Theory of watching the tennis ball

It is pretty simple, you can not hit something that you can not see. If you were in a totally dark room, even with your eyes open, the chance of you hitting an object that is stationery is pretty much slim to none.

The most important object in a tennis match is the ball!

I often watch the professional players play a match and am reminded that the best players in the world focus and do the basics better than everyone else, with the most basic part of tennis being to hit the ball in the middle of the racquet head.

It took me almost 25 years of playing tennis to shout “Eureka”! I still recall the time and practice session that I was having so vividly. I said to myself, “Wow, I can see the ball”, but it also got me thinking. In all the years of tennis and tennis lessons and coaches that I worked with, why did none of them ever teach me how to watch the ball. I was doing what I think most players do, I was tracking the ball with my eyes and head. Just before contact I would quickly move my eys to the contact point of the stroke. The problem is that in those milliseconds of time, I would lose the ball and not be able to refocus fast enough on the ball to see it just before contact.

I think that this principle is applicable to all sports where the player is hitting a moving ball similar to baseball, cricket or lacrosse.

Something is seriously wrong with tennis globally

As we head into the new year, 2016, I thought that I would start with a slight rant about the state of tennis as I see it. Tennis is one of those sports that is truly global and attracts a massive following all over the world. A lot of people follow tennis and the results etc. and many people play the game recreationally even though they might not show up in the official numbers.

I have always believed that the game of tennis is BIGGER than me, bigger than the ATP, ITF and WTA. When people involved in the games management forget that, they start to create problems for the themselves, not tennis, as tennis will live on longer than the individual and associations.

Here are just a few points that I am interested to hear your feedback on;

1. Income of professional players
As well as Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Maria Sharapova and the likes at the top of the game are prospering, in a sport like tennis, it is incredible how badly the whole picture needs to change. Laurynas Grigelis, finished the 2015 year as number 300 on the ATP rankings. He is 24 years of age and in the prime of his career of which he has managed to earn a staggering $215,080. If he had completed a degree from college and performed as well as he has on the tennis court in the business world, he would have earned almost $500,000 by now. The 300th placed women on the WTA tour is Polina Vinogradova who at 22 years  of age has earned $83,891 in her career with $12,616 earned in 2015. This is below the poverty line in income, never mind the expenses that she or someone else is paying. To be in the top 300 of any discipline in the world, should not leave you in this type of financial position!

Lets compare to baseball, the Major League has a total of 750 players based on the 25 man roster. The minimum player income for the Major league is $500,000.00 per year. So in a league that has more players than those in the top 300 players of both the men's and women's games combined, the salary payments of the MLB far exceed that of the tennis players.

Tennis is not managing to attract enough new blood and with so many of the top 100 being over the age of 30, it means that tennis is heading for a period soon where most of the top players will be completely unknown to the fans.

2. Global reach of the sport
For a sport as global as tennis, I am confused why the reach of the elite athletes doesn't span the globe. I understand about sponsorships etc. but why are there not more Grand Slams in continents that love the game of tennis and are fanatical about it. Why does Paris have on the ATP, the Grand Slam, a Masters event and normal tour events when Africa and South America can not even host one Masters event? There is a huge imbalance and false representation of tennis. Makes me wonder if the FBI should too have a look at these associations like the did at FIFA.

Most the stadiums hosting a tennis tournament are almost completely empty for most of the tournaments matches, this is hurting in so many ways including the image of the sport when someone finds the tournament on TV and sees the apathetic support of the sport.

3. Team sport?
Sports like cycling and motorsport have made individualistic sports into team sports. In doing so, they have protected the athletes as well. So when you think that there is a problem from the first point of income in the professional sport, the pay for the athletes in the sports like cycling and motorsports from these teams are very financially viable. The individual athletes are also well protected for the marketing and branding of themselves.

The ATP and WTA are really just glorified "Unions" and are not in a position to protect the athletes and sport for the long term. I would love to see some of the previous champions start to work with smart business people to redraw the competitive tennis structure, keeping in mind that there are less players entering the fray of professional tennis careers, with a gigantic exodus of the major stars coming in the near future!

How to know your opponents weak shots

I can hear the question, and as important as it is to know the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents, you need to know what to look for and how to look for it in order to see it. Once you know how to locate the weak strokes, you will start to see things that you as a tennis player have never seen before.

It is called congnitive recognition.

Watching your opponents body language is the single most important factor when learning which strokes are their strongest and weakest. Our brains have the ability to make instantaneous calculations while watching our opponents execute strokes. In the same way that we can within split seconds determine whether a persons face is balanced and has their facial features in propotion to each other, so we are able to determine our opponents stroke effeciencies and balace through the stroke in less than seconds.

Here are a few important actions and comments from an opponents body language to look for:

Confidence

Step into the ball

Full swing

Racquet head speed

What other actions can you think of that can give you a heads up to your opponents stronger or weaker strokes?

4 Keys to an effective stroke

We all enjoy the rush and thrill of seeing the tennis ball whizz past our opponent. I have all too often been way too excited in the anticipation of it that I end up with the ball in the net or back fence.

In order to hit the un-returnable stroke, the tennis ball needs to have as these characteristics:
1. Speed
2. Depth
3. Spin
4. Placement

Not listed in order of preference, the more characteristics that the ball has, the more effective the stroke is. A ball with all 4 characteristics is a guaranteed un-returnable ball, but you could still see a stroke where the ball only has one of these characteristics being un-returnable.

The characteristics act like a scale, for example a ball travelling at 150mph is very effective, however so is a ball only travelling at 10mph. It is when you find the ball in the middle zone that your ball loses effectiveness and becoming easier to take advantage of. In the same way, a ball landing on the baseline is very effective and too is the drop shot barely making it over the net. A ball bouncing in the middle of the court near the service line on the other hand is not effective in helping you win the points.

We will discuss these characteristics and how to obtain them over the next weeks.

Theory of Pi

From one of my favorite programs comes the definition of Pi, “A number that contains the number of everything that matters to each person.” Although I like that definition, here is the mathematical definition “Represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.”

What has this all to do with tennis and my swing? You will see below a diagram of the swing path for a right handers forehand or left handers backhand. The racquet tip travels along the bigger circle (2), creating a quarter circle from the position of taking the racquet back till contact.

Based on the mathematical equations, an object covering the distance on the line 2 would have to travel Pi or 3.14 times the speed of an object covering the distance on line 1.

If line 1 represented the movement of the players hand and line 2 the path of the racquets tip, in order for both to travel the distance of the quarter circles leaving and arriving at the same time would require that the racquet tip traveling on line 2 to travel Pi or 3.14 times the speed of the hand.

Therefore if the players hand was traveling at 10 mph, the racquets tip would need to travel 31.4 mph.