility and aura in the way they go about their business and present themselves to the world. Sometimes mistaken for arrogance, this self-belief is essential in succeeding in professional sport – and in everyday life. There’s no doubt that talent plays a part, but the best believe they’re the best and, perhaps more importantly, they make their opponents believe they’re the best too.
International Tennis Coach David Sammel, has named this aura Locker Room Power (LRP). David has been successfully instilling Locker Room Power to serve players well on and off the court for many years, utilizing his 30 years of experience and knowledge of how to get the mental toughness required to succeed as a professional sportsperson. David Sammel has now decided to share the theory of Locker Room Power in his first book Locker Room Power: Building an Athlete’s Mind. Primarily aimed at athletes, coaches, and anyone who wants to be achieved at the highest level, whether it be in sport or business.
Locker Room Power: Building an Athletes Mind will help you identify the key factors you need to consistently perform at the highest level, exploring the impact LRP has on your performance and how to create that all-important psychological edge over your opponents. David is a high-performance coach and motivator of athletes and coaches. He specializes in creating a competitive edge through the mind. The work is based on empirical evidence and practical methods that have helped athletes succeed. The book is not for everyone! Only read Locker Room Power if you are interested in:
– Looking into the “mirror” with a desire to improve.
– Ambitious
– Enjoy honest work with the patience and understanding that all good things come to those who stick to a process, a map leading to the end vision (which usually gives birth to the next vision
– Want to learn how to ‘Tackle each challenge without panic’
– Need inspiration that is practical and not fluffy.
David still works the world tennis tour and coached players at every Grand Slam from Junior Champions to top 100, several of whom have represented their countries in Davis Cup and Fed Cup, including Wes Moodie, the 2005 Wimbledon doubles champion. His passion is excellence through the bravery of thought, helping people achieve more than they believed possible, converting hopes into reality. He believes that He needs to keep working at the highest level to keep his focus and knowledge current. He loves doing the workshops as these emphasize the importance of the application. Presenting sharpens the pathway of converting complexity into simplicity ~ a key to teaching!
Grit: The Power of Passion & Perseverance Angela Duckworth
In this must-read book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, athletes, students, and business people both seasoned and new that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called “grit.” Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur “genius” Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success. Rather, other factors can be even more crucial such as identifying our passions and following through on our commitments. Drawing on her own powerful story as the daughter of a scientist who frequently bemoaned her lack of smarts, Duckworth describes her winding path through teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not “genius” but a special blend of passion and long-term perseverance. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Duckworth created her own “character lab” and set out to test her theory. Here, she takes readers into the field to visit teachers working in some of the toughest schools, cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, and young finalists in the National Spelling Bee. She also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in peak performance. Finally, she shares what she’s learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to the cartoon editor of The New Yorker to Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll. Winningly personal, insightful, and even life-changing, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that not talent or luck makes all the difference.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success By Carol S. Dweck, PH.D.
World-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in decades of research on achievement and success, has discovered a truly groundbreaking idea—the power of our mindset.
In this brilliant book, Dweck shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we approach our goals. People with a fixed mindset— those who believe that abilities are fixed—are far less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset— those who believe that abilities can be developed through hard work, good strategies, and mentorship. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishments.
Praise for Mindset
“A good book is one whose advice you believe. A great book is one whose advice you follow. This is a book that can change your life, as its ideas have changed mine.”—Robert J. Sternberg, co-author of Teaching for Wisdom, Intelligence, Creativity, and Success
“An essential read for parents, teachers [and] coaches . . . as well as for those who would like to increase their own feelings of success and fulfillment.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“Everyone should read this book.”—Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick
“One of the most influential books ever about motivation.”—Po Bronson, author of NurtureShock
“If you manage people or are a parent (which is a form of managing people), drop everything, and read Mindset.”— Guy Kawasaki, author of The Art of the Start 2.0
The Mindful Athlete: Secrets To Pure Performance By George Mumford
Michael Jordan credits George Mumford with transforming his on-court leadership of the Bulls, helping Jordan lead the team to six NBA championships. Mumford also helped Kobe Bryant, Andrew Bynum, and Lamar Odom and countless other NBA players turn around their games. A widely respected public speaker and coach, Mumford is sharing his own story and the strategies that have made these athletes into stars in The Mindful Athlete: The Secret to Pure Performance. His proven, gentle but groundbreaking mindfulness techniques can transform the performance of anyone with a goal, be they an Olympian, weekend warrior, executive, hacker, or artist. Mumford’s deeply moving personal story is unforgettable. A basketball player at the University of Massachusetts (where he roomed with Dr. J, Julius Erving), injuries forced Mumford out of the game he loved. The meds that relieved the pain of his injuries also numbed him to the emptiness he felt without the game and eventually led him to heroin. After years as a functioning addict, Mumford enrolled in Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program, and made meditation, on and off the cushion, the center of his life. He kicked drugs, earned a master’s degree in counseling psychology, and began teaching meditation to inmates and others. When Michael Jordan left the Chicago Bulls to play baseball in 1993, the team was in crisis. Coach Phil Jackson, a long-time mindfulness practitioner, contacted Dr. Kabat-Zinn to find someone who could teach mindfulness techniques to the struggling team—someone who would have credibility and could speak the language of his players. Kabat-Zinn led Jackson to Mumford and their partnership began. Mumford has worked with Jackson and each of the eleven teams he coached to become NBA champions. His roster of champion clients has since blossomed way beyond basketball to include corporate executives, Olympians, and athletes in many different sports. With a charismatic teaching style that combines techniques of engaged mindfulness with lessons from popular culture icons such as Yoda, Indiana Jones, and Bruce Lee, Mumford tells illuminating stories about his larger than life clients. His writing is down-to-earth and easy to understand and apply. The Mindful Athlete is an engrossing story and an invaluable resource for anyone looking to elevate their game, no matter what the pursuit, and includes a foreword by Phil Jackson.
“Self-consciousness is when you’re focused on how you’re doing instead of what you’re doing. We have to learn how to push and challenge ourselves, but not in an insensitive way. Honing your performance really comes down to being comfortable with being uncomfortable.”—George Mumford
We look forward to working with you.
