For the past six years Mats Merkel has been working as a consultant to the adidas global sports marketing tennis division. He is travelling and working with some of the greatest athletes in tennis. In the following guest post he is giving you some insights into his amazing job.

My job as a coach for the adidas tennis Player Development Program

My name is Mats Merkel. I just got back from Melbourne, Australia and as you are all into sports you know that in January the first Grand Slam of the year was held in Melbourne. In 2005 Jim Latham who was Head of Individual Sports and Olympic Sports GSM has founded the adidas Player Development Program. Since then the team has been expanded to 4 consistent coaches/mentors, Sven Groeneveld, Darren Cahill, Gil Reyes and I. Let me give you some insights into my work…

Interim coaching and mentoring

The adidas Player Development Program offers a complimentary service to the athletes and their support team in order to help the athletes develop to the best they can be. Some of them have bigger teams including a tennis coach and a physical trainer and some of them only travel with their parents. No matter how big or small the team is if there is a request to work with them we always work with every single team member and not only with the athlete. Even though it is an individual sport we are working at, in the end it is a team effort.

With one athlete we would spend a lot of time on court working on her/his game. With others there could only be talks about their game, advise on their career planning or a simple motivational talk. As you can see a lot of variety which definitely makes the job so interesting as well.

We are traveling to the big four Grand Slams and other events of high importance, following the adidas athletes and working closely together with them and their teams.

If you want to get more insights into my job you can also follow @adidastennis on Twitter where I share news, updates and some behind-the-scenes tweets.

But now see below some pictures where we interact with our athletes:

Insights into my job

From the left: I, Ana Ivanovic, Sven Groenveld and Ana's fitness coach

Insights into my job

Discussing products on court - Jo Tsonga and I

Insights into my job

On the court with Jo Tsonga

Insights into my job

Darren Cahill in Action, Sven Groeneveld in the back

Insights into my job

On the court...

Insights into my job

On the court...

Insights into my job

Sven Groeneveld with Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova

Insights into my job

Darren Cahill interacting with Fernando Verdasco

Some of the players I recently worked with

Andy Murray

Some of the players I recently worked with

Ayumi Morita (JPN)

Some of the players I recently worked with

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the so called Muhammad Ali of the Tennis scene has been helped by us as well

Some of the players I recently worked with

Maria Kirilenko (RUS)

Some of the players I recently worked with

Sorana Cirstea (ROU)

Some of the players I recently worked with

Caroline Wozniacki

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