Bigger Better Tennis - Paul Dale

We all desire Control, Understanding, and Predictability in our lives and feel uncomfortable with anything that is out of our control, not understood, or unpredictable. Unknowingly, this need for predictable outcomes may have led us to train for tennis incorrectly. Many training venues use repetition as their 'go-to' method of teaching players the game. Coaches prefer it, and players enjoy it. It makes them feel good!  The repetition method of training involves someone feeding hundreds of balls from a basket.  The balls being fed from the basket will have the same flight, bounce in the same position on the court, arrive at the same speed, will bounce up to the same height, and will each have the same identical spin.  Hitting hundreds of balls like this gives us the predictability that we enjoy. Also, because we eventually begin to hit the ball fairly well ( after hundreds of balls who wouldn't begin to start feeling better with their stroke?), w...

Having a lot of tennis talent can sometimes be a problem for some players because at the beginning of your tennis career talent goes a long way. At lower levels, talent alone can win matches. It’s only when you get higher up the rankings and play the bigger events that your reliance on talent alone will really hurt you. I was at a group 1 ITF Junior event last week and the standard of tennis was very high. Certainly, much higher than the level just a few years ago. Techniques and physical conditioning were exceptional. However, there was one area that was almost invisible, strategic intelligence! Many of the young players on display last week were the best in the world. Many will be participating in the Grand Slam events this year. I can imagine that in their early years many of these top juniors dominated the junior events in their countries. And there lies the problem. Most of the players last week are so gifted, tactics were never needed. They won on talent alone! ...

I encounter many players who have all the strokes and can play really well in practice but during matches can’t re-produce the same standard of play. In matches their game is riddled with unforced errors. It’s always difficult to find the solution to help these players because the cause of the problem can be many things. Humans are complicated and no more so than the mental issues that plague a tennis player who has a chronic problem with unforced errors! I recently had success in helping with a young player who was prone to unexplained errors during her matches. I found the remedy to her unforced errors by first deciding that her problem was mental and not technical. Although most of her mistakes were caused by poor technique, I had seen enough of her using good technique that I decided that working more on her technique would not help her that much in the long term. This is an important decision for you to make because you will have to constantly hold yourself bac...

TRAIN WITH A PURPOSE It always surprises me just how few players actually prepare for tournaments in a coordinated way. Perhaps the belief is that training before tournaments should basically continue on as before and that, hopefully, things should just “fall into place.” If you don’t train with a specific purpose, great results will most certainly be elusive. Here’s a suggestion for your training just before tournament time. Before each tournament, select one topic to focus on in practice and master that topic! Plan your next "work-on" and include it in your  practice sessions before each tournament. Imagine if the topic you decided to improve on before the tournament was the Serve, particularly the wide serve. If you gave yourself 2 weeks to work on the wide serve how good do you think that particular serve would be in the following tournament? Now, imagine for the second tournament, you decide to work on your ability to create a wider backhand cross-court b...

'It’s important to develop your game beyond technique and towards feeling… …with feeling, technique improves' The quote above is important because what many players and coaches believe is that great technique is the end destination. The belief is that with great technique you have arrived. That’s far from the reality! Great technique is really important. It’s part of   the armour that will protect you from the pressure that comes in high stakes tennis. Your game is much less prone to breakdown in matches because good technique is your firewall to the “bugs” your opponent is trying to hurt you with. However great technique is only the framework to the overall “building” that will be constructed around your game.   Those other additional parts to the “building” include things like shot selection (which shot to play) and strategy (your purpose). These elements will give your game greater overall meaning. Another problem with this technique above all els...

As a tennis coach there can be few experiences that equal sitting in the court as a Davis Cup Captain. You’re an integral part of the drama and at the core of the excitement. The fact is that you are communicating directly with your player at each changeover and therefore actively participating in the match. The conditions we experienced in the different countries we visited varied greatly. We were drawn to play Kuwait in an early round of the 1990 Competition during the time of Ramadan, a month of fasting for Muslims around the world.  During the daylight hours you are expected to abstain from drinking and eating which would have been fine if we didn’t have to play the best of five sets in the hot desert sun. The tie was broadcast locally live on TV and during the changeovers the camera would discreetly pan away from the players and into the crowd, allowing players from both countries to drink water! The timing of our return home from that fixture against Kuwait w...

One of the most neglected aspects of modern tennis is the ability to keep the ball low.  Young players today are so focused on hitting bigger shots and are so fixated on topspin that their ability to maintain a low ball is entirely missing. However, the top players understand the value of keeping a ball low in certain situations and employ underspin a lot more than you might otherwise think. Here's when keeping the ball low is beneficial… 1.   To Stop Your Opponent Attacking You It's the era of big groundstrokes! Dominant forehands are now the norm and any ball waist height today is an invitation for your opponent to go on the attack. If you throw in a low ball when you get in trouble during the rally, you neutralize your opponent's offense. The low ball has taken the ball out of their strike zone and gets you back into the rally on level terms. Underspin helps you to defend a point. By keeping the ball low, you are  neutralizing your opponents at...