How not to be a tennis parent

By the time Ellie-Rose Griffiths was nine, she had left school to train full-time. That was when tennis stopped being just a game and became her life. The former top-ranked junior player would go on to compete alongside some of the top names in British tennis including Katie Boulter, Emma Raducanu and Harriet Dart before stopping playing at 19 because she was burned out and not enjoying it any more. When the 27-year-old looks back now, it is not just the tennis she remembers. It is the pressure around it, and in particular one group of people she believes could deal with it better. Parents. Pushy parents are nothing new in a sport offering the potential of millions of pounds in prize money at the very top - at elite level there are well-documented incidents involving the dads of Jelena Dokic, Mary Pierce and Bernard Tomic to name a few. It all starts at junior level. "You see parents shouting at children all the time in tennis," Griffiths tells BBC Sport. "There's a lack of understanding on how they should behave... on how they could help their child to blossom into the athlete that they should become." And it can get out of hand. "We've had situations here before where unfortunately we've had to call the police because the parents' behaviour is getting that far out of control," says Chris Johnson, head coach at Sutton Coldfield Tennis Club, where he has worked for 36 years. …