Why You Get
So Angry
Playing Tennis
(and How to Control
What Happens Next)

You miss a forehand you make every day in practice. By the time you turn around, your face is hot, your jaw is tight, and you have said something to yourself that you would never say to a teammate. On the next ball you go for more than the situation called for.

That sequence is so common that many players stop questioning it. Some decide they have a temper or that they care too much, and some say they play better angry. Parents watch the racket go down and wonder what is wrong with their child. In most cases nothing is wrong. There is a skill they have not trained yet, and it can be trained like any other.

It happens at every level. Novak Djokovic, asked about his focus after his fourth-round match at Wimbledon in 2026, brought it up himself:

“The outbursts, you know, the meltdowns. I’ve had a few of those today as well. I apologize.”

Novak Djokovic, fourth-round interview, Wimbledon 2026

Almost every athlete I have worked with, professional, junior or recreational, has days when they do not reach their best. If the opponent was not the reason, the reason was usually something mental or emotional. Some get angry, some get nervous, and some start to doubt themselves. Nobody picks which one, but they can change what happens next.

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Angry is one word
for several things

Ask a player who just got angry where the anger is, and most cannot tell you anything about it other than that they are angry. I do not mean that as a criticism, because for many players that is what they know about their own anger: one word and a lot of heat. If that is all you know, there is very little to work with.

When you look closer, anger is a process, several things happening at once, each in a specific place. There is something you feel: heat in the face, tension in the throat and the jaw, the grip tightening on the racket. There is something you hear in your head: not again, how do you miss that. There is something you see: the miss, replaying.

When I am angry I can tell you: heat in my face, tension in my throat and jaw, intensity pretty high. Another player might feel nothing in the face and a lot in the chest or the hands. We both call it anger, and it is a different experience. Someone else may call the same thing frustration. That is why describing what you notice helps more than the name does.

Noticing this detail is sensory clarity, one of the three skills I train. It does not make the experience any different. You just notice more.

Nothing in the diagram gets smaller when you find it. The heat stays as hot and the grip stays as tight, but each part becomes something specific, in a specific place, instead of one word that fills everything. And the more familiar you become with a sensation, the easier it is to allow it. You can describe a forehand in fine detail: the point of contact, the swing, how the ball felt coming off the strings. You have also been angry on court a thousand times, and you may not be able to say where it sits in your body.

One more part is harder to admit. There is often something pleasant in anger, a charge or a feeling of force, and part of you likes it. If you do not notice that, it is hard to understand why telling yourself to calm down does so little.

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The first arrow
and the second

The unpleasant part arrives on its own. You miss, and the heat is there before you have decided anything. That is sometimes called the first arrow, and in that moment there is not much to do about it.

Then comes the part you add, and it comes in two forms. You can fight it: you tell yourself not to be angry, you get angry about being angry, you try to push the heat down and play on as if it were not there. Or you can give in to it: you smash the next ball, you stop trying on the next point, you hit one into the fence. Both are the second arrow, and that is usually what costs you the next points.

Mirra Andreeva, before the 2026 Australian Open, described what that looked like at the end of the previous season:

“I started to be mad at myself and also like all those things when then, I don’t know, an opponent plays well or you miss another shot, and all of that just kind of goes into a big snowball and just keeps rolling and rolling and rolling.”

Mirra Andreeva, press conference, Australian Open 2026

The miss is over in a second, but the snowball, which is mostly the second arrow, can run for three games. It is the same pattern as nerves before a match: the sensation is one thing, and the resistance to it is another. Fighting a feeling takes attention, and you are also trying to play a match with that same attention.

Pushing it down does not reliably remove it either. A 2020 review of 31 studies on thought suppression, in Perspectives on Psychological Science, found that suppressed thoughts came back more afterward, whether or not people were busy with something else at the time. Those were thoughts in a lab, and I would not take the numbers onto a tennis court, but it fits what players describe.

There is a third option, and it is the one you can train. The anger is there, and you notice it, let it be there, do not act on it, and put your attention on the next point. Letting it be there does not mean liking it or deciding it is fine. The voice in your head can keep saying not again, and you hear it and stop fighting it. That is equanimity: allowing what you feel without trying to suppress it and without following it.

