Craig O’Shannessy is a well known tennis statistician. He recently republished the stats below in the context of the Australian Open.
Our Tennis Whisperer attempts to explain the WHYs underlining Craig’s stats in simple terms of the three primary skills underpinning every tennis stroke: ball watching, balance and rhythm . [See WHY comments in these brackets].
These are the seven basics of tennis strategy and, as always, they will be the key to winning at this year’s Australian Open.
Lesson 1: Forehands and Backhands
Nine-time Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic has arguably the best backhand in the world. But who cares.
When Djokovic last won the “Happy Slam” in 2021, he struck 98 forehand winners and 45 backhand winners. That’s why you see players running around backhands to hit forehands. They desperately seek to upgrade.
The forehand is the sword. The backhand is the shield. The sword accounts for about two out of every three winners from the back of the court.
Forehand and backhand winners
M/W
Forehand winners
Backhand winners
Men
70 per cent (3228)
30 per cent (1386)
Women
64 per cent (2236)
36 per cent (1247)
[Whisperer: The NADAL VARIATION creates more extreme angles because of the racket position in relation to body.]
Lesson 2: Tennis is a game of errors
The Australian Open features the best players on the planet, who rally back and forth ad nauseam on the practice court with precious few mistakes. Then matches start, and errors flow.
Winners and errors
M/W
Winners
Errors
Men
34 per cent
66 per cent
Women
30 per cent
70 per cent
Winners are rising at Melbourne Park, jumping from 30 per cent for the men in 2015 to 34 per cent last year. In the women’s game, there was a jump from 27 per cent in 2015 to 30 per cent in 2022.
Because errors are so prevalent, it’s much smarter to make opponents uncomfortable and force mistakes than chase winners. Obsess over the bigger pool of points.
[Whisperer: Minimizing errors by staying in the point has always consistently won more points. ]
Lesson 3: Eight ways to force an error
There are actually eight ways to make the opponent uncomfortable and extract an error.
[Whisperer: WHY explained in Where column of the three primary skills in any stroke: ball watching, balance, rhythm—strength is NOT necessarily the key.]
Eight ways to force an error
#
8 ways
Where
1
Consistency
Court: Watching
2
Direction
Court: Balance
3
Depth
Court: Balance
4
Height
Court: Balance
5
Spin
Ball: Watching
6
Power
Ball: Rhythm
7
Court Position
Me: Balance
8
Time
The clock: Rhythm
These eight elements are the holy grail of tennis. If a player hits a shot that contains just one of these eight, such as depth, they will have gained the upper hand in the point.
If their shot includes two or more qualities, such as power and direction, they will be standing inside the baseline hitting with authority when the weak ball comes back.
If they combine three elements – such as height, spin and court position – the ball doesn’t come back.
Lesson 4: Rally length
Winning the short rallies is the best way to walk off court with a victory. The study of rally length started at the 2015 Australian Open and shook the foundations of the sport because of just how many short rallies occur.
Rally length
Shots
Men
Women
0-4
70 per cent
66 per cent
5-8
20 per cent
23 per cent
9+
10 per cent
11 per cent
[Whisperer: Impact of powerful racket technology and advantage to server. Corollary: get into the point as much as possible. Use typical Djokovic/Medvedev strategy of deep returns to put server off balance to nullify server advantage.]
Rally length is predicated on the ball landing in the court, not hitting the strings. So a double fault has a rally length of zero as the ball didn’t land in, and a missed return is a rally length of one as the serve went in and the return was missed.
Seven points out of 10 are contested by players hitting the ball a maximum of two times each (four-shot rallies) in the court.
The data also blew the doors off the myth that winning long rallies equated to winning matches. There are, typically, not enough long rallies to make a difference.
Lesson 5: Mode
The mode simply means the most common value in a data set. We can predict with certainty that the most abundant rally length at this year’s Australian Open will be the same as last year, and the year before that. One shot in the court. No more. No less.
Ask someone which rally length is the most frequent, and the typical answers are from four to eight shots. You can tell them that Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray thought they played more four-shot rallies than anything else. They were very surprised, like all players, that they play more one-shot rallies than any other. That equates to a made serve and a missed return.
