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When Kylie Moulds<\/strong> left the sport of tennis after a professional career and years of coaching, part of her knew she would return.<\/p>\n Kylie first found her love for tennis in a small country town in Adelaide Hills, where she credits her mum with introducing her to the sport.<\/p>\n \u201cI played both netball and tennis growing up, and I was quite good at both. However, I liked the individual nature of tennis a little bit more. As a child I was quite introverted, so it allowed me to show off my personality in games,\u201d Kylie said.<\/p>\n \u201cI think tennis as a sport is an amazing vehicle, it opened a lot of doors for me. I never would have imagined coming from a small town I would be able to travel around the world. But it wasn\u2019t just the travel that I loved, it was meeting new and diverse people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAt a young age, it certainly helped me gain a deeper understanding of myself and taught me all these different skills from time management, preparation and goal setting, to coping and adaptability skills,\u201d Kylie said.<\/p>\n Kylie stopped her professional playing career earlier than others, but having been exposed to coaching as a teen, it was where she turned her attention to next.<\/p>\n \u201cMy mum had a big influence on me as a netball coach and I loved teaching people. For me, getting into coaching wasn\u2019t simply because I wanted to stay in the sport, it\u2019s just that I loved helping people and coaching was a way to do that,\u201d Kylie explains.<\/p>\n After spending time in New York as a coach, Kylie retuned to Australia where she took up a role as Assistant State Coach in South Australia, before progressing to a national role at Tennis Australia<\/strong> and the Australian Institute of Sport<\/strong> as a touring coach.<\/p>\n But the commitment of coaching took its toll on her.<\/p>\n \u201cI was travelling nine or ten months of the year, it\u2019s hard to put so much time into something without something else breaking down. I never had a good mentor in my late twenties or a strong support network. I didn\u2019t have anybody who could say if I was making the right or wrong decision.<\/p>\n And I think I always wanted to do more than coaching, there was something missing. So, I went back to university and studied behavioral science and psychology.\u201dKylie moved on to working in other sports like softball and netball, before moving to the education space as a lecturer in sport and exercise science at the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney, and now her current role at the University of Canberra.<\/p>\n But the pull of returning to tennis was strong.<\/p>\n \u201cTennis forms part of my sense of identity and belonging. A part of me was missing when I wasn\u2019t involved in tennis. It\u2019s taken me a long time to align everything I wanted to do with my career and to understand the importance of tennis in my life,\u201d she reflects.<\/p>\n Kylie is now completing her PhD at the University of Sydney, examining the motivational requirements of sport coaches and the impact coaches can have on the wellbeing of young athletes.\u00a0 Alongside that work, she is also working with Tennis ACT in a mentorship role, supporting Women and Girls Lead Alison Bai in the delivery of initiatives related to Tennis Australia\u2019s Women and Girls Strategy.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s why I\u2019ve come back, I really want to support female coaches and players. I want to give back to the space that I\u2019m really passionate about.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe ultimate goal with my PhD is to further develop coaches to understand how much influence they can have on players in a positive or negative way. It\u2019s an education piece I feel strongly about,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Kylie hopes she can support women coaches on their journey and act as a mentor she would have liked to have when she was coaching.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the women\u2019s coaching space, I\u2019ve been able to support Coach Connect, which is a mentoring program for women coaches. It\u2019s a really great environment for women to share their ideas. For me personally, I\u2019ve been able to share my journey of how I\u2019ve come back to tennis,\u201d Kylie said.<\/p>\n \u201cI think for women coaches, a lot of the time, you don\u2019t have someone there to bounce ideas off or you don\u2019t have that support base. I think the idea of strength in numbers is true for this program, and I\u2019m grateful I can support a program that brings women coaches together.\u201d<\/p>\n When reflecting on her overall tennis journey, Kylie smiled, \u201cI\u2019ve really come full circle.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Kylie Moulds left the sport of tennis after a professional career and years of coaching, part of her knew she would return. Kylie first found her love for tennis in a small country town in Adelaide Hills, where she credits her mum with introducing her to the sport. \u201cI played both netball and tennis […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6150,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/act\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/act\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/act\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/act\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6150"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/act\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/act\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/act\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/act\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/act\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}