How Can Anna Karolina Schmiedlova Turn Her Year Around?

In 2015, Anna Karolina Schmiedlova had a fantastic year.  She reached three WTA Finals, winning two of them, and played in the WTA Elite tournament in Zhuhai, beating Roberta Vinci 6-1, 6-0.  Overall, 2015 was definitely a success for Schmiedlova, and expectations were very high entering the 2016 season.  Unfortunately, it seems as if the weight of these expectations have caused Schmiedlova's game to collapse.

2016 has not been a good year of tennis for Anna Karolina.  Her record this year is 6-23, which includes a 2-1 record in Fed Cup and an 0-1 record in the Olympics.  If you take these matches out of her record to show how she is doing in matches in which WTA points were on the line, she is 4-21, which equates to a winning percentage of 16%.

Now, luckily for her, she is still doing decently rankings-wise, at number 86.  But, this is largely due to good results during the end of last summer and last fall, which included a Third Round appearance at the US Open, a semifinal in Seoul, a quarterfinal, in Wuhan, and the previously mentioned victory in Zhuhai.  This makes it very important for Schmiedlova to turn her year around, quickly.

So, as opposed to turning this into an article bashing Schmiedlova's year, I have decided to try to figure out some ways that Anna Karolina can turn her year around.  Hopefully, she will read these tips and incorporate, at least, think about some of the ideas I am suggesting, as I really hate to see a player struggle at the magnitude that she has, without any (known) injuries that could be explain her play.

How Can Schmiedlova Turn Her Year Around?

1. Seeing Either a Therapist or a Sports Psychology: At the beginning of the year, many of Schmiedlova's losses were in straight sets, however, in recent matches, Anna Karolina has played decently well, she just hasn't been able to finish the match.  In recent matches to Sasnovich, Ostapenko, and Kontaveit, Schmiedlova has had at least one match point, but just hasn't been able to close out the match.  I think, whether it be a general therapist or sports psychologist, it would be good for Anna Karolina to talk about what she is going through on court, to have someone totally unbiased who will understand what she is going through and help her work through the issues that she is facing.  Perhaps Schmiedlova's issues are an injury that she isn't telling anyone about or something going on in her personal life, but whatever the case, having a therapist or sports psychologist to talk with would do Anna Karolina a lot of good, in my opinion.

2. Block out Distractions: Perhaps Schmiedlova's issues with her game is that she is not fulling invested in tennis this year, and is distracted by other diversions in her life.  Whether she deems distractions as player parties, social media accounts, such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter, television, texting, the internet, or anything else, it is important that Anna Karolina identifies what might be distracting her from playing her best tennis and block out those distractions from her her life.  It might be as simple as blocking out other diversions in her life that could lead Anna Karolina back to being a top 30 player.

3. Don't Panic and Play Too Many Tournaments: In a situation like Anna Karolina's, it would be easy to panic and just sign up for a tournament every week.  I think this is a bad idea, however.  What playing every week does is, if Schmiedlova doesn't win it just continues, every week, to hurt her mindset.  However, if Schmiedlova does start winning and goes on a couple runs in consecutive tournaments, she will be fatigued and would be setting herself up to lose due to exhaustion in subsequent tournaments, if playing, for instance, for three or four weeks in a row.  So, I don't think it is a great idea for Schmiedlova to have played seven tournaments in the past eight weeks (if we include New Haven as a tournament for next week).  I think that, perhaps, scheduling a tournament every-other-week would provide the best balance of playing but not overplaying.

Notice how, in my advice to Anna Karolina, I don't mention any technical changes to her game.  I think Schmiedlova's game is fine, otherwise she wouldn't have won two WTA titles.  For Schmiedlova, I truly think that improving her game is more a matter of doing the right things off-the-court as opposed to making changes to the fundamentals of Anna Karolina's game.

But, Anna Karolina Schmiedlova is a very good tennis player, and I absolutely believe that she will turn her year around.

Should Maria Sharapova Be Praised For Personally Announcing Illegal Meldonium Use? I Don't Think So.

On Monday, Maria Sharapova had a big announcement.  There was speculation about retirement, surgery, and just about anything you could think of.  But, about the one thing I didn't hear people talking about was a failed drug test.  And a failed drug test was exactly what Maria Sharapova announced had occurred at her press conference.

