Teaching Tennis

I took a tennis lesson right around Thanksgiving last year from a guy I'll call Joe. Joe takes an unusual approach to teaching tennis, which goes to show you that tennis can be taught in a wide variety of ways.

In particular, Joe believes that the racquet has, for lack of a better phrase, a mind of its own. OK, that's exaggeration. He believes that you throw a racquet, meaning, let the momentum of the racquet do the work. That's an intriguing thought, and I like the idea.

I find, when I end up teaching tennis, that I end up teaching a little bit the way I like to hit the ball, and the way I was taught to hit the ball when I first started learning to play tennis.

Let me go back to those days of yore. I was taught to play tennis by a guy who took classes by Dennis Van der Meer. Van der Meer, I've discovered, was instrumental in coaching Billie Jean King during her battle against Bobby Riggs, and that notoriety lead him to some fame in Tennis magazine, and his own camps.

He felt that tennis could be broken down in several steps, and would tell people to do those steps. Now, Van der Meer was old school. He taught players how to hit a flat shot. The classic way to play tennis is to hit with a closed stance, which means your front foot (for a rightie, that's your left foot when hitting a forehand, and the right foot for a backhand) is in front of the back foot. In other words, when you hit a forehand, your belly button points to the right wall/fence, and points to the left fence when you hit a backhand.

Ever since Borg was number 1, two things have resulted. Open stances and heavy topspin forehands.

Most teachers, these days, opt to teach you a modern style, which leads to open stances and heavy topspin.

It's rather difficult to learn to hit spin, though it seems easier, depending on your background, to learn slice shots than to learn topspin, probably because topspin requires better timing (you come "over" the ball, which can often lead the ball to be hit in the net).

If you start by hitting shots flat, the question is whether a modern stroke, which is meant to be used with topspin, makes sense.

One of my coworkers and his wife have been learning to play tennis. I find it much easier to spot her errors than his, partly because they are so contrasty. While he has very long strokes, and moves reasonably well, her strokes are too short, and she doesn't move so well.

The "throw your racquet" approach seems to encourage waiting until the last second to hit a shot, then making a quick loop with the racquet. That works OK, if you have time, and to be fair, I am guilty of preparing late too. It's just that, over the years, I've learned to speed up my stroke to handle fast pace. But even so, I know I need to get the racquet back earlier.

So, I'll give a quick laundry list of problems that she's had (and gotten past, somewhat). Initially, she had a very whippy forehand that had very little follow-though and also very little backswing. It was the whip motion that was getting her the pace on her shot, when she could connect, and yet, I felt that this whip was hard to reproduce consistently.

My first piece of advice was to tell her to have a bigger follow through. This would, in my mind, elongate the stroke so it didn't suddenly stop short, lacking pace. She's been able to make the follow-through a bit longer. I will say, most pros, have a VERY long follow-through, but I wouldn't recommend that early on. I advised making it somewhat longer, not the windshield wiper, flip approach that most pros seem to favor.

Today, I covered two other aspects, mostly affecting her backhand. I'd notice that the racquet would only go back when the ball got near her, and then she'd swing really fast. If the ball came too quick, she didn't have enough time to prepare. So I wanted her to get the racquet back and wait for the shot to come to her. That way, she didn't have to time the backhand nearly as accurately.

As she's learning this, there is a tendency to revert back to her way of hitting, which is to again wait and then swing. What I'm trying to figure out now is how to get her to think about hitting the ball with the racquet perpendicular to the ground. Right now, her tendency is to flip the racquet up thus causing the ball to aim to the sky.

I think that's partly because she's been taught to have her racquet pointed down, behind her. The idea, I know, is to eventually get her to learn topspin, but I think it's messing a little with her mechanics, because she's not understanding that, at the point of contact, the racquet should be perpendicular to the ground. What it does before and after, doesn't matter so much. I think the next time, I'd advise her to stop the racquet just as she it makes contact, to make her see where the racquet is aimed when the ball hits it.

