How Many Hours Oncourt is Too Many Hours for a Tennis Coach?

So after uni, dropping out of uni, I moved to Darwin.

I started coaching tennis at a place called Gardens Tennis Complex, right by the casino, right down by the beach in Mindle Beach, Mindle Beach Markets, down in Darwin.

Beautiful spot, absolutely loved it.

Loved the tropics.

pretty much loved everything about Darwin.

It's probably not for everyone, but I really enjoyed it.

Now, what sort of hours was I doing? And I guess, how was the makeup of the hours? Because it's not just the hours, it's what type of lessons are you doing? If you're coaching 30 hours of private lessons with a UTR-7, then it's pretty physically demanding.

If you're coaching 30 hours of old lessons not physically demanding mentally demanding right so it's different so in Darwin um look I estimate that I was I was doing I would say between 28 to 40 hours a week now it did depend right I mean there was rain with the wet season in Darwin which you'd lose hours but I would say that each week I was pretty close to 30 hours and I would have been pushing close to 40 hours.

What was my make-up lessons? Now, in Darwin, I mean, I guess I had a role that was, it was coaching, but, you know, my boss there at the time, who was the manager of Gardens Tennis Complex, a guy called Warren Foote, great guy, great coach, great player, he would really, he patched up my job to just keep me busy, right? So that included coaching, know that included uh supervising the the night comps all right so they had night comps run a couple of days a week maybe two or three times a week had night comps on so you know my job there was you know you get the night comps running and really sometimes you have to find a fill-in player or jump in yourself to have a hit um but a lot of the times you're just serving beer to the people once they finish their night comp so know so i would have that that would be sometimes till 10 o'clock at night a couple of nights a week from 7 to 10 i'm really just there while the comps on taking the scores and selling uh selling beer which was which was pretty popular um pretty popular pastime really in darwin with the with the heat so that was um you know i was doing a bit of that so that was maybe five six six seven hours of night comp supervision.

I was doing group lessons.

I was doing a bunch of private lessons and really that grew, grew the private lessons.

And, you know, it was, I had Sundays off, but it was six days a week.

Would have been each morning coaching.

And so I guess it was pretty balanced between privates, groups, a little bit of the night comps.

Sometimes I just had a role where, you know, I had to, I had to, I had to get rid of palm fronds around the complex there and, you know, like sort of other gardening type stuff.

So there was a little bit of that.

Really, it was just to patch up, make sure I got enough hours.

And then I did some work for Tennis West, which was obviously organized through Gardens Tennis Complex, but Tennis West do the tennis in schools.

And I would have as many schools as I really wanted to go and visit and So that would be between nine and three o'clock sometimes or half a day where I would go and do the school workshops, right? Participation tennis, introducing tennis, up, flips, tap to a partner, catch, things like this.

And so that was different.

That was obviously not physically demanding, but it was harder.

I remember losing my voice after the first week of of pumping out schools.

You're just talking a lot.

You're trying to keep in control of 20 to 30 kids.

And I guess that really taught me about class control and, you know, and also actually trying to save my voice a little bit, right? So when I'm under pressure, I get louder and louder and I had to learn how to just sort of keep control of the voice.