2015 Australian Open men: Most common rally lengths
Rally length
Percentage
1 shot
30
3 shots
15
2 shots
10
5 shots
9
4 shots
8
As you can see from the table above, one-shot rallies are incredibly frequent in a match (30 per cent). The next closest rally length is three shots at 15 per cent.
Notice that three-shot rallies occur more than two shots, and five-shot rallies occur more than four shots. That’s because of the halo effect of the serve, or how long the influence of the serve lasts before things become even in a rally.
[To repeat. Whisperer: Impact of powerful racket technology and advantage to server. Corollary: get into the point as much as possible. Use Djokovic /Medvedev strategy of deep returns to nullify server advantage.]
Lesson 6: You win a higher percentage at the net than the baseline
The baseline seems like a safe haven for players, while the net seems a risky place to win points. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The baseline as a safe haven?
M/W
Baseline win percentage
Net win percentage
Men
47
67
Women
48
66
If you rally from the back of the court, you are lucky to win half of your baseline points.
[WHISPERER: Volleys are an ESSENTIAL stroke for any serious tennis player, and particular for junior development, not an afterthought. Moving forward to the net (from GHOSTLINE) wins about two out of three points.]
The net has always been a fun, prosperous place to win points and nothing has changed statistically to think otherwise.
Lesson 7: Serve and Volley works
No tennis strategy has been more maligned and misunderstood than the serve and volley. Pundits say it belongs to another era and is too difficult to employ in today’s game. It’s simply not so.
Serve and volley works
M/W
Played/won
Percentage won
Men
709/1053
67
Women
36/57
63
Both men and women won about two out of three points serving and volleying at last year’s Australian Open.
That is a far superior tactic than serving, staying back and trying to eke out a living from the baseline to hold serve.
[WHISPERER: Enhances probability of winning the point because of the geometry and physics of relative court positions of each player]
00Robhttps://www.tenniswhisperer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/cropped-LOGOWhisperer1024-300x300.pngRob2023-01-16 08:58:522023-01-16 08:58:52Seven Basics of Tennis Strategy | ATP
Tennis is on the verge of a belated Moneyball revolution. In the northern spring, the Association of Tennis Professionals, which runs the men’s tour, is planning to open up ball-tracking data from every match to all its players and coaches.
The shift will do much to level an uneven playing field. Until now, millionaire players such as the “Big Four” men have had the opportunity to buy better-quality data analysis than their less wealthy rivals.
One might imagine that access to data would be a basic right for all leading professionals. In fact, anyone wanting to use the information gathered by Hawk-Eye, the leading ball-tracking provider since 2014, has had to pay a £150 ($263) processing fee per match. On top of that, tour rules say you can order data only from matches you played in.
In April, this will change. “We want to give players more equal access to this information,” says Ross Hutchins, the Association of Tennis Professionals’ chief tour officer. “We believe it will improve performance levels. We are looking to bring player and ball-tracking online from every ATP tournament. We’re hoping to make this happen by the second quarter of 2023, and then bring in wearable technology, such as heart monitors and GPS location devices, by the second half of the year.”
Despite the relatively large amount of money at stake, tennis must rank as one of the most backward major sports when it comes to sophisticated data analysis, mainly because there are few economies of scale.
Six-figure sums for data
If you are lucky enough to come from a grand-slam nation such as Great Britain or the United States, you can usually dip into your federation’s sizeable dataset. Otherwise, the only way to gain access to more than a tiny percentage of matches is to hire one of the big analytical companies, such as Golden Set Analytics (GSA), which used to charge Roger Federer a six-figure sum annually for exclusive access to its scouting and performance reports.
“In tennis, the teams are smaller than most other sports, and almost everything has to come out of the player’s pocket,” says Philip Mauerhofer, who runs a well-regarded analytics firm called Tennis Stat. “Unless you’re at the top of the game, adding more expenditure to your coaching and your physio and your fitness training is always going to be a stretch. So to have a trove of data available on every player would be a game-changer.”
Agent Patricio Apey welcomed the ATP plan. One of Apey’s clients – America’s Sebastian Korda – has been able to benefit from his close relationship with the United States Tennis Association, which logs all the information from its home tournaments and has a data-pooling deal with Tennis Australia.