The other part I worked on, and this will take more work, is footwork. Tennis footwork is nearly as important as hitting the ball. If you don't get to the ball soon enough, you are almost always going to hit a bad shot. Her footwork is problematic in two ways. First, when the ball is too far, she doesn't get their soon enough. When it's too close, she gets jammed.

I'm trying to remind her to keep her feet moving. But that's going to take time, because she's accustomed to not moving the feet. I will say she manages to hit the ball at the very tip of the racquet more effectively than anyone I've seen, but that suggests she's not moving close enough to the ball.

One thing that I advised her the last time we played was to start her shots with her backhand. At the time, she started her rallies with her forehand, and was never hitting the backhand over the net. She might hit in 1 in 4 backhands successfully. By starting with her backhand, she at least can get one shot with no pressure, and I feel that's helped her get far more consistent hitting her backhand. Actually, before that, I noticed that her left hand was WAY up on the grip, and that simply looked awkward. She's been hitting it with her second hand touching her first, and that's added consistency too.

I'd actually like her to get her racquet back sooner on her forehand too, but her whip forehand, when she connects, has good pace. Again, if you hit too hard to her forehand, she ends up not hitting it correctly, but that's probably true of everyone.

So these days, I feel that her footwork needs improvement, and that she needs to figure out how to get a perpendicular face hitting the backhand. I might have her aim at the top of the net, when hitting her backhand. Honestly, I need a good video camera to see what's going on (on my own strokes too).

OK, I'll talk about Ravi, but it's much harder for me to critique his shots only because it seems like he's got the motion more or less correct. Unlike his wife, Ravi's forehand is very long. In fact, by contrast, it almost seems too long. At some point, I realized that it was so long, and he was trying to generate so much pace, that he was having trouble timing his forehand.

Ideally, I'd tell him to cut out most of the set up to his forehand and hit with less of a setup, but I feel the loop is eventually where he wants to go, so I didn't want to tell him to get rid of the loop (at least the part leading up to hitting the ball), only to tell him to add it back again. One thing I then suggested was to think of his racquet stroke in two parts, first, there was dropping the racquet down, then moving it forward. By thinking of it in two parts, the first part becomes more of a simple setup, and the second part is where he really hits. That effectively shortens the stroke, so there's less time and movement before hitting the ball. The idea is to simplify the stroke.

With the backhand, it's harder to spot the problem. Ravi alternately has his racquet pointing up and down. When it's up, the ball skies upwards. When it's down, it hits the net. He's again, whipping the shot, which gives pace, but he's not sure when the racquet head is up or down. I think he needs to mentally compensate. If it's too low, hit it a little too high next time. If it's too high, then hit it too low next time. I would probably suggest, similar to his wife, getting him to stop the racquet just at the point of contact, just to see where the racquet is aimed. This is a bit tricky because you really want the momentum of the racquet to carry the motion through the ball.

Since what's good for the goose is good for the gander, let me talk a little bit about my own stroke. When I started to hit topspin, I was working on the upward brushing action. Indeed, I hit upward so much that the ball lacked pace. I've been spending over ten years trying to flatten out the shot. In the past, I had very little means to analyze other people's shots. I used to try to use a VCR, and go slow-mo to see what the pros did. These days, a few intrepid souls have put slow-mo of Federer, Roddick, and so forth on the net, so I can watch it in slow-mo.

I have several issues. One, I tend to use only my forearm to hit the ball, using it to spin the ball. I notice most of the top pros keep their arm fairly straight (not quite lock step), with their wrist cocked, and swing fully, only letting the momentum carry the shot on. I've been trying to practice this for a long time (two months or so), and it's still not quite there.

Second, I need to turn my shoulders more. Most pros, on forehand and backhand, have a significant shoulder turn, and use the shoulder and upper body turn as much as the arm movement. Right now, my shots are landing very deep (too deep). So I still need to work on shoulder turn and depth.

I also realize, with today's lesson, that my toss is still inconsistent and too low.

So that's what I'm up to with my own strokes.