Studies of pain show a related effect. Expert meditators with more than 10,000 hours of practice reported the same pain intensity as novices and less unpleasantness (Lutz and colleagues, NeuroImage, 2013; Perlman and colleagues found the same pattern in Emotion, 2010). That is pain and years of practice, not a double fault, but it does show that how strong a sensation is and how much you mind it can be two different things.

Hailey Baptiste was asked in 2026, after beating Aryna Sabalenka, how she had reset after smashing a racket in one match and being broken while serving for the match in the next:

“I just decided to stop fighting myself, basically. It’s a decision that you just make, pretty much. Either you get over it or you sit in that feeling, and sitting in that feeling has gotten me nowhere.”

Hailey Baptiste, press conference, 2026

She does not say the feeling left, only that she stopped fighting herself.

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When anger helps,
and when it does not

Anger is not good or bad in itself. For some players, at some moments, it helps, and what decides that is what it does to the next points.

Taylor Fritz failed to serve out his second-round match at the 2026 Australian Open and then won it in a tiebreaker. Afterward he said:

“It’s super frustrating to me not to serve out the match, but at least with how upset I was that I didn’t serve it out, I was able to, you know, rebound and get it done in a tiebreaker and play a good tiebreaker.”

Taylor Fritz, second-round press conference, Australian Open 2026

For him, in that match, being upset came with a good tiebreaker, and that is the test: after you get angry, look at what happens next. Are you more motivated? Is your attention more on what matters: the ball, the target, the plan? Are your choices better? If so, the anger had a useful effect in that moment, for some time.

For many players it goes the other way. Attention goes to the miss and to the voice in the head, the next choices get bigger, and the anger builds.

Two things make the difference. The first is how much. A little anger can sharpen attention for a few points, while a lot of it fills the face, the jaw, the voice and the replay, and very little attention is left for the ball. The same player can be helped by a little and pulled apart by a lot.

The second is your relationship to it. If you fight the anger, you pay for the second arrow on top of the first. If you let it be there, without fighting it and without feeding it, your attention is free to go where it matters. When anger helps, that is usually what is happening: the anger is there, you are not fighting it, and your attention goes to the ball by itself.

That also shows what was useful: it was the focus and the clear choices that came with the anger, and those can be trained directly. There can be a short-term benefit and a cost later, and both are true: it takes energy to keep anger going, and it does not show up on request. A player who has trained the skills keeps whatever the anger gives without relying on it.

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Where it shows up:
the next shot

Left alone, attention goes to what is intense and unpleasant. This is an old survival mechanism and everyone has it. After a miss, the most intense and unpleasant thing on the court is often what you feel in your own body, so that is where your attention goes. Nothing about a sensation in the chest stops you from hitting a forehand with a relaxed arm and watching the ball. What gets in the way is how much attention is on it and how much you are fighting it.

Most of the time anger does not show up as a broken racket. It shows up in shot selection. After an error you feel the urge to go for more on the next ball, to make up for the miss. Nothing about the situation has changed, and a rally ball is still a rally ball.

You cannot choose not to have that urge, any more than you can choose to like someone you do not like. What you can train is noticing it and not acting on it. So when a player I work with loses a point to a good shot and then does not go for too much on the next ball, I see the skill working, whatever their face is doing. It can be measured in the margin on the next shot.

What you put your attention on next is a choice too. Concentration is the skill of keeping it there. What to choose changes with the player and the moment. Between points it might be the walk to the towel, or what you want from the next point. Before a return it might be the server’s toss. In the rally it might be the ball, or your point of contact. Working out what will help most right now is a large part of the job, and it gets decided again and again.

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Why “calm down”
does not work

“Calm down” asks for the one thing you cannot do on request, which is for the feeling to leave. It also makes the feeling the problem, which starts the fight. If you become calmer, that tends to come after you allow what is there, so it works poorly as the goal.

Allowing is not a fast calming trick either, and the research says so. In one lab study in Behaviour Change, adults with high trait anger who were told to accept their anger after a provocation did not come down much in the following minutes, while those told to suppress it or to reappraise the situation did. So allowing may not make the feeling go away quickly, but it can let you play while the feeling is there.

