Welcome to the Function Tennis Podcast.

I'm your host Fabio Molli and I bring you insights and lessons from players, coaches and parents and experts who are ingrained in the world of high level tennis.

And sometimes I randomly come across an interesting chat on my travels.

I'm just back from the Aussie Open.

If you've never been, I recommend you add it to your bucket list.

It's a well run event, the weather is great most of the time, players are excited with the start of a new year.

There's plenty of fun to be had on the court and outside the court and I can see why it's called the Happy Slam.

Also, if you don't have access to the main courts, the top players often practice on the smaller courts.

It's a great chance to get up close to them on match days.

I've seen Yannick Alcaraz, Novak, IGA Sabalenka all practice on the small courts and they practice there when they're playing that day and also on their off day.

So it's really great if you want to get up close.

I was lucky there with our podcast sponsors Athex, who were launching new Gel Resolution X.

I'll have another episode talking about them and introducing a great new player to the lineup.

Lorenzo Musetti.

I arrived a bit earlier and left a bit later, so it gave me a bit of time to get to the Aussie Open to check out practices and watch some matches.

But one day on my way back to the Essex Hotel, I came across the Yonex Pop up store which was near my original hotel and the drop off for tourman transportation.

I'd heard about it but hadn't paid much attention to it.

So I decided to go in and there I saw Darren Kyle having a casual Q and A chat with six or seven people.

I was like, whoa.

It was an organized event that I should have known more about.

If you don't know Darren, he's the current coach of Jannik Sinner along with a former guest actually Simone Vaniozzi and Darren has worked with Leighton Hewitt, Andre Agassi and Simona Halep in the past.

Anyway, I said to myself I better take out my phone and get recording as well as ask my question.

I did the other day put a short clip of him talking about resilience on the functional tennis Instagram account which people loved and yeah, did really well.

He also during the chat talks about what he loves about Sinner, what Agassi sees in Sinner, Jannik's parents not getting involved in his tennis as well as transition from a player to a coach and how he likes to build a team.

It's short as I was running late for an event and the quality is not up to our usual standards, as recorded on my phone.

And it was quite loud there.

I promise though, you're able to hear it and you'll definitely pick up one bit of advice from it.

Hope you enjoy it.

As a coach, like how do you normally prepare the player?

Like, obviously like Yannick Singer in terms of my set on the day of tournaments.

So that starts well before the day of the tournament.

The mindset is something you can't just switch on and off.

It has to be doing it over and over, the little things over and over and over.

From the first day, you start working with a plan and after a good amount of time, those little habits start to sink in and become more natural for the player.

So it's the little things.

It's eating at the right time, watching enough video about your opponent to find out what you're going to do on that match day, treating everyone well, treating your teammates with respect.

And it's the culture within tennis that makes you feel good as a person.

And if you can make a better person, you can make a better tennis player, in my opinion.

So just some little things make it good.

And coaches and then how do you access your feet?

And also how do you accept winning as well?

How do you take winning?

Do you take winning with being humble, having class, being respectful?

And do you take losses in the same way as well?

So a lot of that comes down to good communication and learnings through experience.

That's why we talk about resilience all the time and building up resilience in a tennis player.

You can only do that through personal experience.

And then you talk your way through those, those moments.

Janik, last year at the US Open, after what he went through at the US Open, for him to be able to put himself in a bubble and play some of the best tendencies ever played speaks a lot to his maturity and his resilience and the qualities of him as a human being as well.

And that's what I admire most about.

It's not the results, the results.

All the great champions have great results.

But it's how you accept and handle those results.

And.

And that'll be his legacy 10 years time, when he finishes playing tennis, it'll be champion.

Yes.

What is he.

Yeah, he crushes every single tennis player.

Every is good friends with Andre Agassi.

You remember Andre, you're a little bit young, but do you remember Andre?

Yes.

One of the great players.

He won eight major number one in the world, Olympic gold medal.

He did everything in tennis and he did everything before I started working with him.

So he was already a legend.

And he speaks to me a lot about Yannick is when he sees Yannick play, he sees every ball as an opportunity to finish the point.

That's what Yannick.

You know, most players like myself will get onto the court and you have to try to find a weakness.

And he puts a ball into a certain part of the court where you feel like you're safe.

But no ball is safe against Yanick.

And that's his greatest strength, is that he can generate pace, power, angle and precision from any part of the core.

And he's improved his game.

He's coming to the net more now, transitioning more, sensing opportunities.

His serve has improved.

We changed a little bit with his serve.

He went from a platform to a step up serve.

So he's willing to take chances within his game to become better.

Not everything we give him is good for him and we'll quickly work out whether or not it works for him or not.

But the stuff that we're giving him, he's willing to try.

And I think Even if he's 15 in the world, 10 in the world, 5 in the world, 1 in the world, it doesn't matter what your ranking is.

You have to continue to look for improvement in your game and then you will have a long, successful career in America.

Correct.

Hi.

I heard Janik's parents were like super important for him.

They gave him tough love lessons.

Did I.

They make.

That's what I heard, yeah.

I'm not sure.

I think they were very honest.

Well, in a good way.

No.

What they did was really was tough, but it made him a stronger person.

And how important are parents in success of a tennis player on and off the court?

I think parents are incredibly important for any athlete in any sport.

But tennis maybe a little bit more so because a lot of parents are hands on in tennis and they have access to change the course of their players or their children's career because the access to the coaching and the parenting and they travel a lot, sometimes it's a necessity.

Right.

You have a young 15, 16 year old daughter that's a really good tennis player and you don't want to send them around the world for 40 weeks of the year.

You like her parents bigger than.

