Posts

Showing posts with the label teaching tennis

THE CONTACT FOOT

Image
You often hear the phrase "take the ball on the rise" in coaching. It's used to encourage the player to step in and take the ball with some weight transfer, and "taking it on the rise' seems  to help the player time the ball better. But what happens when the player can't achieve "stepping in"?  I coach advanced players and relative beginners. If I told an advanced player to "step in" and take every ball "on the rise", they would see me as crazy. At an advanced level, stepping in and taking the ball on the rise every time is impossible. The speed and depth of the ball mean that often, the ball dictates what you do, not you, so stepping in and taking the ball on the rise is simply impossible.  Likewise, telling a beginner to take every ball on the rise will only lead to frustration. They can only do it on some balls. The problem with trying to teach the "ideal" technique is that  there is no  such thing as the "ideal

WE'RE TEACHING TENNIS ALL WRONG

Image
As tennis teachers, we've become obsessed with teaching how the strokes should look, the outward appearance of the stroke, rather than the Fundamentals. It's as if we're more concerned with creating picture-perfect strokes than a fundamentally sound stroke. We're trying to craft a visual masterpiece, but often at the expense of the core skills; the Fundamentals. Fundamentals are our game's building blocks,  while  the way a stroke looks is the Form. Whenever any new player reaches the top of the tennis rankings, Coaches look closely at that player's style and try to copy what the player is doing technically to have made them so successful. They're unable to diagnose the new player's strokes more deeply, so they are left with looking at the "cosmetics" of the player. Anyone learning tennis through the  form  method never learns to adapt to different types of balls or correctly analyse what they must do on each stroke, nor what is causing their e

THE TWO PATHWAYS TO TEACHING BEGINNERS

Image
I have recently joined a team of coaches at a large club. During my first week, I noticed two very different approaches to coaching beginners. The club we all work at has a thriving beginner coaching program. It's been a long time since I've worked with beginners, and it's  my first coaching experience using the "Coloured Ball" system. We use balls with varying degrees of pressure, making it a little easier for young children to control the ball.   The "Blue" balls are used for very young beginners, followed by Red, Orange, and Green, and eventually, players use the standard yellow tennis ball. Working alongside young players and many different coaches has uncovered two different teaching philosophies used worldwide, not just at our club. The first philosophy, and most common one, is; 1. Function Follows Form Coaches who adopt this philosophy believe that students should be taught the correct form of the stroke from the beginning and that function (the a