Is It Normal to Be Nervous Before a Tennis Match?

Every junior who has felt their stomach flip in the car to a tournament has asked the same quiet question: is something wrong with me? The sport's answer comes from its greatest competitor. After he retired, Rafael Nadal wrote that he had been nervous before every match he ever played, and that the feeling never leaves. Twenty-two majors, and the butterflies rode along for all of them.

So the question is not how to stop being nervous. It is what nerves are for.

The best in the world, saying it out loud

The receipts pile up fast once you look. Andre Agassi, the night before winning the 2001 Australian Open: "You're a nervous wreck. Last night at dinner I had a hard time eating. Everything is just tense, and you're just excited. That lets you know you still love what you do." Jannik Sinner, as world No. 1, before a routine opener: "Of course you are nervous. You have doubts. It's normal."

And sometimes it happens on camera. Coco Gauff, already a major champion, fought tears mid-match at the 2025 US Open and named it afterward without flinching: "It was just nerves and just pressure, honestly." Then she won anyway. Nerves and winning are not opposites. They share a court constantly.

What the science says your body is doing

Sport psychology has known the shape of this for over a century. The Yerkes-Dodson principle says performance rises with activation up to a point, then falls: flat is bad, moderate is ideal, flooded is trouble. A racing heart and light stomach are your system delivering fuel for something that matters. The Association for Applied Sport Psychology is explicit that eliminating anxiety is not possible, and not even desirable. You want to be lit up. Just not lit on fire.

Better still, you can relabel the feeling. Harvard's Alison Wood Brooks ran studies where people said "I am excited" instead of trying to calm down before performing, and they performed better. The trick works because anxiety and excitement are nearly the same body state, racing heart and all. Renaming it costs nothing and points all that fuel forward.

The pre-match move, in three parts

First, expect the nerves and greet them. They are information that you care, not a verdict on your readiness.

Second, breathe on purpose. Long slow exhales are the fastest lever on a revving system, one or two before you walk on, one between points when it spikes.

Third, get a routine. The USTA's player-development version has four Rs: respond with confident body language, recover with breath, refocus on how you want to play the next point, ready yourself with rituals like a fixed number of ball bounces. Structure is what nerves grab instead of your serve. When the moment is bigger than a routine can hold, that is not nerves anymore, that is pressure spiking into a choke, and that has its own fix.

Proof it can flip fast: Amanda Anisimova froze in the 2025 Wimbledon final, her word for it was "frozen," and lost badly. About eight weeks later she beat the same opponent at the US Open and said she came out "with, like, not an ounce of fear." Same player. Same nerves. Different relationship with them.

One honest boundary

For most players, pre-match nerves fade once the ball is in play. If dread is constant, shows up days before every match, or starts making you want to quit the sport you love, that is worth a real conversation with a parent, coach or professional. Top pros build that support into their teams as a matter of course. Iga Swiatek has worked with a sport psychologist since 2019 and credits her with her development as a player. Asking for help is a performance move, not a confession, part of the work the durable players do.

The nerves mean you are doing something that counts. Do it where people can see you.