Former Cardinal Paul Goldstein has shifted his career focus back to tennis as he takes over as Stanford’s men’s tennis
head coach. Goldstein is the tenth men’s head tennis coach at Stanford.
“I am humbled, honored but most of all inspired by the opportunity to
lead a program with such a strong inter-generational legacy of athletic
and academic excellence,” said Goldstein. Goldstein was an outstanding
junior player ranked among the top-10 juniors in the world and made
tennis history by becoming the first player to capture three consecutive
national championships (Boy’s 16’s in 1992, Boy’s 18’s in 1993, Boys 18
in 1994). He then had an outstanding collegiate career from 1995-98,
becoming the first player in NCAA history to compete as a starting
member of four consecutive national championship teams. Upon graduation
Goldstein shifted into a professional tennis career which lasted ten
years. Goldsteins ATP
world ranking reached as high as no. 58 in singles and no. 40 in
doubles. In 2008 Goldstein left the tour and became involved with sales
and business development roles at Bloom Energy, a Silicon Valley based clean energy fuel cell company.
SZ: Who have been the influential tennis coaches in your life? What did you learn from them that helped you succeed as a junior, collegiate and professional player?
PG: I’ve been very fortunate and worked with some amazing coaches over the years. Too many to count but if I were to pick two, I’d highlight my junior coach, Matz Claesson. I was thirteen years old when I began working with Matz and continued to work with him until I left for Stanford. While I was at Stanford I maintained a relationship with him. We maintained a close relationship to the point he was a groomsman in my wedding. He really helped me develop both on and off the court through-out my adolescent years. The help he gave me on the court taught me a lot about commitment. He was fairly young, 25/26 years old when we began working together. He had great energy and a lot of passion for tennis and a passion for helping me become a better player. The word that comes to mind when I think of Matz is, “selfless.” He was absolutely selfless. It’s a huge lesson for me to learn now that I am in this coaching position. As a coach I’m there to support my guys on the team as best I can and in a selfless manner. If I can be as half as selfless as Matz was with me I think I’d be doing the guys a good service.
Then of course coach Gould. Having four years at Stanford with coach there were so many lessons to learn from coach and the least important of which was anything he taught me about a forehand, backhand, or serve. I don’t even know where to begin considering he’s still the director of tennis at Stanford and I’m over at his office four times a day asking him for advice. Coach Gould is forty-eight years in at Stanford and still works 60-70 hour weeks. The way he runs the program is unparalleled in all of college sports. Through his empathy for others, the way he builds relationships with others, his passion for Stanford tennis, is just a humbling thing to have the opportunity to be in the position that coach Gould handled with such aplomb for thirty-nine years.
I think I’d say that the biggest thing you learn from coach is the proper spirit of competition. As a player you go out there and you compete between the lines. The way you compete between the lines is you don’t give an inch. You fight for every point and you are competitive. One of the things I always thought when I was playing for him was he wanted his fifteenth national title more than most coaches wanted their first. So he’s a competitive guy but he did so in a manner that engendered respect from those against whom he competed. But I don’t think you’ll ever find a peer coach in the collegiate community who doesn’t have incredibly warm things to say about coach Gould. They respected the way he competed. They respected his competitiveness but they also respected the way he went about it which was with high integrity. I think that’s the biggest lesson I learned from coach Gould.
SZ: In April of 2006 you reached a professional career singles high of fifty-eight. What was the shift that raised your match play success?
PG: As I progressed through my professional career my training habits changed. At the beginning of my career I might have been on the court everyday for three to four hours for every one hour in the gym or off court. At the end of my career it was inverse. It became three to four hours a day in the gym for every one hour on the practice court. That work load obviously changed a bit when I was in a tournament. I started emphasizing my off court strength and conditioning more later in my career which I found to be very beneficial from the standpoint of I was healthier longer and I was mentally fresher when I was on the court. I wasn’t any longer killing myself on the court six hours a day. I can probably count on one hand the number of bad practices I felt I had the last four years of my career because when I was on the court I was there for the right reasons and in the right mental frame of mind. I was also in great shape and had good energy when I was on the court. I think that was the big adjustment I made in the later part of my career.
SZ: Do you think that piece of the game has changed?
PG: I think that athleticism, power, explosiveness and agility is more important now than it ever has been in sports history. Obviously people are spending a lot of time off court but I think they are still spending a lot of time on the court. It’s a difficult thing because there is a point in a player’s development where they really do need to hit, to take a line from Malcom Gladwell, to put in 10,000 hours on the court to become elite. Tennis is a small motor skills sport and very much a muscle memory sport and you do need to put a lot of time on the court during the adolescent years. But I can see some of these player’s perhaps spending too much time on the court and would benefit by a little bit more time in off court training so they are mentally fresh when they play. It’s important when a player is competing that they are enjoying themselves. I think that perhaps we’re spending a little too much time on court and so player’s aren’t fresh when they are out there competing.
