RABBIT’S ESSAYS
This page will look at what you need to play the game better: strokes, strategy, tactics, drills, and physical conditioning.
It will also offer analysis of how the pros play the game
Scroll down to find the following posts:
1. What You’ll Find on Tennis Instruction Websites
2. The Ultimate Consistency Drill
3. Rafa and the Forehand of Tomorrow
4. The Future of Running Around the Backhand
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What You'll Find on Tennis Instruction Websites (Post #1)
For the recreational tennis player the game’s great technological revolution is not the rackets and strings with which they play the game. The truly extraordinary technological change that most benefits the ordinary player is in the realm of instruction. With the World-Wide Web as their home, online instruction sites are revolutionizing the way we can learn to play tennis or to improve the game we already play.
The number of instructional sites has grown markedly in recent years. There are so many that it is almost impossible to name, much less follow, them all. I will be posting links to the best materials that I find on various instruction sites, but you may want to pick one or more sites to explore more thoroughly. Towards that end I will also post reviews of entire sites. But first, let’s take a look at what to expect when you visit tennis instruction websites.
First and foremost, these sites have a lot to offer. Their creators are almost always experienced teaching pros and/or former top-notch players adept at transmitting their knowledge. I haven’t found a single site that I don’t trust.
One of the best things the sites offer is free instruction—a lot of it. If you’re like me, you’ll love this aspect of the sites. What’s not to love about free, high-quality instruction? But make no mistake, many of the sites are intended to be moneymaking enterprises. So don’t be surprised when you realize that a site’s free offerings, though numerous and helpful (sometimes very helpful) are teasers, the ultimate object being to sell you the sites’ more comprehensive materials for a fee. And don’t be surprised if the sell is a hard one, characterized by lengthy online promotional messages and videos and by annoyingly numerous emails, all of which shamelessly hype the sites’ offerings as the cure you have sought all your playing days. Still, I urge you to overlook these inconveniences. These sites’ offerings, whether they come free or with a price tag, are almost always helpful. Sometimes they are superb.
Most of the sites rely on video instruction. The videos are usually short, five to ten minutes. Some are longer. The format is ideal for teaching tennis, and the sites are evidencing a growing sophistication in filming technique. Some of the sites’ creators even have considerable stage presence. Their personalities add appeal to their videos.
A few sites offer podcasts. These can often be downloaded to your smart phone. They make for great listening at odd moments when, for example, you’re working out.
So, don’t hesitate to dive in and sample various sites. If you take what they offer seriously, your game will benefit. And even if you’re not intent on changing your game, but are just interested in tennis, you will enjoy these sites.
The Ultimate Consistency Drill (Post #2)
At any given level of the game consistency is the strongest weapon. Yes, the pros have great shots. But their shots are great only because the pros can hit them consistently. And at the recreational level? Listen to Arthur Ashe's Rule of Five: "For club players I have a comfortable rule of thumb. If, on every point you play, you hit the ball in five times, you are not going to lose any matches. . . . [I]f you hit your first five shots of the point in anywhere . . . you will win the match. . . . So start with steadiness; then add aggression and power."
Here is a drill I learned from Long Island Master Pro Ron Rebhuhn. The drill will first test your consistency, and then improve it. It will also pressure you to hit with depth. It will do these things while enabling the feeder and the hitter to practice at the same time, and giving both a good workout.
The feeder and the hitter are at the baseline on opposite sides of the net. Let's assume you're the hitter. The feeder feeds you a cross-court forehand, and (assuming you are both righties) the two of you engage in a cross-court, forehand-to-forehand rally. However, you, the hitter, have a target: the rectangular area directly behind the deuce service box on the feeder's side of the net.
If you're on a clay or Har-Tru court, you can use your racket or your foot to scratch-out the extension of the center service line. On hard courts you can use plastic drop lines or just rely on the Feeder's call.
As you rally count your target hits. As soon as you miss, stop the rally. The Feeder then feeds you a second ball, and the two of you resume the cross-court rallying. Count your target hits again, starting from the number that you hit on the first ball. Thus, if, on the first feed, you had six target hits, start counting from seven on the second feed.
Continue this process until the Feeder has fed you 10 balls. Divide your total number of target hits by 10 and you have a benchmark average of how many times in a row you can hit the target on each feed. Repeat the same drill for the backhand. Then you become the Feeder and your partner becomes the Hitter, and the two of you go through the same cross-court rallies. Notice how the Feeder and the Hitter can both practice deep, cross-court placements.
Before going on, I want to point something out: this drill has an enormous target: 243 square feet. That is more than 23% of the entire area of the singles court on the Feeder's side of the net. But that is a misleadingly small percentage, because this is a baseline rally drill, and when hitting drives from the baseline there is an area immediately on the other side of the net that is not accessible to you. Unless you hit a drop shot (a pretty good one) or a very high-arcing and very short lob, the first five feet (at least!) on the other side of the net can't be counted as part of the area to which you can hit in this drill, even if you hit short of the target. And if you eliminate that first five feet of the court on the other side of the net, the target for this drill is almost 26.5% of the area that you can possibly hit to. Like I said, it's enormous.
