Mirror, Mirror

In a famous Star Trek episode, Kirk, Uhura, McCoy, and Scotty are sent to an alternate universe where there's an empire, including a goateed Spock, and Chekhov (do you know there's a tennis player named Pavel Chekhov--no really!).

But that's not the point of this blog entry.

Of course, it's about tennis, as my blog used to talk about interesting stuff, and now it's mostly about tennis.

A little while ago, I bought a mini-DV camcorder. This was a difficult decision, because frankly, unlike digital cameras, there are lots of different mediums to pick from a camcorder. Should I get a DVD format? Or a hard drive? Or use the mini-DV cassettes?

Fortunately, I found a website that suggested mini-DV was at a good price point. Cheap, yet high resolution. I found a Canon camcorder for less than 250 dollars (the ZR-950) to be specific.

The goal was to record myself hitting tennis balls, and see where I could improve. One problem I ran into, rather immediately, was that the first time I used it, no one in my family (except my brother who wasn't in town) plays tennis. In particular, I couldn't have someone rally with me.

This meant I had to feed myself the balls. Since I had six tennis balls, I did this six times, from three different angles. Side on, from the front, and from the back.
I recorded this on Monday. I didn't look at the video until last night (Wednesday).

All I can say is that I'm surprised I hit that way. Shrini felt that it didn't matter how I did my windup, as long as I hit OK. I suppose, but no pro hits my way, and I figure that at the very least, I should try to look like most good players look, and see if that helps or not.

This is one of the major reasons I got a camcorder. The way I hit and the way I think I hit are two different things. Without something to look at, I would not make any changes to the way I hit. You could argue that many of the things we do, in particular, drive a car, rely on seeing what we're doing, and then making small adjustments to make sure we are on track. These adjustments are in reaction to what we see.

Similarly, without a good way to tell what I do, I don't realize what I'm doing, so I don't know how to make appropriate changes.

But now I do. Next step is to download the video to the computer and look at what I'm doing more closely.