SZ: You’ve mentioned that, “The landscape of competitive tennis in the U.S. has changed dramatically since you attended Stanford in the 1990’s.” What are a few changes you’ve seen and what do you hope to create in the Stanford men’s tennis program to address these changes?
PG: One of the things I was referring to is that a lot of junior tennis players use distance learning for their form of education which is okay. It’s just the landscape is that they are specializing in their chosen sport at an earlier age and emphasizing development in a sport sometimes perhaps at the expense of academics. As you know Stanford is looking for student athletes that are committed to pursuing excellence and athletics and being able to maintain that balance.
SZ: The balance of academics and the amount of time participating in a high level year round sport.
PG: In a lot of cases the international kids basically are professional tennis players by the time they are thirteen years old. I think this puts pressure on our American players to feel like in order to keep up they have to take the same approach and that sometimes comes at the expense of pursing academic excellence.
SZ: In your view in what ways has the men’s game changed physically and strategically? What mental skills do successful player’s need to be in command of to compete at the highest collegiate level or professionally?
PG: Very clearly the game has become more physical than at any point in our history. Look no further than Rafa Nadal who really changed the game from a physical standpoint. The other major change is with technology. Not so much with the rackets but more so with the string which allows you to take really, really big cuts at the ball and create massive amounts of RPM’s, meaning spin and rotation on the ball to keep it in the court. The ability to generate these massive RPM’s has made moving forward and finishing points at the net much more difficult. Because a player can take these huge cuts at the ball the game is more violent, more physical, and more laborious than it was in the early 90’s. This is why the emphasis on physicality is so much greater now.
SZ: What mental skills do successful players need to be in command of to compete at the highest levels of the game?
PG: Winning begets winning and confidence is the most important mental competitive advantage I think any tennis player can possibly have. That comes from winning and a player putting him/herself in situations where when playing competitively they find a way to get through. That’s really what separates player’s who win consistently and those who don’t. To a certain extent there are skill sets involved as well but I think at some level there’s a lot of parody in tennis of how a player is able to hit the ball and the players that are more successful are those who have been there before and find a way during the most critical points of the match to execute the same way that they would execute on the practice courts or at the beginning of a match. It’s a very difficult thing to do.
SZ: It’s the experience of doing when it counts the most. Are there any mental techniques, visualization, breath control that you feel are important to apply to this?
PG: I am sure there are. Frankly that’s an area of growth and development for me to become better at.
SZ: It’s not something you utilized in your professional experience.
PG: No, I didn’t utilize visualization. I am aware of the technique. I didn’t apply that myself perhaps to my detriment.
SZ: You competed on the professional tour for ten years what kept you motivated/inspired during your professional tennis career?
PG: More than anything my family. I was fortunate to be supported by my parents through-out my adolescence and then through-out my professional career. My girlfriend at the time who later became my wife gave me amazing support. Her support allowed me to travel around and play on the tour and her support of that endeavor meant the world to me. More than anything my families support was what kept me motivated. I felt that when I was away competing I was doing so at the expense of being close to my family and it would be doing them a disservice if I wasn’t putting everything into it.
SZ: It’s a nice change to be home and local and still involved in tennis.
PG: It’s been a great change over the last six and a half years at Bloom Energy. My wife and I have had three children over those years and I’ve been home quite a bit. But with this new position as the men’s head coach at Stanford I will be traveling a lot more. That will be a transition but not as big a transition as when I was playing professionally.
SZ: It may be too early to know but do you think the six and a half years of job experience at Bloom Energy will contribute to your coaching success?
PG: Absolutely. No question. I’ve had the opportunity get experiences in the business world. In sales you are a communicator. As a professional player in an individual sport communications skills aren’t necessarily the most important attribute to be successful. It’s a nice thing to have though and certainly as a coach who’s responsible for not only the ten to twelve members of the team but also relationships with the administration, athletic department and alumni having communication skills are absolutely essential to be successful in this position. I think the experiences at Bloom which is made up of an amazing team and being surrounded by people who are passionate about an important goal that I firmly believe in, that’s to make clean energy reliable for everyone in the world, has been very inspiring.
SZ: Are there any upcoming Stanford men’s tennis events that you wish the public to be aware of?
PG: All of them. They should come out and watch all of them. I am very excited and it’s a priority for me to have myself and the team invested and engaged in the Stanford community so I welcome everyone’s attendance at the matches. We are hosting a regional event in late October. We begin the dual match season in the winter and certainly our matches against USC and UCLA will be a lot of fun.
