Ryan Harrison believes that new junior players can be taught not to grunt, but doesn’t believe that established players can tone down the volume of their shrieks. Harrison’s father Pat is a longtime teaching pro who told his kids not to be noisy.
Ryan Harrison told reporters at the SAP Open in San Jose said that some kids at the Nick Bollettieri Academy, where he occasionally trains, are "a lot more [noisy] than they need to be. If you have a 7-year-old girl grunting louder than I can scream in my entire life, that’s not really necessary. If you make some sort of exhaling noise, that’s fine, but whenever you hear a loud scream, I don’t know if it’s necessary at all times. There are some women pros who can’t stop because they have been doing it for so long, if you tell them to stop if will mess with their game. At that point they’ve gotten in rhythm and they are in their comfort zone. You can’t tell someone like Maria Sharapova to stop grunting because she's been doing it since she started playing. For her it’s not a distraction technique for her opponent, that’s just what she always done."
Harrison added that some coaches are culpable. "There are younger kids at academies like Bollettieri's that are taught to do things like that to mess with their opponents. My dad is OK with some sort of exhaling or some sort of noise, but if he starts getting the feeling some distraction for an opponent… The guy I was playing today [Dimitar Kutrovsky] was trying to dance around during my second serve and I’ve never been one to do anything, from bathroom breaks to grunting to trying to dance during someone’s service motion to try to mess up another player. Anything I’ve ever done is to try to control my side of the court. That’s how I was brought up. My dad never taught me to take bathroom breaks like you see other coaches trying to tell people to do that to try and disrupt rhythm. I always have had the approach that my game is better than yours and I don’t need to disrupt yours because I’m going to do what I can do and that’s going to be good enough."—Matt Cronin