The tennis club incorporating funetics activities into their lessons
The fundamental movement skills of run, jump, and throw are present in most sports, and whichever path a child chooses to take in life will have been positively benefitted by giving funetics a go!
We recently caught up with Matt Hillman, founder of MH Tennis, to discover how he has been using funetics activities as a fun way to develop key movement skills in his tennis lessons.
Origins and aims
MH tennis was set up in 2020, with the aim of offering inclusive, high-quality youth and adult tennis coaching for players of all backgrounds and standards. We focus on six key aspects in each coaching session: technical, tactical, physical, mental, social and competition.
They run sessions at three venues in Birmingham, teaching players from ages three up to adults, but specialise in youth tennis coaching, ages 3-16 years old.
funetics and tennis
Matt told us, "We started incorporating funetics activities in tennis lessons from September 2023, after becoming aware of the programme through our involvement with the HAF camps. I evaluated our current youth tennis sessions, and looked at how we develop the session to include more fundamental movement skills to help grow our youth players into 'complete athletes'."
"We now start each tennis session with a funetics style activity, and the children love it as a great way to warm them up, develop key motor skills and have fun too!"
Fundamental movement skills
funetics activities are designed to help children learn, develop and practice the fundamental movement skills of running, jumping and throwing. Developing these skills helps children to move confidently and efficiently, providing a strong foundation that can be beneficial for athletics, running and many other sports.
"Tennis is predominately a sending and receiving game, so throwing is a really important skill. But being able to move well, through short sprints and change of direction is also important to be able to cover the court and get to the ball."
As children get older, the more advanced skills such as balance and weight transfer become important, and by having a solid face of fundamental movement skills make this transition a lot easier.
"We do also look at fundamental movement skills in adult coaching too. This is generally more 'hidden' in more tennis specific activities. But skills such as side-stepping, split-stepping and hopping all play a big part in development adult tennis players."
"We pride ourselves in our tennis session on creating 'whole athletes', rather than strict tennis players, so if for any reason a player moves onto a different sport, they have the fundamental skills to transfer over."