| While tennis enjoys a popular following in Egypt, a lack of qualified coaches is hamstringing the professional aspirations of the nation’s players |
| By Rana Kamaly |
| You would never know it, but 2011 was a pretty good year for Egyptian tennis players. In July, the under-14 girls national team won the First African Junior Championships and a berth at the World Tennis Juniors Cup in the Czech Republic. And 17-year-old Karim Hossam, number 19 in the ITF Junior Rankings and heralded as the best Egyptian player since Ismail El Shafei, made it to the quarterfinals of the 2011 junior US Open in September.Egypt certainly has no shortage of potential in tennis, but rarely does that potential go anywhere. Ask any tennis professional, instructor or sport psychologist, and they’ll tell you that for a player to succeed beyond the amateur level, he or she needs a support system. If that support system is circular, then a person’s talent, supportive parents and the right training facilities all fall along the circle’s perimeter. Right at the center, the most important position, is a good coach. “We have a coaching problem. We have courts, resources, players, but […] we don’t have enough coaches to serve the some 7,000 to 9,000 players who compete in tournaments. We don’t even have an exact count of the number of players,” says sports consultant Hassan El Aroussy, director and head coach of Palm Aroussy Tennis Academy at Palm Club. The quality of coaching is also a serious concern, and although the Egyptian Tennis Federation (ETF) has a three-level certification system for coaches with courses on the latest developments in the sport, few coaches even bother getting certified. “We have 70 coaches certified at level one, 14 certified at level two, very few certified level three, and well over 500 not certified at all,” says Ismail El Shafei, former ETF head and current chairman of the International Tennis Federation’s (ITF) Coaches Commission. “We don’t even have a proper count for those not certified.” El Shafei helped bring the annual ITF’s Coaches Worldwide Conference to Marsa Alam in November 2011, the first time it has been held in Egypt. Dr. Khaled Farouk, a sports psychologist and former head coach at the BNP Paribas Tennis Academy, says the ETF’s system is not effective. A frequent presenter at ITF coaches conferences, Farouk is currently touring the European Circuit with the top Egyptian junior players, who have won several titles under his management. Farouk notes that the ETF’s coaching courses are translated from ITF programs. “When it is translated, most of the information is lost or misinterpreted,” he explains, adding that the certifying instructors are also a problem. “The teacher sometimes just wants to be paid, so he either doesn’t understand what he is teaching or doesn’t want to teach the students well for fear they will get better and take his position. So you don’t learn much in these courses. “In Egypt you don’t really need a license to work as a coach. We don’t have a system to grant licenses,” he continues, asserting that the majority of today’s club coaches are former tennis players and ball boys who have not studied coaching. “Actually, you don’t need anything — just looking good on court, being social and loved could do, mostly you won’t need any education after that.” The Talent Whisperers Farouk calls coaches who are able to bring out the best in a player “talent whisperers,” after the novel about a horse trainer with a special understanding of the animals he works with. These special coaches are not young. “They must have a psychology background and be able to read people well; they must be social yet objective with everyone, and they must have tactics, fitness and experience, among other things,” he explains. “It’s very hard to develop this fully integrated system [of coaching]. It takes time, and the coach also has to have a good mentor.” Some think that a coach is as good as his playing ability, an incorrect assumption as the coach’s tennis skill is not going to simply transfer to the player. “If you enjoy reading, that doesn’t make you a great writer,” Farouk notes. “[Take] Nicholas James Bollettieri, one of the best coaches in the world, no one knows if he can even play as no one has seen him play before, but he has studied the game well. It’s very rare to be an elite player and a good coach.” Indeed, in many local sports facilities, a coach often trains all of his players in the same way, regardless of a player’s individual strengths and weaknesses, because the coach thinks that his way is the best. “When I went to Germany the coach instantly saw my mistakes and corrected them for me. He wasn’t trying to turn me into a copy of himself, he saw my style and directed me to be better,” says Mazen Mahmoud, a tennis player in the under 14 division. “In Egypt, every coach tries to make me do what he thinks is better, not what’s really better for me.” “There is no best teaching style because every player differs. In the old days, [training] was very conventional — shake hands with the racket,” explains El Shafei, recalling his tennis career during the 1960s and 1970s. “Today it is different with Western, semi-Western [techniques], etc. […] Everyone must be trained according to his or her goal, abilities, strength, mentality and style.” In the past, athletic success was built on power and talent, but now it is mainly science. The coach must understand the biomechanics of the body and how to make the most out of it. “In the UK, when they were developing their tennis base, they took the ITF coaches database and sent for the best coaches to come and teach their own coaches,” notes Farouk, who was asked to share his science and psychology expertise with the British coaches. “We don’t have anything like this here in Egypt. The few who want to learn don’t know how, and the rest think they know everything — and that’s just the beginning of failure.” “Unfortunately, all sports coaches stop learning and developing at some point,” says Al Aroussy. “No matter how good you are, you must read something new every day to learn and develop, and now the internet makes it so easy.” Coaches often focus more on improving their financial status rather than their coaching skills, he notes, choosing to spend their time working rather than studying and investing in classes. “Coaches must also attend lectures and seminars, but there aren’t many offered in Egypt,” Al Aroussy adds. He notes that even though the 2011 ITF coaches conference was held in Egypt, there were only three Egyptians presenting workshops, out of 20 total workshops and 60 speakers. “We need more teachers to be able to raise the quality of coaching.” Some parents are seeking out foreign coaches for their budding tennis stars, but that’s not necessarily a guarantee of quality. “The ones that come to Egypt are mostly the ones who couldn’t survive in their own