But another of Apey’s stable – Greece’s Stefanos Tsitsipas – has had no such support. Tsitsipas thus needs to spend considerably more to gain the same level of tactical insight. As a top-five player, he can probably afford the difference. Those lower down the ladder are not always so fortunate.
“I’m cautiously hopeful that the governing bodies will see that making this information available to all players and their teams will only make the sport better,” Apey says. “Look at how sophisticated Formula One is when it comes to using data. Maybe in the future we will see cutting-edge analysts in the player boxes doing their work in real time and passing useful feedback to coaches and players during matches.”
Test run for courtside coaching
Tennis has many governing bodies, and at the moment only the Association of Tennis Professionals – as opposed to the grand slams and the Women’s Tennis Association – is committed to opening up its dataset. But the scenario Apey mentions is already here, even if it was used only on an experimental level at last November’s ATP Next Gen Finals in Milan, where coaches were allowed to advise their players during matches, as is becoming the norm on the ATP Tour, and at the two hard-court slams. They were also given an electronic tablet showing live data from the match as it progressed.
“It was challenging to use at first,” says James Trotman, the British coach whose player, Jack Draper, was eliminated in the semi-finals of that event. “There was so much data, whether it be the direction of the serve, the accuracy of the return, or the speed of each player’s forehands and backhands.
“I had to keep it simple, so I just focused on the first of those categories. There was one opponent who was always serving in the same place, so when it came to the tie-break I was able to tell Jack to sit on that return, which helped a great deal.”
Four years ago, Germany’s No. 1 Alexander Zverev said that “all the big guys are using data analysis, they just don’t like to talk about it” – and leading players are still coy about their data support. A rare exception is the world’s best player, Novak Djokovic, who allowed his former analyst, Craig O’Shannessy, to speak publicly about their work together.
The bigger your database, the easier it is to supply reliable scouting reports on every opponent. GSA says it has an automated algorithm that “scrapes” data directly from TV coverage, but for the smaller operators, many thousands of hours have been spent on hand-tagging matches. The going rate for a one-off scouting report from these lesser outfits is $US300.
So what kinds of insight can a big company provide? “A lot of added value is obtained from using data richer than anything the human eye can detect,” says Ben Depoorter, GSA’s vice-president of player analytics. “Hawk-Eye’s ball-tracking system generates millions of data points. And the insights that show up are not always what you might expect.
“Contrary to most expectations, Djokovic is outstanding with his backhand on fast returns hit towards his feet, and weaker on loopy balls that land short but with more of an angle, because he likes to hit on the rise. People come in with set ideas about what works – and the only way to disprove their preconceptions is with data.”
Source: The Telegraph, London
00Robhttps://www.tenniswhisperer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/cropped-LOGOWhisperer1024-300x300.pngRob2023-01-14 10:14:492023-01-14 10:14:49Moneyball Comes to Tennis
If you want to get better at tennis and improve your fitness, these gadgets maybe a starting point?
Tennis is a very physical sport. For example, the tennis serve represents a complex movement that requires muscles throughout the entire body to rotate in unison to deliver accuracy and power.
Whether you’re new to the game or a seasoned veteran looking to get just a little bit better, there are a handful of tech gadgets you should check out.
These gadgets can track and analyze your swing, keep track of the score, and measure the speed of your serves, among other things.
00Robhttps://www.tenniswhisperer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/cropped-LOGOWhisperer1024-300x300.pngRob2023-01-11 16:51:312023-01-11 16:51:316 Gadgets Which Improve Your Tennis (Maybe??)
I know this sounds pretty crazy, but you should not be trying to think while you are playing a point.
This idea goes against what our mind is telling us as well as what it is trying to do. We will usually have the tendency to try to work things out in our head during the exchange of shots in a point. Unfortunately, this will have a negative impact on all of the practice and training we have done, and it may cause us to make errors due to indecision.
It is much better to just play the point once it starts. [Just focus on bounce hit: Whisperer]
Before the point, choose one technique idea and one strategy idea to remind yourself how you would like to hit the ball and play the point.
After the point is over, assess what has just happened and repeat the one technique, one strategy idea. You may have to make some adjustments based on what the last point was like, but try to keep things simple.