The evidence for training over time is stronger. A 2025 review of 118 studies in Clinical Psychology Review found that mindfulness-based training lowered anger and aggression with moderate effects compared to control groups, across mixed groups that were not athletes. In a small trial with 34 junior elite ice hockey players, published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2021, training that included acceptance and mindfulness improved goals, assists and shots, and blind coach ratings of performance and focus. Three months later the coach ratings held and the on-ice numbers did not. I have not found a trial like that on anger in tennis.

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What actually
helps

Check what it does to you. After a match, look back at the moments you were angry. What happened in the next three points? Did you play with more purpose and better choices, or did you go for more and lose the thread? Do this over a few weeks. Some players find that a little anger sharpens them and a lot of it never does, and others find it never helps. Either way you are working from your own pattern.

Get to know it, starting small. Where does anger show up in you? The face, the throat, the jaw, the hands, the stomach? How strong is it? What does the voice in your head say? You do not need a match for this, and you do not need to wait until you are so angry you could run through a wall. A little annoyed in traffic or in a slow line is a good opportunity, because it is easier to notice and easier to allow. Doing this for thirty seconds or a minute during the day is what I call micro practice. A longer daily exercise, where you do nothing else but notice sensations like these, is dedicated practice, and it builds the same skill with less going on.

Notice where it is not. When you are angry, for most people the body is more or less cut in half: anger in the arms, the hands and the chest, and nothing much in the stomach and the legs. If all your attention is on the part that is angry, it seems like all of you is angry. Notice that your legs are neutral, and the anger may not take you over as much.

Frustrated is fine. Continue without delay. In drills I often say: it is okay if you miss, and it is okay if you are frustrated. I am not telling you to not be frustrated, or to be less frustrated. But even though you are frustrated or annoyed, you still continue without delay. Six balls in a row, no matter what happens. The moment you actually get angry in training is the moment you can train this.

Catch the urge. The urge to go for more after a miss is specific, so look for it specifically. Urge to hit it anyway? Let it be there, do not follow it, and play the ball you planned.

Label the point, then play the next one. After each point, label it silently by how it felt: rushed, relaxed, or too passive. The word matters less than the fact that you had to stop and look, because that gives you a moment to choose what you want from the next point. When a player who has stopped labeling during a rough patch starts again, the focus and the decisions often come back within two or three points.

Train it where it is easier first. A player can keep noticing comfortably in a rally and lose it completely in a match. The answer to that is to build it up: shorter blocks of point play where the noticing can hold, rallies without keeping score when the frustration is high, and then full matches.

All of this is repetition. Getting angry and reacting the same way every time is training too, because it trains that reaction. Choosing a different response takes deliberate effort for a long time, until it starts to happen by itself.

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If it is your child
on the court

Anger in a junior player is not a character problem, and it is not proof of being spoiled. Very often it shows how much they care. When I have to tell a player go easy, go easy, over and over, that is a sign of how much passion they have.

For some juniors a bit of anger even sharpens them. So the question is what happens in the points after, more than whether they look angry. Asking a child not to be angry adds a second arrow from the outside. Now they are angry, and they are also failing at not being angry.

What helps is the same as for any player. After the match, once it has settled, ask what it was like. Where did you feel it? What did the voice say? Did you go for more on the next ball? You can separate the feeling from the behavior: being angry was fine, and throwing the racket was an action, and actions can be trained. Then watch for the point where they were clearly angry and still took the first step and played the next ball with margin. That is the skill, and it is worth naming when you see it.

It also takes longer than anyone wants. A player who cannot let a point go until the next one starts can learn to let it go in fifteen seconds, then ten.

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The goal is not
to stop being angry

Some players hardly ever get angry, and they have something else instead: nerves, doubt, not being motivated. Everyone has something.

For the ones who do get angry, the anger itself often changes with training. With the players I work with, it tends to get less intense and to come on less quickly. They also notice it sooner, and they notice what it does to their decisions and their intentions.

The research fits the part about intensity. The 2025 review found lower anger after mindfulness training. In a 2018 brain imaging study in NeuroImage, long-term meditators with more retreat hours showed less reactivity to negative images in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional responses, while an eight-week course did not show that effect. I do not know of a study that measured how quickly anger comes on in players, so that part is what I see on court.

Those changes are a result of the training. The goal is to play, compete and make the decisions that are best for your performance, however much anger or any other emotion is there. The heat may still come and the voice may still say not again, but you know what both of them are, and you go and play the next ball.

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