You would think that such a big target is easy to hit. But that is not what experience suggests. In fact, even the upper reaches of recreational players, people at the 4.0 and 4.5 levels, have trouble with this drill. On their first try they frequently total no more than 20 to 35 target hits—an average of 2.0 to 3.5 consecutive hits. And bear in mind that this is a noncompetitive drill. The person on the other side of the net is not trying to make you miss. All you have to do is hit groundstrokes cross-court and beyond the service line—the most basic tactic in the game.
How many target hits should you be averaging in order to call yourself truly consistent? Ron, the pro who introduced me to the drill, says that the goal, even if you can't reach it every time, is a total of 100 target hits—an average of 10 hits per feed. If you regularly get to 60 or more total target hits on 10 feeds for both the forehand and backhand, and occasionally get to 100, they will refer to you in awe as "the ball machine"—plug her in, and the ball comes back. Try it. I think you'll find these are difficult goals to achieve.
So, how do you improve your consistency? I espouse six keys to consistent hitting. Five of them came from Ron. Here is one of the most important: net clearance. Think of jump shots in basketball. In the NBA few players launch low-trajectory, straight-line shots at the basket. Instead, most arc the shot so that when it's coming down the ball "sees" the basket in its aspect as something approaching a full circle, the broadest possible target. And so it is whenever you're trying to put a ball into a horizontally laid out target. The target presents itself more narrowly to a ball coming at it on a flat, linear trajectory and more fully to a ball coming down from above after being hit or thrown on an arc. So, if, as I suspect, you're having trouble hitting this drill's 243-square-foot target, especially if you're hitting short, try clearing the net by more. Of course, this may mean taking some pace off the ball, which many players resist. Just remember, the pros' great shots are great only because they can hit them consistently. They understand that consistency is the foundation. They would agree with Arthur Ashe: "start with steadiness; then add aggression and power."
So, grab a partner, try this drill, then come back and click "Post a Comment" below or in the top right of the page and tell me what you think.
““Keep all of your shots deep and in play, and you will be famous by Friday.”
— Vic Braden”
Rafa and the Forehand of Tomorrow (Post #3)
With the reverse-follow-through or "buggy whip" forehand the racket finishes on the same side of the body as it started. The buggy whip is ubiquitous. All the pros have it, so do a few recreational players, and its use at every level is increasing. However, with one exception, no one uses it as their normal forehand. They still start the great majority of their forehands on one side and end them on the other. The buggy whip is a punctuation mark inserted for more topspin and/or power. It is a change-of-pace stroke that adds variety to a player's game. The exception is Raphael Nadal.
For Rafa the buggy whip is the forehand of choice. He buggy-whips at least 90% of his forehands. That is the first thing that distinguishes him. The second is the manner in which he executes the stroke. Look at every other player in the world. They pull the racket back over their hitting shoulder well before it reaches the other side of their body. But Nadal lets the racket surge as far towards the other side of his body as is humanly possible without actually finishing on the other side, and only then whips it back over his hitting shoulder. The motion is violent. It looks like his shoulder is going to tear away from his body. I suggest that this longer, more energetic motion before pulling back is the reason he is able to generate the pace and topspin that have made his forehand legendary.
Today Rafa's buggy whip is unique both in the frequency with which he launches it and the manner in which he hits it. For how long will this be so? Will others abandon following through across their bodies, make the buggy whip their go-to forehand and delay the whip until the last possible instant? It is understandable that the current generation of professionals is not adopting Rafa's method. They grew up without exposure to the method and its success. Their forehands are ingrained, and they won't risk their livelihoods on a major change of form.
But what about the next generation? Are today's youngsters looking at Nadal and comparing him to Federer, Djokovic, Naomi Osaka, Serena and Venus Williams, and saying I want to play like Rafa, I want to hit that buggy-whip, and I want to hit it all the time? Will coaches and teaching pros urge Rafa's style on their students?
In the late 1960s and early 70s, there were very few two-handed backhands at any level of the game. Then along came Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors. The game changed quickly and now there is speculation about the possible extinction of the one-hander. This in spite of the fact that Roger Federer, Pete Sampras and Justin Henin, each with a one-handed backhand, have forged historic careers. But, despite these players' success with the one-hander, there is nothing that even hints at the return of its predominance. Or consider John McEnroe's groundstrokes: virtually no loop on the backswing, a virtually straight forward motion with almost no topspin. He had tremendous success, but no emulators. Rafa has been spectacularly successful with his buggy whip, but, as these examples illustrate, sometimes success means that a technique will propagate, and sometimes it doesn't.