On the changeovers you can have a little more detail in your own self-coaching, but overall, try not to over analyze.
Letting your body react automatically and instinctively gives you the best chance to execute your shot and play the point the way you want to. To do this, we need to have less going on in our head.
Don’t think during the point!
Steve Annacone, USPTA Pro
00Robhttps://www.tenniswhisperer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/cropped-LOGOWhisperer1024-300x300.pngRob2023-01-08 17:39:002023-01-08 17:39:00Don’t overthink each point | AskThePro
Too often, the average player’s focus is on their “Hardware” — coordinating muscles to hit the ball. True, for most, just coordinating your body to consistently hit the ball week in and week out is difficult to say the least. It quickly becomes very frustrating when playing in the wind, changing court surfaces or against, what I will call, an awkward opponent. And escalates even faster as we age and our muscles lose strength and coordination.
Our Hardware skills pathway includes three essential skills which underpin any tennis stroke: ball watching, balance and rhythm. The basic Tennis Whisperer program teaches the development of the core supporting muscles to both enhance those skills and prevent injury. As an example, just improving your ability to “really see the ball” rather than merely trying to “watch” it during play can go a long way to improving your consistency — at any age and stage of tennis. These basic skills can be taught or refreshed at any age.
But Hardware is only one part of the equation. Hardware is very much about muscles, joints and physical traits. “Software” is brain perception, action and decision making. Software is what often gives a player a head-start on those who might be physically stronger, quicker or, dare I say, younger! And from time to time, a win against the ‘better hitter’.
Your neural system is the third part of this equation, and in basic terms, connects a player’s “Software” to their “Hardware”.
Software should be view as a “Pyramid”. At its base be more aware of your end of the court: basic court positions when returning serve or covering the net. And the positions change depending on the opponent and the conditions. For the more powerful opponent, it’s better to play further back when returning serve — not only to give yourself a little more time to watch the ball, but more importantly to ensure you’re moving forward into the shot to stay on balance. This is why Nadal, one of the best players in the world, plays so far back to improves his balance by moving forward into each shot.
Moving up the Pyramid, and still at your end of the court, where you stand in the court, particularly in dubs, has a huge impact on your ability to stay in the point. For example, at ANY level of tennis, Tennis Physics means that EIGHTY PERCENT (80%) of shots fall in a two (metre) circle around the middle T of the serve line. Merely standing in that circle guarantees you’ll get a shot at most balls — you might not make the shot but you’ll be in the point.
As the Pyramid narrows, and looking at the opponent’s end of the court, action and decision-making comes to the fore. Your focus is on the Hardware of the opponent. Do they have any “obvious weaknesses” — not just the weaker backhand side but where do they consistently return the ball? Any physical limitations in running down lobs? Are they comfortable hitting volleys or overheads? Are they comfortable moving forward, backwards, sideways? What did you learn from the warm-up? [You didn’t try to win the warm-up, right??]
Even further up the Pyramid, and still at your opponent’s end of the court, your focus is on the opponent’s Software. How can you identify and find a way to exploit their limitations? Where do they stand in the court, to return serve, at the net etc? Do they stand too close to the net and therefore are suckers to a simple lob return? What’s their state of mind at different times of the match? Do they rush under pressure? Consistently miss first serves on game and tie breaker points?? How can you adjust your Software and Hardware to take full advantage of your observations during play??
And lastly, at the very Pyramid Top, and now we are back to your end of the court, what’s your decision-making style to analyze opponents during match play. It’s the rare player who can change their Hardware midpoint to hit a different shot under pressure. Even rarer, the player who can consistently play more than one type of game — to unsettle an opponent and match the conditions. For most of us, suffice to say, it’s better to rely on a simple ritual to prepare to play each point — at least to start out each point standing in the right position and with a calm mind.
Tennis is a great game. And you’ll get so much more enjoyment by NOT leaving your Software on the sidelines. And who knows, perhaps a few more wins.
00Robhttps://www.tenniswhisperer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/cropped-LOGOWhisperer1024-300x300.pngRob2022-12-19 14:08:022022-12-19 14:08:02Tennis Intelligence: It Takes Pyramid Power | ATP
Have you ever experienced hitting an amazing shot when you know it “doesn’t count”?
