Bailey’s Blog

When you are born you will share your birthday with 15 million people

During your time at school, by the time you are 10 years old you will have an average of 17 friends, by the time you are 40 years old you will have an average of 2 friends

Throughout your life you will grow 950 kilometers of hair and laugh an average of 18 times a day and walk an equivalent of 3 times around the world

You will eat 30 tonnes of food

Drink 9000 cups of coffee and have a 1 in 10,000 chance of being accidentally electrocuted

Throughout your life you will spend 10 years at work

20 years asleep

3 years on the toilet 

7 months waiting in traffic and 2 and 1/2 months on hold

You will spend 12 years of your life watching television and 19 days looking for the remote control

This leaves only 1/5th of your life LEFT FOR LIVING so …….YOU BETTER GET STARTED!!! 

As a footwork teacher I realise that not all children are as coordinated or gifted as each other - the reasons are varied, it could be a physical thing, a social thing or a confidence thing. But, from an early age you can see who are really going to make something of themselves because there seems an innate sense of achievement within them.

In tennis I think of what Steffi Graf and Rafael Nadal must have been like as students….They don’t LACK - they’d rather try than lie! If you hit a ball anywhere on the court they would bust there guts to get to there….this is what I look for ….(you know, you can’t send a duck to eagle school!)

Great achievers are great students, they are always a pleasure to teach…..they make the lesson easy and are a joy to teach. If they fall over they don’t look around for sympathy they brush themselves off and get up…they don’t stay down.

If I could teach only one thing to every child in the world it would be this-

“Failure is not the worst thing in the world. The very worst is not to try”

There is such a strong habit by some children to quit when overcome by temporary defeat or when something pushes their boundaries. I want to see students who have stickability not quitability….. that is realy all I can ever ask! It is not about talent…it really is all about attitude!

Lack of effort = Failure

If I could teach the perfect  maths lesson I would teach that the only angle to approach life is the TRYangle approach, because teaching children to count is important but not as important as What what counts!

Quote: “To try and fail is at least to learn. To fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been”.

The greatest curse in life is to catch the disease of lazy-itiss!   

“The best defense is active offensive”

Tennis should be an equal  combination of

W - What you Want to do

S - What you Should do

C - What you Can do

What you want, should and can do will have a profound effect on you playing style and preferred footwork selection and contact moves.

Simply put:

What you want to do relates to - tennis playing personality

What you should do  relates to - smart shot selection  

What you can do relates to - what feels comfortable and works for you