Lessons

When I was 13 or so, my mother enrolled in me in local tennis lessons. They were held for two weeks, five days a week, for an hour each. In those days, it was probably quite cheap to get lessons. I'm sure it was about 20 dollars each for my brother and me to get lessons.

They were group lessons. The first year we were taught by some guy named Jay, I think. He had learned tennis at the Dennis Van der Meer camp. He was the guy who gained some notoriety coaching Billie Jean during her match against Bobby Riggs and became a contributor to Tennis Magazine. He thought he had boiled down playing tennis to a certain few key steps and if only you'd practice that, you'd get good.

In hindsight, he taught in something of a classic style. My first racquet for that class was an old wooden racquet that my dad had bought used, and we had another one that seemed like a cheap K-mart brand.

At the time, the two-hander was still something of a novelty. Despite some very high profile two-handers, Chris Evert, Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, and some lesser players like Harold Solomon, it was still slowly making its way to tennis instruction. So I was taught to hit a one-handed shot. My brother read an article on Gene Mayer and how he hit his two-hander on both sides, and adopted that style for some time.

The following summer, we took lessons from Dave and Arnel. They were, at one point, on the tennis team, but had recently gone to college, and saw this as a summer job, teaching kids to play tennis. Dave was a good looking guy sort of the Mark Hamill type and Arnel seemed Filipino, and was there to assist and hang out.

I don't recall if we took lessons after that. Basically, after the first year, I was pretty much self-taught, which turned out OK in hindsight, but not great.

Although I learned tennis in the early 80s, I was trying to learn what was termed then and now as "modern" tennis, which meant a loopy forehand, open-stance shots, and so forth. I remember playing videotapes of Mats Wilander and Bjorn Borg (in an exhibition, no less) trying to imitate their shots, and later on, trying to imitate early Agassi. I tried the Lendl forehand.

What I didn't realize then was how faithful I was to their shots, which was, in hindsight, not very. Early on, I learned to hit pretty good topspin on my forehand, but switched to a two-hander, and could never get good topspin on that shot. I would hit a slice backhand too.

One thing that was a little unusual was that I liked coming to net and hitting drop shots, even early on. It didn't hurt that John McEnroe was on top, and had deft shots.

For many years afterwards, I took no more lessons. I wasn't sure who I'd take them from, and they would have been pricey had I looked.

A coworker of mine whose wife had just joined him after finishing her degree wanted to learn tennis with his wife, and they had signed up for lessons in DC at the site of the Legg Mason Tennis Classic where they have a semi-public court, where there's no membership, but you pay for the use of the courts.

I took lessons with Dale who looked a bit like Ron Paul. Dale taught a kind of tennis as exercise style for advanced players. He offered very little instruction. The idea was to go and do drills and essentially get in shape to play tennis. My tennis only improved incidentally, mostly through just playing.

Around Thanksgiving of last year, I took a lesson from Joel. He taught in this holistic manner. Throw the racquet at the ball he would opine. He would suggest that the racquet wanted to move in a certain way, and you had to be free and relaxed.

I didn't take another private lesson until January when I decided to take one at Cabin John with a guy named Mike. Mike was a youngish Asian dude in his early 20s. He was a bit more technical about what he wanted me to do, rotating my shoulders more, etc. He seemed a touch dispassionate, I seem to recall.

Then I didn't take lessons for a while, a few months. I heard about these high schoolers that would teach lessons at about half the cost of normal lessons at public courts. So I took three or so lessons from a guy named Sharat, who was finishing up his junior year in high school.

He was a pretty chatty dude, talking about how to hit the ball. He favored teaching you to play mini-tennis, suggesting that good technique comes from being able to hit the ball well when you are hitting in slow motion. If you have bad technique hitting slowly, you'd have bad technique hitting quickly. He was reasonably good, but still I felt something missing.

By this point, I was reading Fuzzy Yellow Balls and Essential Tennis. I knew Ian said, on his website, that he had private lessons. Although he was a bit of a hike from where I lived, it was still under an hour to get there. I wasn't sure what to expect, but so far, he's given the best lessons so far.

He's able to offer advice in the "modern style" dealing mostly with using the core more to his shots. He's able to observe strokes then offer a simple idea here or there to focus on one problem at a time. I've tried teaching tennis, and I find that I get nitpicky on all sorts of things. In the end, the person doesn't listen so much. Some of the advice I've heard before, but I didn't know to apply it to my own game.

A lot of tennis is surprisingly non-intuitive. For example, most people think of tennis as an arm sport. Apparently, if you play other sports like baseball or if you box, you find that you need to use more of your body if you want to get good power. The arm can get pretty strong on its own, but it can do even more if you coordinate it with your body.

There's plenty of players that don't turn their bodies when hitting shots. This turn helps add power to shots, but it takes a bit of coordination to do. I've been working on that more, since I used to not do it. I'm sure there are still issues with how I hit shots.

With volleys, I used to never cross-step to reach a volley nor turn sideways to hit. I'd frame the ball but never knew how I was doing it. I'd use too much hand motion trying to hit a ball and get no pace when I hit shots.

I understand these aren't intellectual endeavors but physical ones. And they're costly to learn these lessons, but they are rewarding too. Intellectual tasks require discovering the unknown often with little assistance except your own intellect. Learning tennis is trying to solve a problem to which some people have solutions to (at a price, to be fair).

Few things in life have answers as pat as tennis. Although it's taken some work to find someone to offer good lessons, it's been worth it so far!