If we are to believe Maria, she was taking the now-banned substance named meldonium for the previous ten years.  She claims that her family doctor had recommended this medicine, if we are to call it that, to her because she was getting flu often, had an irregular EKG, and also has diabetes, along with the all-important family history of diabetes.

Now, I'm not going to get into the speculation about how long Sharapova actually needed to take it, how it wasn't FDA approved, nor whether her true intentions of taking the substance were good enough.  The ITF will do their investigation, and as of now, Sharapova is intentions are innocent until proven guilty in my mind, and this is coming from a huge Serena fan.  I trust that Maria wouldn't blatantly disrespect the rules and that she would realize that she can beat the vast majority of the tour without trying to artificially enhance her performance.  And maybe this is naive of me, but Maria does not seem like someone who would purposefully disrespect the game in this manner.

With that said, let me get to the brunt of my argument.  I recently saw on Twitter that talked about how Maria had "guts"for holding a press conference to admit she failed a drug test.  And someone else on Twitter reminded me that I read yesterday that in Serena Williams' press conference yesterday, she essentially said that Maria was very courageous for coming out and admitting that she was using meldonium.  Now, do I think that Serena really believes that?  Of course not, but I have to take her word for it and believe what she says and analyze based on her words alone.

But, let's be honest here, with all due respect to Serena, Sharapova's press conference was anything but courageous.  At the end of the day, she broke the rules, and that's all that matters.  As Sharapova stated, she was sent something linking to a list of banned substances.  However, as she stated, no one on her team even bothered to look at this list, knowing full-and-well she was taking this meldonium medicine.  If you are putting any sort of supplement or medicine in your body, even if you think it's approved, it would still be a good idea to check the new banned substances list.  And so, I don't think her negligence should be excused just because she holds a press conference on short notice for herself.

But, beyond that, let's just take a look at how Sharapova benefits from holding a press conference to say she tested positive for meldonium.  First off, Sharapova gets to spin the narrative in her direction by holding this "courageous" press conference to announce her illegal drug use.  Before anything else gets out into the media, Sharapova can insert words and phrases such as "family doctor", "diabetes", "legal until this year", and "taking full responsibility" into our mind to try to put her in the best light and lessen the damage done to her image by getting out ahead of the ITF's announcement.

And I'm not saying this was a stupid thing for her to do.  She has, effectively I may add, made it almost seem like she is a victim of the ITF's covert effort to trick players into taking drugs that were snuck onto the banned list.  However, I think this was a necessity for her and not an act of courage or something worthy of praise.  Maria Sharapova broke the rules out of negligence and put something in her body that shouldn't have been there.  There is no way around this fact.

I'd expect any athlete who broke the rules to own up to it.  And whether or not Sharapova called a press conference for herself or not should have any effect on how she is treated because it shouldn't matter that Maria has the resources surrounding her to be able to hold a press conference for herself, a video or a statement released the day before would have been fine, and it wouldn't have caused so much unnecessary speculation.  Even a conference call with reporters on Sunday, giving them the ability to ask questions, would have been perfectly fine.

Look, I understand why Maria Sharapova got ahead of the curve and personally announced that she had taken meldonium.  However, to call her "courageous", or say that she has "guts" for doing it, is a slap in the face to everyone who has actually been courageous or had guts over their lifetimes.  You want courageous?  A fireman rushing into a burning building is courageous.  You want guts?  Dr. Martin Luther King's efforts to stop segregation took guts.

So, should Maria Sharapova be praised for personally announcing her illegal meldonium use?  I don't think so.

The Power of Twitter in Relation to Tennis

As someone who has on twitter for over three years now, I know twitter very well and love it dearly.  I love sending out irrational, angry tweets to my 100+ followers who could probably care less what I have to say.  But, as some random, unimportant dude who's tweets really mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.  I've made tweets that, if I had any sort of stature in society, would get me ridiculed with sponsors pulling any support of me they previously had.

But, the good news?  I don't have to worry about that because, as I said before, I am essentially Joe Schmo.  However, for players on the WTA and ATP Tours, one is constantly in the spotlight.  As a professional tennis player, whatever you say will be twisted, convoluted, and you will be blasted for something that you totally did not mean to say.  But, in the case of some players on tour, no twisting is needed and what players say on twitter is quite powerful.

