Overnight Sensation Tennis Superstar Training Tip
We are taking her HOMEEE❤️🇬🇧🏆 pic.twitter.com/L6P52UFpAm
— Emma Raducanu (@EmmaRaducanu) September 12, 2021
“she’s only gone and bloody done it!“
From nowhere to arguably the greatest individual sporting achievement of modern times.
Standard superlatives seem hardly fit for the astonishing rise of Emma Raducanu.
What a tennis US Open championship victory.
So much writing bound to follow about how she so quickly and unexpectedly and unprecedentedly reached such pinnacle.
The clamour now as always in walks of life outside of elite sport, to see which element can be taken into your world. Either as direct inspiration to slavishly pursue or remixed to live and guide by.
The Grammar school girl done good, hey. I shudder to recall what I was doing during the Summer after attempting my own (pre-Uni) A-Level exams. It sadly wasn’t winning global sporting acclaim like our Emma.
So let’s see if we can’t add to this frenzy within our Sales domain.
One aspect that definitely caught my eye, is how her non-tennis parents treated her coaching approach.
They apparently simply could not understand why players seemed to make prolonged use of only one coach.
Yes, the stars have physios, pyschs and fitness gurus on call. But the day-to-day actual hitting a ball prep was, to them, mystifyingly in the hands of a single trainer.
Surely better if you have the best backhander teaching you that shot, likewise forehand, a brilliant returner, server, drop-shot, overhead smash, low volleyer and so on?
Well, whilst that may (for now) be taking things to extremes, the point remains valid. Even more so in the gleaming bright light of glory.
That being, for each component part, a different person may well be a better bet to help than one alone for all them put together.
I’ve blogged before on how this approach has paid the highest of dividends. From England Rugby Union’s 2003 World Cup triumph to the ultimate performance hackers of Olympic Gold machine, British Cycling. Even those who scoffed when Liverpool football club employed the world’s only throw-in coach.
And before you start thinking that the cost of such attention would be prohibitive, then think too about Team Raducanu deployment. You’re brought in as a specialist. Impart the skill like no other. It’s taken in, proved to be lodged on board. And then you’re thanked for your (brief) service and paid nicely for your (short) time on the team.
In and out. Think too how the tech giants with so much money that they can only think to plan trips to space next. They greet a willing parade of subject ‘experts’ who lecture employees about a singular skill. Usually ending in the same manner; Thanks for your hour – We’ll take it from here now.
Whatever the actual behind-the-scenes program for Emma, she clearly has made the most of this kind of ‘crowd-sourced’ support from many contributors.
I have seldom seen this in a selling setting. Which is such a shame. A massive missed opportunity.
A Sales enterprise tends to rely on a small, often sole, internal resource, with very occasional external assistance once in a blue moon.
What is needed is both diversity of voices and perhaps even more vital, a diversity of instruction.
Sure, if you’re sticking with a particular plan – one based around process identification and refinement – then the messaging core is in place. Yet you can seek different ideas on how to execute the many moving parts along the way. Avoiding sycophancy and groupthink as you go.
The vaunted One-Percenters of the sporting Marginal Gains movement could write a list of one hundred different skills that all add up to an embracing total of what made up their discipline.
Improve on just one and you release a 1% improvement that could make the difference in the razor-thin margins world of major event performance.
Have you broken these down for your role?
Better still, know who to call on for help nudging any one of them ever higher?
If so, then you too can be like Emma. As is so often the case, an overnight sensation, a dozen years in the making.