Take Away Half of the Court

One of the most frustrating things I see weak-minded players do is give up on a play. I understand not everyone is wired like Rafael Nadal with a relentless attitude to chase down balls from seemingly impossible situations. However, here is a good trick that makes logical sense and something you can implement into your game right away.

Lets say you are in a tussle and slowly your opponent pushes you deep into the corner. Without meaning to, you cough up a short ball so short, you quickly calculate the odds of winning the point to be less than 10 percent. One option is to give in and just turn around. Another option is to run to the center of the court and see what happens. The BEST option is to guestimate the one place the winner will go and run to that spot. This means taking half the court away and take away the easiest shot for them to hit.

Standing in the middle of the court opens up the edges. However, most people who play great defense have a knack for guessing right. What these players are really doing is reading the ball, the opponents body language, and checking where the most probably place the next ball could potentially go and taking that option away. Make them hit the most difficult shot and maybe if you are strongly covering one-half of the court, good things could happen- like the ball coming onto a crash collision with you.

Like chess, you always want to apply pressure and think a couple steps ahead. Now if you continue to chase these balls down (Lendl said: "I run after everything, even if I think that I can't get there"), however dire the situation may be, and continue to take away half of the court- they will start to feel the pressure deep into the set or match. Easy shots suddenly aren't so easy, muscles start to tighten, and shots that were once manageable without blinking start to feel like catching a mosquito with chopsticks (well maybe not that hard, but anything is possible when you get underneath someone's skin). Good things can happen and these types of points can switch the momentum and cause rookie players to crack mentally.

Passing the Eyeball Test

In a perfect world, everyone would like to hit with players at an equal or greater level than them themsleves.  It makes perfect sense, the ball always comes within the vicinity of one or two steps with solid power and consistency.  On the flipside, ill-informed players rather not hit with so called "scrubs".  I am calling them ill-informed for the simple fact that hitting with so called "scrubs" can be really beneficial to your game. 

Think about it from a different point of view.  

a)  The ball never comes to you.  That is great!  One of the best ways to determine who passes the eyeball test for being a good player if you are watching from the sidelines is if a player can track down any kind of shot and place it perfect to their hitting partner.  Now think about that.  How often does a "scrub" make you perform below par?  I already know the answer, most of the time.  For obvious reasons, the ball never comes within a 5 feet radius of you, the randomness of pace, heights, depths completely tinker with your timing, and mentally it wears on you.  Guess what?  Sounds like a real tennis match.  

b)  With all this variability being thrown in your direction, you can really develop a wide array of skills.  Your goal is to lay the ball right onto their racquet without having for them to move.  Can you put it there in such a way that doesn't require them to move wide, deep, or short and doesn't require them to deal with too much or too little pace and doesn't require them to raise or lower their racquet at contact?  Yes that's pretty tough, but that's what good players can do.  

c)  Improving your skills.  Sometimes the ball lands short and might bounce 5 times before it reaches the baseline.  Trust me, not an ideal shot for you to be scooping off the ground and having to generate enough pace to get it over the net.  A common problem rookies have is to overplay the shot.  Meaning if you have a semi-western forehand and the ball has no pace and is 3 inches off the ground- Why are you hitting a topspin forehand?  The experienced and mature player would saavily turn the grip towards a continental eastern grip and gently slice the ball in a way that the "scrub" can hit it back again.  These little skills can add up and help you win important matches against the equal to better players.  These are the types of shots average players miss and good to great players rarely miss. 

Lack of Loyalty and Cherry Picking Coaches

Tennis is an endless search for the Fountain of Youth.  Ponce de Leon learned the hard way, venturing to Florida to only fail in finding the ever so famous Fountain of Youth.  As like Ponce de Leon, venturing to Florida to the world reknowned tennis coaches such as Nick Bollitieri or Rick Macci will not boost your tennis game overnight.  If it were that easy, I would recommend locking in a time slot with Nick himself at $800 a pop.  

The reality is tennis is a very tough game.  There are no magic pills, secret elixirs, or specific technical tips that will instantly make something click in your head.  One has never heard of a story who from a one hour lesson went on from nobody to somebody in a matter of weeks.  Tennis takes time, patience, and an endless amount of trial and error.  The best players are able to grapple with this fact sooner than later, accept their flaws and work within the boundaries placed before them.  Sure, you will always attempt to improve different aspects of your game, but when it comes time for the match of your life with money and pride on the line- you must do only things that will increase your chances of winning.  

Many parents and players have been guilty of cherry picking.  If you ever have gone cherry picking on a farm, your #1 goal is to find the plumpest, juiciest, reddest, most vibrant cherries on the stem.  By golly, when you see it, snag it.  Well in terms of searching for coaches, parents and players do the exact same thing.  They see someone is having a little success with one coach or they think they are in a rut, the easy solution is to jump ship and cherry pick a juicier coach.  I'm not suggesting one coach isn't better than another, but when one starts to seek a multitude of coaches on a frequent basis to solve their issues, one is not going to have the success he or she wants.  