Perhaps the biggest example of someone who probably needs to censor themselves more on Twitter is Ivo Karlovic.  We all surely remember Ivo Karlovic's passive-aggressive tweet following Serena William's 19th Grand Slam victory in Melbourne.  When Serena closed out Maria Sharapova in straight sets to win the tournament, in showing her excitement, Williams started jumping up and down and hopped over to her Player's Box.  Karlovic, upon seeing Serena's celebration, sent out a nasty tweet that said "Earthquake in Melbourne #jumping".  The implication here certainly seems to be that Serena is overweight and her jumping is causing the ground to shake.

So, what were the implications of such a tweet?  Well, of the direct responses to the tweet, some of them thought it was funny (but did not necessarily agree with what Ivo had to say) while many others ripped into Ivo and thought it was anything but amusing.  In addition, tennis website tennis.com considered it a lowpoint and the tweet generated A LOT  of discussion on the popular women's tennis forum tennisforum.com, in which, based on the first couple of pages that I read for writing this post, were not favorable.  In any case, it was very inappropriate of Karlovic to (whether intentional or not) deflect the spotlight from Serena and onto himself.

This was not the only case of Karlovic making a spectacle of himself with jabs on twitter.  Just last Sunday, Ivo lashed out in a tweet against Roger Federer, saying, "Roger said its dark so it's dark".  What Karlovic completely ignored is the fact that it was cloudy out, and therefore would get darker earlier than usual, and also that Monfils could have probably used the rest, given that the world later learned he was sick for that match with Roger.  So, while Karlovic had been trying to take a swipe at Federer, he ended up looking pretty stupid himself.  Karlovic also has had many more cases in which he has written rude tweets, so he certainly has a track record with abusing his twitter account for the sake of putting down others.

So, why am I bringing up athletes and twitter today?  This is because, today, I read a very rude and disrespectful tweet from Tara Moore, who is also on the WTA Tour (but is lightyears behind Serena in terms of quality of play, and I now know, in terms of quality of individual).  It was learned before the match that Serena was very sick for her Semifinals match against Timea Bacsinszky at the French Open.  Serena was very down on court, and was clearly suffering even more so than during the Australian Open this year.  However, Moore was not convinced about Serena's performance and sent out a tweet in which she said, "Not only is serena one of the best women players of all time, she's also one of the best actresses #suckitup #learnhowtolose #pathetic".  In my opinion, the hashtags at the end of the tweet are where Moore really crossed over the line and made a rude tweet into a disrespectful one.

So, how did this tweet go over for Moore?  Well, almost every reply was negatively directed towards Tara, with Moore later even tweeting that death threats were coming her way.  Moore tweet also got coverage at theguardian because of her tweet, which also reported that even injured tennis player Laura Robson sent out a tweet dismissing Moore's "#pathetic".  All of this controversy over the 395th ranked women's player in the world in the live rankings!  This should really not be happening and the amount of attention payed to Moore is certainly not proportional to the amount of attention she has received (almost entirely negative) due to this tweet.

So, a player like Moore should be desperately working to make her way up the rankings in order to really try to make it on the tour.  Instead of sending out a nasty tweet about, arguably, the best women's tennis player of all time, she should be making sure the spotlight is off of her, so that she has no distractions on her quest to be the best that she can be.  And the same can be said for Karlovic, as well.  Since winning Delray Beach in February, Ivo has won a total of three matches.  In the entire clay court season, he won a total of one match.  And, when he sent out the tweet regarding Serena and an earthquake, he had made a Second Round exit in the Australian Open.  Again, like Moore, instead of drawing attention to himself, Karlovic should be wanting to deflect all of the attention off oh himself and really focus in on his tennis.

I must say, though, I give a little more leeway to Moore regarding this issue (as of now) than I do to Karlovic.  This is because Karlovic (as previously mentioned) definitely has a long history with sending out rude and hurtful tweets, where, as far as I can tell, Moore seems to be a "first time offender".  And while she is an adult, and thus is totally responsible for whatever decisions she makes, perhaps she didn't quite realize just how bad her tweet had and the subsequent impact it would have, while Karlovic seems to tweet nasty things all of the time without batting an eyebrow.  However, both Karlovic and Moore should feel ashamed about how they have presented themselves on their twitter account.

In any case, the main lesson here is that, for professional tennis players, twitter is very powerful.  For players those who tweet with class and grace it can be a great way to connect with their fans.  But, for those who do not conduct themselves in that manner on twitter, perhaps it's time to shut the account down.  Maybe Ivo Karlovic and Tara Moore's twitter accounts need to be deactivated.