In tennis, mentoring takes many forms. It’s not always a coach showing a young athlete the finer points of the kick serve. It can be as simple as an older player beating the tar out of a younger one for a couple of sets. (Somehow, losing to someone a decade or two older stings less than losing to a peer.) Better yet, if the student is lucky, he or she may learn a thing or two, and might even get a useful tip. This just doesn’t happen when two juniors play.
Consider the saga of the singular Dickie Herbst, who started tennis late and never had a tennis lesson in his life. Yet he eventually played for tennis powerhouse Pepperdine University, competed for years in ATP events, and built a career coaching tennis at all levels, from children to pro luminaries like Patrick McEnroe and Tim Mayotte.
Now based in Sarasota, Florida, Herbst is pioneering a type of coaching that involves getting families to play together and encouraging kids to discover their “signature style” of play. His philosophy grew out of his own tennis experience, rooted not in drilling and instruction, but in playing thousands of matches against a wide range of players. “We
played a lot more than juniors do now,” Herbst says. “We didn’t have academies then, and my family couldn’t have afforded one, anyway. Tennis was not a business—it was a game to be played.”
“We didn’t have academies then, and my family couldn’t have afforded one, anyway. Tennis was not a business—it was a game to be played.”
Herbst discovered tennis one morning while walking to football practice (an excellent athlete, he was trying out for quarterback) at Chandler Junior High School in Worcester, Massachusetts. Three of his buddies on a tennis court asked Dick if he had a few minutes to play with them. “Tennis hit me right in the heart, instantly,” he recalls. “It was challenging, demanding, and I couldn’t believe how much fun it was. I skipped football practice and quit football the next day to play tennis.” Herbst and his friends played at
Logan Field in Worcester, where the court had a steel net made of hurricane fencing. “It was great fun,” he says.
Herbst soon branched out to courts at Worcester State College, Clark University, and public courts in Holden, Massachusetts. There, as a ninth grader, he met Fran Jennings, who helped him get a scholarship for a junior membership at the Worcester Tennis Club. Herbst assisted at the club’s junior clinics and became the go-to guy when any doubles game needed a fourth, or an adult wanted to play some singles. He also helped groundskeeper George Nicklen (“one of my most significant mentors”) in the pro shop and other ways. “I’ll fill in with anybody,” was Herbst’s motto. No game was off limits—senior doubles, senior mixed, women’s doubles, and singles with every type of opponent. He spent all summer and every weekend on the club’s seven red clay courts, where major New England tournaments often took place.
"You learned how to play tennis, not just than how to hit balls. You became a player, not a driller."
“I was probably playing 10 matches a week,” he recalls. “One match every weekday and two or three on Saturday, plus one or two more on Sunday. Today, a junior player at an academy is probably drilling two to six hours per day. There's a disproportionate amount of time spent practicing and playing points, versus playing best two-of-three set matches. I played against so many different styles. You learned how to play
tennis, not just than how to hit balls. You became a player, not a driller. Competing every day meant you were always playing while you were practicing. I grew up playing under pressure, so pressure became no big deal. A tournament wasn’t a big deal.”
Herbst developed quickly and as a young teenager became the 26
th-ranked junior in New England. He qualified for a national junior development program at the Wightman Tennis Center in Weston, Massachusetts, where Harvard coach Dave Fish was coaching. Fish liked what he saw in Herbst, talked with him about Harvard, and introduced the 16-year-old to Ned Weld, who had captained Harvard’s varsity in 1959. (A teammate was Tim Gallwey, who later wrote the 1974 bestseller The Inner Game of Tennis.) When Herbst met Weld in the early 1970s, the older man, then in his mid 30s, reigned as the #1 player in New England, a status he held for many years.
Weld saw young Herbst’s talent and volunteered to drive out to Worcester to train with him. Weld lived an hour away in Weston, Massachusetts. But starting in the winter of Herbst’s junior year of high school, Weld drove out every Wednesday night and played singles with Herbst from 7:30 to 9:30 PM. “He would buy two cans of balls and pay for two hours of court time at the
Greendale YMCA,” Herbst remembers. “For two years, we played every week. For me it was a tournament match. Ned was practicing, and giving me some coaching.”
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The two had great competition and long rallies that sometimes frustrated Weld, due to young Herbst’s lack of tactical sophistication. After one such exchange, Weld beckoned the teen to the net and asked, “We just had a 35-ball rally—but what are you trying to
do? What pattern are you trying to run?” These were conversations that Herbst would not have had playing against other juniors.
Furthermore, “Ned convinced me that the ball was round and it didn’t matter who was hitting it,” Herbst recalls. “He opened my eyes to the idea that I could beat anybody.” (Their singles rivalry climaxed when Herbst beat his mentor in the semifinals of a tournament at Wightman, only to lose the final to his own doubles partner, Ted Macbeth.)
Weld’s generous spirit led him to form similar mentoring relationships with several young players in New England. One was Ferdi Taygan, who won an athletic scholarship to UCLA, just as Herbst did at Pepperdine. The two boys met twice in the finals of the Massachusetts state high school championships, with each winning the title once. Taygen later won the 1982 French Open doubles title with Sherwood Stewart and rose as high as #8 in the ATP doubles rankings.
Weld, who died in 2006, encouraged the teenaged Herbst to play men’s tournaments around New England, noting that when he got to college he would be playing men—sometimes men four years older than he. “Playing those men’s tournaments was much more challenging than junior events,” says Herbst. He traveled around the region playing the likes of John Mayotte, brother of Tim, and the well-known player and coach Bill Drake. “I was playing men aged 25 to 55,” Herbst recalls. “They wanted to beat the crap out of you. It wasn’t easy, but they turned you into a player. That’s not happening anymore. There’s not enough adversity.”
"And by promoting level-based play as the best path for development, UTR has emerged as an amazing way to recapture the vitality of competition as I knew it."
“If we can honestly get kids
playing, we’ll have better results internationally,” he continues. “Now, the juniors drill until they are blue in the face. The assumption is that four hours of training will somehow show up in a match. That idea would never pass the smell test. All the variables of a match are different from the ones you have in practice. What we really need are clubs where you have matches with all styles and all ages playing each other. And by promoting level-based play as the best path for development, UTR has emerged as an amazing way to recapture the vitality of competition as I knew it.”
Herbst eventually matriculated at Bowling Green State University, and then transferred to Pepperdine, where he played under coaches Larry Riggs (son of Bobby) and Alan Fox, and graduated in 1977. Every summer he played ATP events in Europe, Asia, the Mideast, and all over the United States, primarily at the Challenger level.
Ultimately, Herbst chose to become a coach, like his father, a beloved teacher and high school football coach in Worcester. Herbst coached tennis at clubs all around New England, and later mentored pros like top-tenner Tim Mayotte and Patrick McEnroe, who reached his highest career singles ranking under Herbst’s guidance. Herbst was also a national USTA boys under-14 coach, and in 1999 joined the U.S. coaching staff for the Davis Cup tie against Australia.
Always an innovator, Herbst now works with families, developing young players in the four-to-10-year age group. “My assistant coaches,” he says, smiling, “are their parents.”
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