Learning to play as opposed to simply hitting the ball

Probably because I had such a hard time learning to put my racquet on the ball, all through my junior playing days, all I ever learned to do was to try to hit the ball as well as I could. So I never learned what to do with either myself or the ball after I'd hit it. It wasn't until I started playing again - and losing to 70-year-old guys at the club - that I realised there was more to playing tennis than simply hitting the ball as hard as I could. And I was lucky to meet Mr. Harry Wong, an old friend who'd coached a couple of local champions during my years away from the courts. It was Harry that tipped me off to the three basic stages of progressing as a tennis player -

1.Place the ball.

No matter how well or how hard you hit the ball, it's not going to do you much good if you keep hitting back to the same place all the time. You have to make your opponent move for the ball - and preferably in a direction or manner that he hates. Against most people, a deep ball to the backhand is usually good enough to draw a weak return. But then, if you hit back to that same area again, he's going to be waiting for it there and will play a better return because he's already in position.

So the first thing I had to learn was to hit away from my opponent. And then, when I could do that consistently, I had to learn to hit behind him or occasionally, down the middle to keep him uncertain.

2.How or where might my opponent return the ball and what I can do about it?

If you hit deep to his backhand, for example, where might his returns go? There are only so many places he can reasonably hit to if you've placed the ball well and forced him to run for it - all within a certain angle of returns.

To save my stamina and be ready for most balls, I had to learn to move to the centre of those possible returns so that I would have a good chance of getting to the ball with the minimum of effort.

Of course, as I got a little bit better, I also learned to identify my opponent's best or favourite method of returning the ball. This meant that I had to shift myself slightly more to one side of the angle of possible returns if he had a very good backhand down the line, for example.

3.When the ball comes back, what are my best options if I'm in position?

Hitting it deep into an open court seems like the most obvious thing to do - and very frequently, it is if I've managed to keep my opponent pinned down defending his weaker shot. But against a good, fast baseliner that wasn't always a good option because the ball could come back to me in a way I didn't like or expect.

So I had to learn to hit not only angles and dropshots, but also to thnk about how to prevent my opponent from using his stronger shot, a running topspin forehand down the line, for example.  

I think learning and thinking about things like this was the beginning for me. Of course, as time went on, I had to think about other things like my own playing style, using my own best shots (not an instinctive thing for me, I am afraid), what else could I learn or do that could keep my opponent on the run, and the hardest thing of all for me, tracking the ball and moving to attack it before it bounces in my court. Too many years of simply reacting to my opponent's shots had given me poor reactions and reflexes so that I had to unlearn a lot of bad habits and re-learn a lot of things that would help me play better. I still can't do it all well enough to consider myself any higher than a 2.75 pointer most of the time because it requires such a tremendous focus that I can't keep it up for long, but I'm getting there.

And then, some day, I'll also learn to incorporate higher skills into my game like -

1.identifying when and where would be best to hit a topspin or a slice backhand or forehand.

2.how to make my opponent hit to my  stronger side more often.

3.how not to try to keep blasting the ball all the time but knowing when to play a safety shot, a neutralising shot and a finishing shot effectively from the different areas of the court.

Next post, I might talk about how I had to learn about the three different hitting areas on a court and how I had to learn which strokes worked best for me in each of those areas...or I might decide to discuss how limiting my options worked better for me than having too many different shots to use. I know some people feel that a complete armoury of shots is the ultimate goal for tennis players, but using so many shots well depends so much on real talent and the ability to make split-second decisions (I have no talent and I'm lousy at making such decisions when I play) that in my experience, limiting myself to just two or three of my best shots works better for me.

I guess my tennis is very much like the way I approach anything artistic I do. Take my pottery, for example, instead of learning to make just a few basic shapes well to learn the skills properly, I prefered to learn to make as many different shapes as I could for the same purpose. And now that I'm also thinking about how to decorate my pottery, I can't just stick to one particular way but must experiment with two or three all at the same time (see pictures below). Luckily for me, I'm not competing against anyone at the pottery classes...except me!