For me it usually happens on a casual swing at a serve that landed a foot out – so I call it out and just let’r rip.
No pressure. No expectations.
Amazing how those swings feel so smooth, and yet the result is a booming shot that paints a corner.
Just like hitting in practice, right?
In practice you aren’t concerned with winning or losing so everything is smooth and relaxed.
Effortless.
So why the 180 degree turn around in match play?
It comes down to one ugly word.
Fear.
Now that the shots you’re hitting really “matter” your mind is racing and the feeling of fear takes over:
Fear of embarrassment
Fear of letting down your doubles partner
Fear of disappointing your teammates or coach
Fear of losing to a weaker opponent
Fear of losing your reputation as a player
Unfortunately, most tennis players treat fear as the problem when it’s actually just a symptom.
Once you understand what the root cause of your fear (and how to best manage your particular issue –emphasis added by Tennis Whisperer) is it melts away leaving you free to play your best tennis.
Source: Jorge Capestany, USPTA
00Robhttps://www.tenniswhisperer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/cropped-LOGOWhisperer1024-300x300.pngRob2022-12-16 07:16:102022-12-16 07:16:10Here’s Why You Play WORSE In Matches | ATP
Annacone started his tennis journey as a high-level player, where he had a very respectable pro career that saw him peak at No. 12 in the singles rankings. But he saw the game at an expert level, and was drawn to the coaching ranks where he excelled at a nearly unprecedented rate.
He started coaching Pete Sampras in 1995, and was with him for nine major titles. He coached Roger Federer from 2010-13, and the Swiss Maestro won a Wimbledon title and returned to the No. 1 ranking during that span.
Annacone was able to use transfer wisdom through teaching methods, and his core coaching philosophy is based on three pillars. The individual is made up of three things:
Their head, which is how they process stuff, how they figure out and problem solve.
Their heart, how well they can unconditionally compete.
Their physical attributes.
After digesting every bit of those components in his mind, then it was time to transfer the knowledge: “My philosophy is, how simply after that can I say what I need to say, the way they need to hear it.”
Sampras and Federer are of the greatest players to ever pick up a racquet, but as Annacone explains, they couldn’t have been more different to coach.
Sampras fit into Annacone’s “magician” category, in the sense that he could process information very quickly and didn’t necessarily need a lot of repetition to master certain elements of his game.
Federer, on the other hand, wanted to be coached and instructed thoroughly, with the caveat that he would challenge the methods and force Annacone to defend the reasons for his tactics. “I’ve never seen a guy happier on a tennis court,” Annacone said in regards working with Federer during countless practice sessions.
“The most important thing [with each player] is they knew themselves really well. Pete knew exactly how he wanted to be to achieve his goals, and Roger knew exactly how he needed to be to achieve his goals. Very different, but it worked for them.”
00Robhttps://www.tenniswhisperer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/cropped-LOGOWhisperer1024-300x300.pngRob2022-12-05 06:29:052022-12-05 06:29:05Talking Shop with Coach Paul Annacone | ATP
When I was a young aspiring player, I often lost tennis matches by being too adventurous, which is my attempt to avoid admitting I was very impatient. I enjoyed playing the front court as much or more than staying near the baseline, and I never saw a short ball I did not want to attack.
Even by the age of twelve I would try and dominate my opponents with strong shots, or I would even serve and volley. Naturally, a game style with this risk profile produces plenty or errors. (In addition to an occasional spectacular play). After lost matches coaches would always tell me the number of unforced errors I had made. I never knew what to do with this information. (It’s not like it was my intention.)
“You made 41 unforced errors today!” a coach would say.
“What does that even mean,” I would respond rebelliously. “You’re just going for too much.”
I struggled with this feedback. How can I learn from this? In hindsight, I wish the coach would have helped me with situational play. When did the errors occur? How long were the rallies before I missed? When may I give myself permission to attack and when is patience more prudent. Certainly, an unforced error at the score of 40-0 is different from one produced at 30-40, don’t you agree?