Kendall Chitambar is an outstanding teaching pro in Boulder Colorado. I once asked him why the game has changed so much—in other words, how had the modern game evolved from the classical game? Kendall thought for a moment and said, "Kids." He meant that coaches and teaching pros usually stick to the tried and true. They aren't innovators. They pass tradition on to the next generation. But once in a great while a kid comes to them with a style that both offends and improves upon tradition. Run-of-the-mill coaches and pros see only the offense and remold the deviation—to the child's and the game's detriment. But a particularly good coach or pro will recognize that the improvement outweighs the offense, they encourage it, they adopt it and teach it to other players. Other kids emulate the new form, and that is how the game changes.
Basketball provides a convincing example. When I was a kid there were players in the NBA who took two-handed set shots. If you're under 40, you may not even know what a two-handed set shot is. Take the ball in both hands, hold it to your chest, and, still using both hands, throw it upwards and towards the basket. Your feet may leave the ground, but not by much. That's a two-handed set shot. If you're under 40, you may never have seen one anyplace, much less in the NBA. Moreover, when I was a kid there were NBA players who shot fouls from between their knees. The great Rick Barry mastered the form. Take the ball with a hand on each side, kneel down with the ball between your knees, and, as you straighten your legs, toss the ball towards the net with an upward swing of your arms. You don’t see much of that today, at any level of the game. And, of course, basketball has changed in numerous other ways. It is a more offensive-minded, power game.
Where did the changes in basketball come from? They came from kids on the streets unafraid to play with creative flair. That is where changes in any sport come from. Skateboarding and snowboarding, recent arrivals though they are, exhibit the same phenomenon. Even the best coaches and teaching pros rarely, if ever, bring anything new to the game. Rather, their excellence lies in their gatekeeping: they know when to leave innovation alone.
Listen to famed coach Nick Bollettieri tell about his encounter with a new forehand style. He is speaking of
a young boy named Jimmy Arias. I first met him when he came to [my academy] from his home in Buffalo, New York. Although only 12, he was already the U.S. 14-and-under champion. He was 5'2" on his toes at the time and had a slender frame, but he shocked us all by jumping off the ground, throwing his full body into his forehand and wrapping the racquet around his shoulder on his follow-through. Add to this his weird grip (strong semi-western) and you get a preview of today's game. (from Changing the Game, by Nick Bollettieri (2014) pp. 93-94)
Arias, of course, went on to an outstanding professional career, reaching a ranking of number five in the world. It happens that his father taught him his forehand, but Bollettieri had the sense to recognize that this was an instance of profound innovation rather than a deviation that required reversion to the then current norm. "I called my staff over and said, 'Here's the new Bollettieri forehand' and invited [Jimmy] to join me at the junior academy, offering him a scholarship."
As Bollettieri notes, the jumping, wrap-around forehand has become the norm. In the next decade or two we will see if coaches and pros and the kids on club and public courts embrace Rafa's routine use of an extreme buggy-whip as a creative innovation to be emulated or as an exception to the rule that, like John McEnroe's ground strokes, will remain a colorful oddity.
The Future of Running Around the Backhand (Post #4)
In his excellent book of instruction, "$20,000 in Tennis Lessons, Your Personal Coach," published in 2006, Dr. Robert Ford Greene has this to say about what is, at the professional level, the virtually universal tactic of running around the backhand:
Within a decade or two more players will arise who can hit with sufficient power on their backhands so that they won't want to run around their backhand and hit a forehand. The ability to really clobber a backhand is especially promising for two-hand swingers in tennis. The power backhand hitters of the future will likely do a lot of intensive strength training. They'll take the ball early, use a controlled loop backswing, take a sizeable step toward the net, and stroke the ball further from the body to attain greater leverage. They may gain a larger shoulder turn by pivoting their feet backward during preparation, and then toward the net on the forward swing. Two-hand backhands might have both arms bent on the takeback and both straightening on the forward swing. Double-handers will generate more force from the left side, including the rear hip and leg. Perhaps some players will extend their racket takebacks further, though this would imperil their control.
Dr. Greene has only this caveat to add: he asks "shouldn't the two-hand backhand have as much offensive potential as the forehand? Not quite, for on the forehand you'll always be able to set up quicker and attack a short ball more easily because of the open stance."
Consider that use of the two-hand, open stance backhand is growing, thereby undermining both Dr. Greene's caveat and his assertion that the "power backhand hitters of the future will . . . take a sizeable step toward the net." "Intensive strength training" is, of course, nothing new. Apart from his prediction, Dr. Greene here gives some good advice for upper echelon players who are looking to hit their two-handers with greater pace.
But what about that prediction? Has running around the backhand become less common? Dr. Greene wrote in 2006 and said his prediction would be realized "[w]ithin a decade or two." We're nearly in the middle of the second decade, and I haven't seen it beginning to happen. Have you?