Game – Set – Match: Grow! How Professional Tennis Fosters Personal Development of Business Students

The abilities to set and pursue goals as well as to cope with pressure to perform and stress are highly important to both business students and future managers. Nevertheless, many business students report that they still lack these skills when they near the end of their studies. This may be due to the fact that it is difficult to train these skills in a classroom and allow students to immediately experience the positive effects of various strategies for achieving goals as well as coping with pressure and stress. These conditions reduce the likelihood that students will actually be convinced and motivated to incorporate these strategies into their everyday (study and work) life.

This deficit is eliminated by the design of a recently developed course at Vienna University of Economics and Business: the above-mentioned strategies are not only conveyed as part of a management training course taking place in a classroom, but also developed jointly with trainers of professional tennis who work with the students on the tennis court by applying techniques that are usually used in professional tennis.