Last week I was having a conversation with one of my adult clients about her most recent match. She mentioned that she had made too many unforced errors, and then she added a few more stats that she probably got from watching tennis on television. I told her that I was getting the gist of what she was saying, but I still could not get a good feel for the match as stats do not always paint the entire picture. I said that some stats are completely useless, and others can be counter intuitive.
“What ya talking ‘bout Willis?” (she did not actually say this) I continued by asking my Harvard- educated student the following question:
“After the match, what would yourather have the stat sheet say regarding break points, 2/3 or 4/17?”
She looked at me slightly confused (she suspected it was a set up): “I want to say 2/3, but it’s probably wrong, isn’t it?”
“Yes”, I continued. “Think about it, a 66.67 percent success rate (2/3) is indeed much better than a 23.5 percent (4/17), but in this case it is still better to break your opponent’s serve four times, instead of only two”.
She agreed to it being counter intuitive. I only mentioned that my client was Harvard-educated to show that intelligence was not in question here. I wasn’t teaching Penny, the waitress from the Cheesecake factory (no offense if you are a waitress, or don’t like The Big Bang Theory).
For some reason we look at all those break point opportunities and consider it a failure. What can we learn from this? The more opportunities we give ourselves, the better it is. A mindset of neutrality will be helpful here, an unattached approach to the outcome: if the break happens, great. If not, great.
Another stat in this realm is net points won/lost. When you look at a ratio of 4/9, you might judge it as a bad ratio. The player won four points at net, and she lost five points. What if I were to tell you that those four points won were all at break point! Then we might conclude that the nine attempts at net were not enough. If she had attacked the net twelve times for instance, she might not have needed those seventeen breakpoints! Your personal call to courage and to be brave at the right moments is a key strength for a competitor.
In any case, tennis stats are helpful, but have their limitations. Match play will still come down to being patient at the right times, being courageous at the right moments, and staying disciplined all match. Use the stats to dig into those areas more specifically. Answer the questions ‘when’ and ‘why”!
[Our Tennis Whisperer teaches the GHOST LINE strategy to answer the ‘when’ and ‘why’ questions — emphasis added]
Tonny van de Pieterman is a tennis professional at Point Set Indoor Racquet Club in Oceanside, NY. He has previously been named USTA Tennis Professional of the Year for the USTA/Eastern-Long Island Region.
https://longislandtennismagazine.com/tennis-numbers Tennis By The Numbers | Long Island Tennis Magazine
00Robhttps://www.tenniswhisperer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/cropped-LOGOWhisperer1024-300x300.pngRob2022-11-27 17:48:542022-11-27 17:48:54Tennis By The Numbers | AskThePro
Technique improvements are great, but if you’re in a pattern of losing to lower level players it’s NOT the answer.
A quick story from Olivier in France illustrates that perfectly.
He was able to play at a “9 out of 10” during practice but only a “2 out of 10” during matches, especially against players who were weaker than him.
During one particular match he actually completely lost confidence and feel for his backhand while his opponent floated him weak shot after weak shot.
Here’s how he tried to solve the problem at first:
“I had mostly looked at the technical aspects. I had looked at the internet already because I remember doing some drills and stuff like that because I was really thinking that I needed to find the technical stuff that makes me be more consistent in my tennis. But then I realized, no, what is happening that I lose all this confidence in just a moment, in just a second? So either I fix that and I progress so that I can see that it’s no longer a disaster or I quit and do something else.”
Olivier eventually came to understand a vital truth: if technique execution is good during practice but significantly worse during matches you do NOT have a technique problem.
You have a mental demon problem.
Mental demons cause a wide range of problems for players. Low performance during matches is just one of them but it’s definitely one of the most common.
Here’s how another one of our students describes it:
“I have a regular weekly match with someone I have been playing for many years. Our matches were always competitive but then I started overthinking my shots and forcing changes and he started beating me (badly).
Technique is a fundamental element to tennis success, but becoming fixated on it can cause big drops in match performance!
Source: Jorge Capestany, USPTA
00Robhttps://www.tenniswhisperer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/cropped-LOGOWhisperer1024-300x300.pngRob2022-11-21 07:19:032022-11-21 07:19:03Technique Is NOT The Answer | AskThePro
Whether or not you agree, it’d be tough to argue Serena Williams hasn’t had an impact on women’s tennis and what it means to be an athlete, period. Her 27-year professional career is one of the longest in her sport’s history.