country. So they are mostly not good, they know we don’t have any selection criteria,” Farouk says. “We [as Egyptians] think that any foreigner is good, which is totally wrong. People treat him differently and listen to him more than the normal Egyptian coach, but they don’t differ much.” Noting that it is the parents who choose the coach, Farouk points out that, “If you depend on the customer’s ignorance to succeed you are going to be out of business soon. Abroad, people know this, but here coaches can survive for a long time, depending on the parents’ ignorance.” So Who’s Coachingthe Parents? Coaches have to contend not only with their players, but the players’ parents and their ambitions for their kids. “Nobody is thinking about who is helping or teaching the parents, and lots of problems originate from the interference of parents in practice or during matches,” says Mark Tennant, the director of the University of Warwick Tennis Centre. At the ITF Coaches Conference in Marsa Alam, Tennant presented talks about coaching young players and their parents. “Some fight with their kids, coaches and judges, and mainly it’s because they don’t understand. That’s the fault of the coach, because it is his responsibility to educate them as well. It’s a three-way relationship and the parents have to be involved in the right way.” “My parents are always tense during my matches, and although they don’t mean it, I feel it and it affects my performance negatively,” says Nada Hussein, a tennis player in the under-18 division. “I always tell them to be calm — after all it’s not life or death.” Some parents also cheer and applaud the competition’s mistakes, which is considered highly improper in tennis culture as it angers the opponent and creates unnecessary psychological pressure. Some coaches are no better. “The coach shapes his [player’s] behavior not just his game, and parents forget that,” explains Farouk. “When coaches are violent with players, some parents think this is how they should be trained to succeed. The truth is that none of them will succeed, and the players will grow up to be the people who scream, fight, drive badly become coaches and teach the same [habits].” Parents often think that their children will only improve if they practice a lot; they don’t understand that long hours of playing could affect bone growth and create other health issues. El Shafei says a bad coach bowing to parents’ pressure could lead to player injuries, while an educated coach can gauge the right amount of training. At the other end of the spectrum, there are the children who are extremely talented and could become successful pros, “but still parents can’t accept the idea of their kids leaving school and being professional tennis players, although they could get a better education from the internet than from Egyptian schools,” says Israa El Sanhoury, current president of the ETF and North Africa Tennis federation, and a member of the ITF’s women’s circuit committee. Show Me the Money But for parents who take the success of their children seriously, there are a slew of other frustrations to deal with other than good coaching. “There are no sports in Egypt because there is no system and no sponsorship. A lot of talents can’t afford it on their own,” says Mamdouh Ebada, whose daughter Yasmine and son Omar are two of the nation’s top tennis players. “When Yasmine was 14, she was number one in the under-16 and 18, and second in the women’s ETF ranking. Then at 16 years old, she was ranked number 167 in the world. That was the time for someone to invest in her, take her on tour, get her good coaches, but this never happened here. It happened with Ons Jabeur from Tunisia who won the Junior Championships at the [2011] Roland Garros [tournament], and my daughter always beat her easily. Ons is now among the world’s top 10 juniors and didn’t pay a penny — the Tunisian federation sponsored her and got her sponsors. Why doesn’t the ETF do the same?” The chief national body responsible for training and organizing the Egyptian tennis players for national and international matches, the ETF was established in 1920 and joined the ITF in 1923. Tennis players and coaches say, however, that the ETF has made very little progress in the past three decades. The federation’s support to players, coaches and judges is very limited, and the number of tournaments and coach workshops has not increased, despite requests from players, coaches and parents. According to El Shafei, countless tennis courts have been destroyed or converted for other uses, especially in rural areas, while many existing courts are in poor condition. “The clubs have limited resources and if the ETF actually implements its regulations on the quality of courts, clubs that don’t have the finances will shut down the courts,” El Shafei says, noting that no one knows how many tennis courts are available in Egypt. Match Over? Sports experts say there are three steps needed for not just tennis but sports in general to properly develop. First, “there has to be real sports in schools so we can have lots of players. Without sports [programs] in school, there will be no sports,” El Shafei says. “The education system helped in the decline because it is based on memorization so students have no time to do anything else.” Second, El Aroussy says, “The ETF must set some standards for coaches, judges and courts, as the coach’s education is the direct way to sports advancement.” Third, authorities must create the right management structure for sports federations with properly educated, highly qualified and well-paid staff. The federation has to work toward a common vision, El Shafei explains, and it needs to start by gathering data on every aspect of the game — from courts to coaches — to better judge what investment the sport needs. The ETF head notes that the federation is not getting much support from higher sports authorities as well. “The [local] Olympic committee must finance the professionals who are going to win Egypt medals and work with the federations to make budgets for those pros,” Sanhoury says, “But in Egypt the system is […] let’s say different. We go through the whole process and then they give us nothing.” In addition to bringing its Coaches Conference to Egypt for the first time, the ITF has been doing its part by offering the best African players a two-month paid tour around Europe to attend major tournaments. Ultimately, the players are the ones who suffer from the coaches’ ignorance, parents’ mentality, federation stagnancy and overall neglect of sports. “Professional players don’t just happen, they have to have the whole complete system, and if one side falls apart the whole system does,” Farouk says. “It’s just like a building: You have to build it in order and if one part is weak or if you take out a brick the whole building collapses.” |
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