SZ: Are there community events where the public gets to know you as a coach?
PG: We have a fundraiser event Sept. 27th for EPAT which is the East Palo Alto tennis and tutoring program. The program is for at risk youth who come over to Stanford everyday and not only receive tutoring from Stanford students but also the opportunity to play tennis as well. It’s a wonderful program and the Stanford tennis athletes are involved.
SZ: Paul congratulations and best of luck to you in your new job, and thank you for taking the time for this interview.
SZ: Who have been the influential tennis coaches in your life? What did you learn from them that helped you succeed as a junior, collegiate and professional player?
PG: I’ve been very fortunate and worked with some amazing coaches over the years. Too many to count but if I were to pick two, I’d highlight my junior coach, Matz Claesson. I was thirteen years old when I began working with Matz and continued to work with him until I left for Stanford. While I was at Stanford I maintained a relationship with him. We maintained a close relationship to the point he was a groomsman in my wedding. He really helped me develop both on and off the court through-out my adolescent years. The help he gave me on the court taught me a lot about commitment. He was fairly young, 25/26 years old when we began working together. He had great energy and a lot of passion for tennis and a passion for helping me become a better player. The word that comes to mind when I think of Matz is, “selfless.” He was absolutely selfless. It’s a huge lesson for me to learn now that I am in this coaching position. As a coach I’m there to support my guys on the team as best I can and in a selfless manner. If I can be as half as selfless as Matz was with me I think I’d be doing the guys a good service.
Then of course coach Gould. Having four years at Stanford with coach there were so many lessons to learn from coach and the least important of which was anything he taught me about a forehand, backhand, or serve. I don’t even know where to begin considering he’s still the director of tennis at Stanford and I’m over at his office four times a day asking him for advice. Coach Gould is forty-eight years in at Stanford and still works 60-70 hour weeks. The way he runs the program is unparalleled in all of college sports. Through his empathy for others, the way he builds relationships with others, his passion for Stanford tennis, is just a humbling thing to have the opportunity to be in the position that coach Gould handled with such aplomb for thirty-nine years.
I think I’d say that the biggest thing you learn from coach is the proper spirit of competition. As a player you go out there and you compete between the lines. The way you compete between the lines is you don’t give an inch. You fight for every point and you are competitive. One of the things I always thought when I was playing for him was he wanted his fifteenth national title more than most coaches wanted their first. So he’s a competitive guy but he did so in a manner that engendered respect from those against whom he competed. But I don’t think you’ll ever find a peer coach in the collegiate community who doesn’t have incredibly warm things to say about coach Gould. They respected the way he competed. They respected his competitiveness but they also respected the way he went about it which was with high integrity. I think that’s the biggest lesson I learned from coach Gould.
SZ: In April of 2006 you reached a professional career singles high of fifty-eight. What was the shift that raised your match play success?
PG: As I progressed through my professional career my training habits changed. At the beginning of my career I might have been on the court everyday for three to four hours for every one hour in the gym or off court. At the end of my career it was inverse. It became three to four hours a day in the gym for every one hour on the practice court. That work load obviously changed a bit when I was in a tournament. I started emphasizing my off court strength and conditioning more later in my career which I found to be very beneficial from the standpoint of I was healthier longer and I was mentally fresher when I was on the court. I wasn’t any longer killing myself on the court six hours a day. I can probably count on one hand the number of bad practices I felt I had the last four years of my career because when I was on the court I was there for the right reasons and in the right mental frame of mind. I was also in great shape and had good energy when I was on the court. I think that was the big adjustment I made in the later part of my career.
SZ: Do you think that piece of the game has changed?
PG: I think that athleticism, power, explosiveness and agility is more important now than it ever has been in sports history. Obviously people are spending a lot of time off court but I think they are still spending a lot of time on the court. It’s a difficult thing because there is a point in a player’s development where they really do need to hit, to take a line from Malcom Gladwell, to put in 10,000 hours on the court to become elite. Tennis is a small motor skills sport and very much a muscle memory sport and you do need to put a lot of time on the court during the adolescent years. But I can see some of these player’s perhaps spending too much time on the court and would benefit by a little bit more time in off court training so they are mentally fresh when they play. It’s important when a player is competing that they are enjoying themselves. I think that perhaps we’re spending a little too much time on court and so player’s aren’t fresh when they are out there competing.
SZ: You’ve mentioned that, “The landscape of competitive tennis in the U.S. has changed dramatically since you attended Stanford in the 1990’s.” What are a few changes you’ve seen and what do you hope to create in the Stanford men’s tennis program to address these changes?