And the mental toughness she’s consistently displayed throughout the decades is certainly noteworthy, says Eric A. Zillmer, PsyD, a licensed clinical psychologist and the Carl R. Pacifico Professor of Neuropsychology and an athletic director emeritus at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
“Some people may be ‘broken’ by a crisis, while others emerge from a stressful experience sometimes even stronger than before,” he says. An abundance of research backs this up.
While mental toughness is talked about often in sports, it translates to everyday life as well. “Mental toughness and resilience can be learned,” Zillmer says. They’re skills and qualities that are accessible to everyone.
Ultimately, it’s about treating yourself well and cultivating a sense of purpose and belonging in the world.
Losing is a key part of competitive tennis. Here are three examples of how to better deal with it….
1. Find Joy in a Highly Competitive Sport — and Show It
It’s no secret that tennis is an especially high-pressure sport. Players compete alone, travel often, and are subject to constant scrutiny by the press and the sport itself.
Williams’s appreciation for all aspects of her sport, not just winning, is key to her success. “Sports by definition is competitive, hard, stressful, and deals with a constantly changing environment,” Zillmer says. Learning to enjoy all the ups, downs, and pressures of the job, at least to some degree, is the very definition of resilience and mental toughness.
2. Find Motivation in Setbacks
Serena Williams wasn’t always great. “When I was little, I was not very good at tennis. I was so sad when I didn’t get all the early opportunities that Venus got, but that helped me. It made me work harder, turning me into a savage fighter.”
She’s fought her way out of many scoreboard holes to win matches (including, famously, the 2012 U.S. Open championship match), and has been dubbed the “queen of comebacks”.
That kind of determination in the face of adversity is part of what defines mental toughness. Rivalry is a great way for people to learn resilience starting at a young age. Learning to cope with failure early on, and even be motivated by it, is another thing that sets certain individuals apart.
3. Lose With Grace
Losing is part of ALL sports. And Williams has lost many tennis matches throughout her career. She does it with grace — even when she lost the (presumed) final match of her career.
“Dealing with winning is easy, but losing is tough,” Zillmer says. If and when a loser does muster up that good sportsmanship, s)he actually has a lot more to gain by doing it graciously than sorely.
“In sports psychology, losing graciously can also help someone maintain belief in themselves, even after (or because of) a setback.” It can help keep your confidence up, which makes you more likely to succeed in the future.
When Ajla Tomljanovic was a little girl, she asked her father about a prized photograph of him holding a big trophy on his head. Ratko Tomljanovic was a great professional handball player, winning two European Championships for Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, and was the captain of the Croatian national team; before that, he was a member of the Yugoslavian team.
His daughter wanted to know where that shiny trophy was, because she had never seen it in their home. Ratko Tomljanovic explained that it had been a team award, and that he did not get to keep it. Unimpressed, Ajla told him that she would not play handball.
“I want the trophy just for myself,” she said.
So Ajla Tomljanovic chose tennis, and she is still striving for that big trophy, for a professional championship. She has shown the talent for it, though her nerves have betrayed her at times — what she calls “the bad Ajla.”
But on Friday night, Tomljanovic, who is ranked 46th, demonstrated to herself and the world that she had the mettle and the shotmaking ability to win a trophy of her own. If she wins four more matches in the coming week, it will be one of the most coveted in sports.
That night, Tomljanovic beat the six-time U.S. Open champion Serena Williams, 7-5, 6-7 (4), 6-1, in front of a raucous, partisan crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York to advance to the fourth round of the U.S. Open for the first time.
“I feel like I belong here now,” she said.
That was not necessarily what she was thinking in the moments before she took the court.
Tomljanovic was nervous, and for good reason. Williams was her idol, and Tomljanovic had never played her before. She had never played in Ashe. In fact, she had never even practiced on that court. She had asked tournament organizers if they could find a time for her to hit some balls in the largest tennis stadium in the world at least once, but nothing was available.
Then there was the matter of her playing the role of villain, of facing down nearly 24,000 fans, virtually all of them screaming for Williams to win, and millions more watching on television. It would make anyone a tad nervous.
