UNDERSTANDING & MASTERING CONTACT: "Control of Heights"

Eighty percent of all the mistakes you will make in tennis will be either in the net, or out over the baseline (the other 20% of the mistakes will come from hitting too far right and too far left).

We can address these two most common mistakes directly, because contact is responsible for both of them.

If you hit the ball too short, your racquet face was too closed on contact with the ball. If you hit the ball too high and out over the baseline your racquet face was too open at the moment of contact.

WHY PEOPLE GET CONFUSED

When trying to master feel for net clearance don't ask topspin to give you feel for height accuracy, that's the job of contact, not spin!

For height accuracy you need to send your awareness to your racquet face, and particularly the degree that your racquet face is open or closed. An open racquet face increases the height of the ball and a closed racket face decreases the height of the ball. This should be your sole method of achieving net clearance accuracy.

There is a lot of misinformation out there that tries to tell you that increasing the amount of topspin on the ball increases the height the ball crosses the net. You'll find people who tell you to "brush up" from low to high and that this will in some way increase the height of the ball. This type of tennis instruction is simply wrong and has made tennis very confusing for beginner players. Topspin has only one function...

The job of topspin is to create the required arc to help keep the ball inside the lines. 

Understanding the two different and distinct functions of contact and topspin is therefore a very important component in mastering control of your groundstrokes. Confusing the role of both Contact and topspin can often "contaminate" the clean ball striking we all aim for in matches.

Now that we have eliminated spin from the picture we can focus on enhancing Contact.

GAIN BETTER FEEL FOR YOUR CONTACT

To really gain better feel for your Contact you must first develop racquet head control. There are two approaches a player can take to increase feel for their racquet head. Firstly, you can hope that your racquet head feel develops from hitting thousands of balls over years of practice. 

You simply develop great awareness of the racquet head angle for each ball. You are improvising angles based on your needs for each ball.

What I have found with this "improvisation" method of gaining feel is it can break down under pressure.

Another method, and the one I teach my students, is the use of the opposite hand, or non racquet hand to set the racquet angles (closed or open).

When adopting the "Opposite Hand" method, control the racquet 

with the fingertips... this will give you greater feel for the 

racquet face and ultimately greater feel for your heights

There are several benefits to using the opposite hand, but the one we will focus on here is using it to set the racquet face angles in terms of degrees of closed and open depending on the height you want the ball to cross the net.

The neutral opposite hand position with fingers on the 

throat of the racquet and ready to set the racquet head 

at the desired "Open" or "Closed" position.

Instead of improvising with your racquet hand (it already has enough work to do!), you will begin setting the racquet face with the opposite hand during the backswing. In fact the backswing can now also be performed by the opposite hand.

For each stroke, you are deciding what height you want the ball the clear the net. The higher the net clearance, the deeper the ball will land at the other side. The lower the ball crosses the net the shorter the ball will bounce on the other side.


Summary

1.  Separate the function of Contact and Spin. They have distinctly different roles to play. 

2.  The role of Contact is to given you degrees of net clearance 

3.  To gain greater awareness of your net clearance (heights), use the opposite hand on the throat of the racquet to set your angles depending on how open or closed you want to be.

Contact is one of my 3 fundamentals. By using fundamentals everyday to analyse and correct any problems a player may have you automatically begin to eliminate many of the faulty myths that can confuse and hinder a players development. Helping a player achieve great Contact through a better understanding of their racquet face will go a long way to improving their control and ultimately their results.