The first problem is very few parents and players are willing to accept blame and responsibility.  With very little sense of loyalty in the world today, most are looking for the easy way out.  There will always be someone around the corner or at a tournament chirping the "grass in greener on the otherside" tidbit.  Those people are usually frauds, beware of them.  The good players who have some class, character, and substance don't look for the easy way out.  They refuse to cherry pick and try to work out the issue themselves.  

If you talk to good to great players who grew up before the 1990s, most played tennis because they had the "bug" for it.  They played because their parents played.  They played because their friends played.  In today's society, parents are driving the kids to lessons.  If the kid has poor results, lets find a new coach who can motivate the kid better.  The parents are always ready to catch the kids when they fall.  The coping skills needed to become a good player are not being developed as the parents are doing them a great disservice in finding them solutions to their problems.  

The ideal way to start and develop as a player is to limit your private lessons to one per week.  One per week is plenty.  Why?  The player needs time to digest the information.  The player needs time to work out the kinks whether be a new technique, strategy, or shot.  The player needs to spend hours on his own honing his skills through a series of trial and errors experiments, learning how to make adjustments on the fly without being told how to adjust.  The player might make a discovery on his own and stumble upon something amazing for his/her game.  Lastly, the player needs to test his lesson under matchplay pressure.  Play a couple sets before the next lesson and see what needs work.  A week later, the player now has some good information to relay back to the coach.  Do not overcoach the kid.  Let the player learn to adjust and adapt with no one else looking over their shoulder.  The best players have ultimately learned to become their own coach.  

Steal this Drill: Closing Volleys

In hitting volleys, simplicity is often the best strategy. Players who spend a lot of time at the baseline believe that volleys are just as complex as hitting ground strokes and, as a result, over-think the shot to their detriment.

Let's simplify things a little bit. The purpose of the volley is to take time away from the opponent. However, instead of doing so through-pace generation, the player should attempt to move forward as as quickly as possible and close out the angle.

I will let your private coach focus on the particular technique (be it grip, footwork, balance, etc.). My tips are simply to keep three components in front of you at all time: 1) the ball; 2) the racket and 3) the opponent. Often times, player move forward and "forget" to take their racket with them (thereby inadvertently creating a back-swing which then results in an over-hit). On the other hand, some player don't mover forward at all and feel that they have to swing at the ball in order to generate any kind of pop. It's important to keep in mind that, on the volleys, the moving forward (aggressive lunge forward) IS the swing. By stepping forward, the player uses his body-weight to make solid contact with a fast-moving object (ball) Also, a contact out in front means that the opposing player has a less time to cover the shot. Again, take time away from your opponent through forward movement.

To practice this, start out by hitting volley-volley against the coach. However, in this drill the coach is at the service line and the player is about 3 feet inside the baseline. The player should advance forward taking aggressive but MEASURED steps. Once the player reaches his service line, the coach should "pop up" one of her volleys and the player should practice moving forward quickly and pouncing on the ball (but with a controlled "stick") before it drops below the level of the net. This is a reaction drill in that the player's eyes have to pick up the "pop up" very quickly in order for the brain to trigger a signal to the legs to move forward.

To add some fun into the practice, the coach can sometimes feed a lob right after the closing volley and the player has to run back and either hit a "regular" shot back in play or practice a between the legs or some other fun shot. Sometimes, the player can start the drill with a swinging volley (or half-volley) and the proceed to moving forward with regular volleys. The key is for the player to become comfortable everywhere INSIDE the court and also to "stick" the volleys by using his legs and not so much the racket. 

Steal this Drill: Inside Out Volley

As a follow up to the inside-out drills from the baseline, the player should also consider hitting inside-out volleys". This is mainly a feeding drill where the player hits a forehand volley from the backhand side and a backhand volley from the forehand side. Although this is something that the player would seldom do in an actual match, the benefits are in that the player learns to (i) move quickly side to side (relatively less time to move and adjust than from the baseline), (ii) get low and in balance and (iii) more importantly, to keep the leading shoulder in front on the volleys (i.e., left shoulder for the forehand and right shoulder for the backhand).

Often times, the players do not learn to work correctly with their shoulders (maybe it's a "relic" from open-stanced groundies) on the volleys relying too much on swings and swats as opposed to "punching" the ball. For purposes of this drill, the player should stand about 10-12 feet from the net and have a cone placed at their feet. The player should have to recover around the cone after each shot. Furthermore, the feeds should force the player to (a) circle slightly backwards and (b) move slightly forward/diagonally back through the ball. After a couple of sets of this drill, the coach and player should engage in a quick-hands volley drill (i.e., volley-volley) in order to see how the player reacts when the ball is hit right at her (i.e., hopefully with the correct shoulder in front). For example, is the player moving quickly out of the way and punching through the volley or does the player wait for the ball on her heels (with shoulders parallel to the net)? If necessary, have the player alternate between these inside-out drills and live-ball quick-hand hitting. Even if the ball is struck at her, the player should manage to (1) get out of the way with small, measured steps, (2) turn her shoulders and (3) step forward and punch through the ball.