I understand that it's, it's normal, but you have to find that balance between being a parent and being a coach or a mentor as well.

And that's a tricky thing for a parent.

So I have two kids and I went through exactly the same thing.

I would step on the floor with my kids when they were young, 12, 13, 14 years of age, and I'd try to tell them something and they'd say, no, dad, that's not right.

It's the same challenge for me as.

It is for all the parents.

But their parents never got involved.

Sorry.

Yannick's parents never got involved in the tennis.

They always left the tennis to the people who were the coaches.

So whether that be Ricardo Piatti or.

I don't know if you guys have seen his latest documentary that came out, which was an amazing watch.

They speak a lot to his original coaches back in Italy.

And the parents never got involved in that.

They realized that his dad's a chef and an amazing chef.

So if you're next to walking into the kitchen and try to tell the dad about cooking, dad's going to go stop.

Same for Janik and the tennis.

So they have a really healthy respect.

And I think that Yannick's parents did an amazing job of giving him a perspective that this is just a sport.

This is not real life.

This is a moment in your life that you're going out and doing something you love.

Go out, have fun doing the best you can, and then when you're finished, then you'll step into what is real life.

And it's having a family, raising children, having a real job, making sure there's enough food on the table for your kids.

That's what they did as parents.

So that's more important than going out there.

And the quickest story I heard was he was in the car one day with Piazzi and he rang his mom.

He's like, mom, I can't do this.

He was beaten like he's 15, 14, 15.

He's like, this is not for me.

He was homesick.

And his mom goes too.

Like, what time do I come home every night?

And he goes, 11 o'clock.

Do I moan about that?

And do you hear me moan to you about that?

And he goes, no.

And then she was like, I miss you.

You've been away for two years.

Do I ring you up and tell you how much I miss you?

And he goes, no.

And he sort of got the message.

He's like, just get on with it.

Yeah, I don't know that story specifically, but that wouldn't surprise me.

His mum doesn't speak great English, so I don't get to speak to them one on one very often.

But you can tell the connection they have as a parents and a son, but they have two, two sons.

He's also got an older brother as well.

They are a very tight family, a very tight knit family.

Good people, humble feet on the ground.

And they come from a small town in northern Italy.

Watch the documentary.

It's amazing.

It's about 52 minutes.

It just came out on what channel?

No, I think it's on YouTube.

Okay.

Yep.

And you can get a real good sense of his upbringing and why he is the person he is today.

Great, thank you.

How do you manage like work, life, balance?

Because obviously tennis is pretty much an all year round sport.

Do you get many holidays?

Like do you get to spend a lot of time with your family?

Like you're doing a lot of travel.

So any.

What's your way of managing that?

I have a great job.

For me, being a coach and especially of a touring professional is the next best thing to play.

And my career got cut a little bit short because I have bad Knicks.

So I finished when I was about to play easily.

So for me to step coaching and start coaching good players, for me it's a dream.

So I don't feel like I'm going to work any day that I need work.

But there are some sacrifices you make being a professional tennis coach and that is you're probably away from your family for 30, 35 weeks of the year.

I travel 35 weeks.

Maybe my family, my wife comes on the road 15 of those weeks and I see her for the other time.

So we're seeing half the year, we're seeing each other.

And then I see my kids a little bit less because they're both in college in the States.

That's no different to a lot of families.

Right?

See, a lot of families are exactly the same.

I think if I was home more than three weeks, my wife would probably because I ruined her routines and her way of life.

And this is what we're used to and this is what we signed up for.

She met me when I was a professional tennis player and we got into coaching straight away.

This is all we know.

So I have a lot of support from her.

I have a lot of support for my kids.

Really proud of my family and what my kids have been able to achieve.

And so as I said before, for me it's not work.

This is a love and I enjoy doing it.

And I've just been lucky that I've been able to, to work with highly ranked players which is a bonus.

I have another question.

Yeah.

Obviously you played before you coached.

What was the transition like from player to coach?

Like, how did that happen?

So for me it was really tough because I was 25, I'd had about 12 knee surgeries, I was out for three years training every day to try to get sacked to play.

And then I came back for six months, got my ranking back from zero to inside the top 200, I think 150.

And then I busted my knee at Wimbledon.

So after six months.

So it was.

Yeah, I was a bit wrecked after that as well.

After fighting so hard to get back onto the court and then having to stop.

One door closes, another one opens.

It was about a year later, two years later, I went back, I worked in a bar in Adelaide, invested a little bit of money, I put a beers for a couple of years.

I did things what normal people did, went out a little bit, had normal life.

And then I got a knock on my door From a young 12 year old called Lake Hewitt and said, can we get a few balls?

And from there I got into coaching.

So I was also a little bit lucky that my father is quite a well known Aussie rules coach back in South Australia.

Came over here and coached Collingwood for a couple of years.

I got to grow up in a football environment.

So a lot of the stuff that I learned from him and a lot of the stuff coaching stuff that I learned from seeing the way we went about it, I brought it into my tennis coach.

So I took an individual sport and took a lot of my football stuff that I learned from my dad and tried to create teams within all my coaching jobs.

And I think it's helped because it provides a way to look at other sports, see how they do things and then try to get better for what we are as well as tennis coaches.

So I was kept busy with that.

It worked pretty well.

As I said before, when we talk about the coaching relationships, I was with late for about eight years.

The three of those years were full time on the road.

I was with Andre Agassi for five years, Simona for about five years.

Simona Howe, five years.

And this will be my third or fourth.

Yeah, two and a half.

It'll be two and a half years.

So going into our third year.

So they're not huge long relationships, but if you do it right, I think that's about right.