Personal Responsibility to Making Change

June 3, 2014 | By Lonnie Mitchel
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If you have been following my columns, you should know by now that you have to advocate for yourself in life and on the tennis court. Recently at SUNY Oneonta where I serve as head tennis coach, I was asked to lecture on the topic of “Personal Responsibility and Making Change.”

So let’s transform, transition and transcend to better tennis players, better people and take on more responsibility. The secret of change, as the philosopher Socrates said, “Is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old but, on building the new.” As tennis players you are transforming and transitioning all the time. You ever hear the expression, “Life can throw you a curveball?” I use tennis to illustrate this theme.

While observing a highlight of a recent match between Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, there were 54 exchanges for just one point. Curveballs spin as do shots of varying speeds. How much change can you handle in a day, a week, a month or even a year? Tennis players of all levels have to immediately react to the change on every shot. However, why in life are you sometimes afraid to make change? Whereas our game is predicated to reacting to change with every shot hit back and forth across the net.

“Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be” as said by John Wooden (the great UCLA basketball coach). Tennis is a game of change at every second, and you must adapt or failure is imminent.

You might be getting ready for your next social match, going off to play collegiate tennis or getting ready to compete in the USTA Leagues this summer. Transformation begins now as you encounter life’s curveballs when you go off to work or school. Moods are constantly changing, such as the mood of your boss, the mood even of your teacher, coach or yourself. What changes are in store for you the next moment of your life? Embrace all of these changes and to borrow another quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste the experience to the utmost. To reach out eagerly without fear for newer and richer experiences.”

I personally still carry with me the discipline for change and time management skills necessary to perform at my highest level because of the adaptation and transition learned from the tennis court. The life skills incorporated in being a college athlete is difficult to replicate on the college campus. Our game of tennis can teach this and can make transition from college a smoother one. 

Tennis is a microcosm of life isn’t it? So you are losing to the same person over and over, you know you can beat that person, but it is just not happening on the court with the results you are getting. I have watched club level players and my collegiate players compete and sometimes the essence of their game changes very little.  They then wonder why they are getting similar results.  The answer I give is this, what did you do to change the outcome? Doing the same things repetitively rarely gives you a different outcome. Perseverance is great, but change with that quality of determination is what you need. It might get worse before it gets better, but change!

So, here I am in Upstate New York coaching a team. The women’s team has not won a conference title in over 30 years. Okay, I get it … that bit of news will not be broadcast on ESPN tonight and Division III women’s tennis does not even make it to the editing room before a broadcast. None of that matters though. Why? Because very few people care except the players, friends, family, alumni and coaches. That does not make it any less worthwhile to take on the project which I undertook two years ago by coming to Oneonta and leaving my roots on Long Island and realized that things were always done the same way.

Why would we win a Conference Title doing it that way? I have thrown the book out the window and made change on how we practice, how we promote the program, how we present ourselves and what we do around campus and how we perform in the classroom. It might not always work, but doing it the old way certainly was not working, so change comes … some painful changes for me and my players. Recruits who come here will see the change and the recruits who don’t come here will have missed out. I am not 100 percent confident that it will work, but I am 1,000 percent confident that what was going on prior was not working. My players have and WILL continue to succeed in the classroom, but now they will find ways to win on the court beyond what they did before, not just get good jobs after graduation, but to improve spiritually and be more secure in life. They will now learn the skill of change which is the hardest to discover.

I worked for the Disney Company for many years, a company known as the leader in innovation. Shame on me if I do not synergize my thoughts and experiences combined with the tools available to me to take chances by asking my players to change and exceed expectations in everything they do! 

I took my team to Florida a few weeks ago, and we had a private audience with one of the greatest tennis coaches in the world while we were training at the IMG Tennis Academy. Nick Bollettieri came and spoke to our tennis student-athletes and motivated them to perform better in everything they do, not just on the tennis court. I soon realized that that very few teams, whether it be Division I, II or III and certainly not a small SUNY school like Oneonta State, have the opportunity to meet one of the most world renowned coaches. It took a lot of work and budget scrutiny to make change a reality and to make the IMG Nick Bollettieri training academy a reality. The point being that making change and adapting to change is necessary to improve both on the tennis court and in life. Dare to be different! Make change happen when change is the last thing many people want. I will boast and brag, “I made a change,” and If I can, you can too.

Tomorrow, look at your choices, scrutinize them to improve your life and your tennis game. Follow your heart and adapt to real change to make things happen. 


Lonnie Mitchel

Lonnie Mitchel is head men’s and women’s tennis coach at SUNY Oneonta. Lonnie was named an assistant coach to Team USA for the 2013 Maccabiah Games in Israel for the Grand Master Tennis Division. Lonnie may be reached by phone at (516) 414-7202 or e-mail lonniemitchel@yahoo.com.

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