It would probably be fair to claim that mental health provision in sport has improved in recent years. But for Gary Bloom, a UK-based sports psychotherapist, there is still a long way to go.

“Once you start using those two words together – ‘mental’ and ‘health’ – you’re going to scare off an awful lot of people and that’s one of the biggest problems that people like me come across,” he explained in an interview with ITFtennis.com this week. “People believe you have good mental health or bad mental health… and my job is to help educate people to say that we all have a relationship with our mental health, just like we all have a relationship with our physical health.”

Bloom began his career as a sports broadcaster before training as a psychotherapist in the mid-2000s. Since qualifying he has worked with clients from across the sporting world, and is a sport performance psychotherapist at Oxford United football club.

The two strands of his career intersect in the radio show ‘On the Sporting Couch’, broadcast on Talksport Radio in the UK, in which elite sportsmen and women share a therapy session to talk through struggles with their mental health.

He outlines his work as a sports psychotherapist in simple terms: “The question I would ask if I was working with a tennis player is: ‘Where are you? Where do you want to be in two or three years’ time?’ And once you’ve decided where you are and where you want to be, the next question is: ‘How are you going to get there?’

“It’s a relatively simple path once you decide where you’re going. A lot of sportspeople don’t know the answers to those questions – or they have inflated ideas of where they currently are or where they want to be within that timescale.

“So that’s kind of my work: to try and help them understand themselves. It’s not for me to turn round to a young tennis player and say ‘you need to be a Grand Slam champion in two years’. It takes as long as it takes.”

Such understanding seems particularly pertinent during a global pandemic that has seen elite-level tennis – along with many other sports around the world – grind to a halt. If ever there was a moment for self-reflection then this would be it, as the travelling circus that is the global tennis tour (and all the pressures, mental and physical, that are associated with it) has abruptly stopped.

And while emphasising that the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic would vary greatly from person to person, Bloom suggested that it could be an opportunity for players to think deeply about how the current situation could have an impact on their careers more broadly.

“It’s going to impact on people in different ways depending on their personal circumstances,” Bloom said of the pandemic. “If you have been on tour for weeks and weeks and weeks, and the thing that you really want to do is be at home with your mum and dad, or with your kids, this could be the best thing ever. If you are a young person who has been on tour and you really hate the solitude of being in a hotel room and the grind of working with a coach in practice and so on, the solitude of being in lockdown could make things very tricky for you. Everyone will have a different circumstance.

“There are certain things we can do and certain ways we can look after ourselves. But it might be a really interesting concept to think: ‘What have I learnt from this lockdown? What am I learning about myself as an athlete? What am I learning about myself as a human being?’”

As we approach what should have been a glorious tennis summer, though, it may be difficult for players to see the opportunities that lie in the postponement or cancellation. This week should have seen qualifying for Roland Garros (now postponed until the autumn), while Wimbledon has been cancelled for the first time since the Second World War, and the Tokyo Olympics pushed back a year.

Bloom, however, has words of encouragement for athletes disappointed by the empty months that lie in wait.

“Many sportspeople who work with psychologists will be aware that you can only control the controllables,” he said. “The cancelling of the Tokyo Games this year is not a controllable… so what does that mean to you? Is this a chance to work on your backhand? Is this a chance to work on your serve?

“What area of your game has been shielded by the lockdown and the cancellation of the Tokyo Olympics? What could you work on and who could you work with to improve that area?”

While 2020 may be an exceptional year in the impact that the pandemic has had on sport, athletes, like everyone else, will face various personal challenges throughout their lives. Bloom is firmly of the opinion that facing those issues when they arise – and, importantly, finding a resolution to them – will have a positive impact on an athlete’s sporting performance.

“If you have a bereavement, if you’ve lost a loved one, if you’ve lost your job, if you have financial issues… all these things are going to impact on you as an individual and that’s going to affect your performance,” he explained. “If we are unhappy in our personal lives, it will impact on our jobs.

“If you are a tennis player and you have problems that are unresolved… however hard you try, you just can’t get to your very, very best.”