Mission Statement

Greetings ... Our mission here at the Junior Tennis Development Company Facebook Page is to begin an active open and hopefully vigorous dialogue about all the various aspects of the competitive junior tennis development process. More specifically, We are starting a consulting business focused around helping families with children playing high level junior tennis make the best possible decisions in their development process with the primary goal being the long term healthy development of their children. As tennis professionals in our mid 40's, we have seen and lived many of the dysfunctions in our sport, dysfunctions that we still see existing at all level's of our sport, from the highest executives of tennis' governing bodies down to the physical and emotional well being of the children currently pursuing excellence at our sport of tennis at it's highest competitive levels.

Our goals are not to alarm and frighten those who have children involved in competitive tennis . Tennis is not on life support or circling the drain; at it's highest levels, it is as vibrant and entertaining a sport as it has ever been.

But the manufactured message being sent out to the viewing public either through television's coverage of tennis' major events, the endlessly inane programming of The Tennis Channel, or the criminally fluffing journalistic output of tennis' print media in our opinion is nothing short of irresponsible. Their collective portrayal of tennis' upper echelons as one big red carpet feel good lifestyle event tells a woefully incomplete story of the entire tennis development process. We are only being shown the highly polished finished products of a very select few all too familiar names. Yes, there is great fame and fortune for those champions who hold poster board size checks above their heads on Sunday afternoons in a cosmopolitan city nowhere near you.

But well out of site and far from earshot is a long historic and sadly still unfolding story of widespread abuse neglect and dysfunctional family dynamics in our sport that no sane observer could possibly mistake for healthy. Correlation does not always equate to causation, especially when human behavior is involved . But to absolve our Tennis culture of all responsibility for the darker outcomes of the junior tennis development process would be equally irresponsible... A tennis culture we have been immersed in since our earliest memories.. And a culture either resistant or incapable of erecting the proper safety nets for what we believe constitutes long term healthy human development.

For we can't sugar coat this any longer.. We have lost friends to this sport, we have had friends struggle with a myriad of child abuse issues that never were treated, and as those angry young children became angry young adults, we watched the wounds of their formative years bleed into their adulthood in various forms, ranging from substance abuse and mental health conditions , to an overall dysfunctional inability to transition from the privileged life of a talented tennis teen into the responsible life of an adult provider and healthy life partner and parent. Let me make clear that these incidents are far from the majority, yet they are not random outliers either.

The passion in our tone stems directly from the undeniable fact of how few in our sport want to acknowledge these realities. Further motivating us to speak to you now in this forum is A highly disturbing statistical reality currently unfolding in American tennis. Of our peer group of men and women whom we competed with for years and years, of those who have transitioned from the tennis life into their post-tennis lives and have started families, a stunningly low number of these parents have children following in their footsteps, striving for excellence in our sport of tennis.

In essence, we have lost a generation of an athletic gene pool and a collective knowledge about how to play our sport that is nearly impossible to quantify, yet even more difficult to replace. The reasons given by said parents range from the quiet passive "no way I'm putting my kid through that" to even more impassioned expletive laced rejections of the entire childhood experience we all shared as developing talented tennis teens. If anyone should have insights in to navigating the oft-confusing emotional waters of the adolescent tennis development experience it should be our peer group. Yet the categorical rejection of exposing one's child to such an upbringing often comes without a calm coherent message. The dialogue we hope to begin with you all here is to pull out of the shadows what happened to much of our peer group leaving them so bitter and somewhat traumatized to our sport of tennis. More importantly, with enough wisdom and experience to fill a small library about the dos and donts of tennis development not involved in the game any longer, who is guiding this next generation of hungry talented youngsters through the minefield of junior tennis development? Can there be "success" in our sport for such a small number when the overwhelming majority of our peer group have walked away from our sport somewhat traumatized by the entire experience and turned their backs on tennis completely?

Thank you in advance for participating in our large challenging yet hopefully profoundly effective project.. We eagerly await all of your input

Barry Buss