PG: One of the things I was referring to is that a lot of junior tennis players use distance learning for their form of education which is okay. It’s just the landscape is that they are specializing in their chosen sport at an earlier age and emphasizing development in a sport sometimes perhaps at the expense of academics. As you know Stanford is looking for student athletes that are committed to pursuing excellence and athletics and being able to maintain that balance.
SZ: The balance of academics and the amount of time participating in a high level year round sport.
PG: In a lot of cases the international kids basically are professional tennis players by the time they are thirteen years old. I think this puts pressure on our American players to feel like in order to keep up they have to take the same approach and that sometimes comes at the expense of pursing academic excellence.
SZ: In your view in what ways has the men’s game changed physically and strategically? What mental skills do successful player’s need to be in command of to compete at the highest collegiate level or professionally?
PG: Very clearly the game has become more physical than at any point in our history. Look no further than Rafa Nadal who really changed the game from a physical standpoint. The other major change is with technology. Not so much with the rackets but more so with the string which allows you to take really, really big cuts at the ball and create massive amounts of RPM’s, meaning spin and rotation on the ball to keep it in the court. The ability to generate these massive RPM’s has made moving forward and finishing points at the net much more difficult. Because a player can take these huge cuts at the ball the game is more violent, more physical, and more laborious than it was in the early 90’s. This is why the emphasis on physicality is so much greater now.
SZ: What mental skills do successful players need to be in command of to compete at the highest levels of the game?
PG: Winning begets winning and confidence is the most important mental competitive advantage I think any tennis player can possibly have. That comes from winning and a player putting him/herself in situations where when playing competitively they find a way to get through. That’s really what separates player’s who win consistently and those who don’t. To a certain extent there are skill sets involved as well but I think at some level there’s a lot of parody in tennis of how a player is able to hit the ball and the players that are more successful are those who have been there before and find a way during the most critical points of the match to execute the same way that they would execute on the practice courts or at the beginning of a match. It’s a very difficult thing to do.
SZ: It’s the experience of doing when it counts the most. Are there any mental techniques, visualization, breath control that you feel are important to apply to this?
PG: I am sure there are. Frankly that’s an area of growth and development for me to become better at.
SZ: It’s not something you utilized in your professional experience.
PG: No, I didn’t utilize visualization. I am aware of the technique. I didn’t apply that myself perhaps to my detriment.
SZ: You competed on the professional tour for ten years what kept you motivated/inspired during your professional tennis career?
PG: More than anything my family. I was fortunate to be supported by my parents through-out my adolescence and then through-out my professional career. My girlfriend at the time who later became my wife gave me amazing support. Her support allowed me to travel around and play on the tour and her support of that endeavor meant the world to me. More than anything my families support was what kept me motivated. I felt that when I was away competing I was doing so at the expense of being close to my family and it would be doing them a disservice if I wasn’t putting everything into it.
SZ: It’s a nice change to be home and local and still involved in tennis.
PG: It’s been a great change over the last six and a half years at Bloom Energy. My wife and I have had three children over those years and I’ve been home quite a bit. But with this new position as the men’s head coach at Stanford I will be traveling a lot more. That will be a transition but not as big a transition as when I was playing professionally.
SZ: It may be too early to know but do you think the six and a half years of job experience at Bloom Energy will contribute to your coaching success?
PG: Absolutely. No question. I’ve had the opportunity get experiences in the business world. In sales you are a communicator. As a professional player in an individual sport communications skills aren’t necessarily the most important attribute to be successful. It’s a nice thing to have though and certainly as a coach who’s responsible for not only the ten to twelve members of the team but also relationships with the administration, athletic department and alumni having communication skills are absolutely essential to be successful in this position. I think the experiences at Bloom which is made up of an amazing team and being surrounded by people who are passionate about an important goal that I firmly believe in, that’s to make clean energy reliable for everyone in the world, has been very inspiring.
SZ: Are there any upcoming Stanford men’s tennis events that you wish the public to be aware of?
PG: All of them. They should come out and watch all of them. I am very excited and it’s a priority for me to have myself and the team invested and engaged in the Stanford community so I welcome everyone’s attendance at the matches. We are hosting a regional event in late October. We begin the dual match season in the winter and certainly our matches against USC and UCLA will be a lot of fun.
SZ: Are there community events where the public gets to know you as a coach?
PG: We have a fundraiser event Sept. 27th for EPAT which is the East Palo Alto tennis and tutoring program. The program is for at risk youth who come over to Stanford everyday and not only receive tutoring from Stanford students but also the opportunity to play tennis as well. It’s a wonderful program and the Stanford tennis athletes are involved.
SZ: Paul congratulations and best of luck to you in your new job, and thank you for taking the time for this interview.
*This article can also be read @ Examiner
*Photo by Mark Dadswell/Getty Images