Tomljanovic confided the anxiety to her father, who was happy that his daughter admitted to the nerves. Better than hiding them, he thought. Ratko Tomljanovic also knew about playing in hostile environments, especially in Europe, where handball is intensely popular and the stakes are high. He tried to calm Ajla by evoking the almost comical role of the hard-bitten veteran of scrappy handball matches — the kind of yarn he had spun to her and his other daughter, Hana, many times before.
“Don’t tell me you are afraid of the crowd,” he told Ajla. “I played in some terrible places with 5,000 people booing and spitting, and one time the crowd came on the floor and there was a big fight. Don’t tell me it’s hard because some guy in the 35th row is yelling at you.”
It was not exactlyMickey yelling at Rocky. It was a speech designed to lighten the mood, and it worked. Ajla laughed. “She doesn’t care about what I did, at all,” Ratko said, chuckling.
But then he brought out another motivational tool. He mentioned one of his favorite movies, “For Love of the Game,” in which a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, played by Kevin Costner,reflects on his life and careerin the midst of a perfect game.
“But she didn’t know the movie, so I had to explain it to her,” he said. “I told her, ‘You have to be Kevin Costner today.’”
In the film, he told her, the pitcher focuses explicitly on the catcher’s glove and ignores everything else in the stadium. Ajla understood, and she followed the advice with her own unique resolve.
She blocked out all the noise, the roars for Williams, the indecorous cheers when Tomljanovic missed a serve, all the celebrities in the stands, the video tributes to Williams and her own childhood adulation for Williams, a 23-time Grand Slam champion standing across the net and playing as well as she had in years. But Tomljanovic was better.
“From the first moment I walked on court, I didn’t really look around much,” she said. “I was completely in my own little bubble.”
00Robhttps://www.tenniswhisperer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/cropped-LOGOWhisperer1024-300x300.pngRob2022-09-04 16:00:512022-09-04 16:00:51How Ajla Tomljanovic Faced Down Serena Williams and 24,000 Others
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Seven Basics of Tennis Strategy | ATP
/in Ask the Pro, Whisperer/by RobCraig O’Shannessy is a well known tennis statistician. He recently republished the stats below in the context of the Australian Open.
Our Tennis Whisperer attempts to explain the WHYs underlining Craig’s stats in simple terms of the three primary skills underpinning every tennis stroke: ball watching, balance and rhythm . [See WHY comments in these brackets].
These are the seven basics of tennis strategy and, as always, they will be the key to winning at this year’s Australian Open.
Lesson 1: Forehands and Backhands
Nine-time Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic has arguably the best backhand in the world. But who cares.
When Djokovic last won the “Happy Slam” in 2021, he struck 98 forehand winners and 45 backhand winners. That’s why you see players running around backhands to hit forehands. They desperately seek to upgrade.
The forehand is the sword. The backhand is the shield. The sword accounts for about two out of every three winners from the back of the court.
Forehand and backhand winners
[Whisperer: The NADAL VARIATION creates more extreme angles because of the racket position in relation to body.]
Lesson 2: Tennis is a game of errors
The Australian Open features the best players on the planet, who rally back and forth ad nauseam on the practice court with precious few mistakes. Then matches start, and errors flow.
Winners and errors
Winners are rising at Melbourne Park, jumping from 30 per cent for the men in 2015 to 34 per cent last year. In the women’s game, there was a jump from 27 per cent in 2015 to 30 per cent in 2022.
Because errors are so prevalent, it’s much smarter to make opponents uncomfortable and force mistakes than chase winners. Obsess over the bigger pool of points.
[Whisperer: Minimizing errors by staying in the point has always consistently won more points. ]
Lesson 3: Eight ways to force an error
There are actually eight ways to make the opponent uncomfortable and extract an error.
[Whisperer: WHY explained in Where column of the three primary skills in any stroke: ball watching, balance, rhythm—strength is NOT necessarily the key.]
Eight ways to force an error
These eight elements are the holy grail of tennis. If a player hits a shot that contains just one of these eight, such as depth, they will have gained the upper hand in the point.
If their shot includes two or more qualities, such as power and direction, they will be standing inside the baseline hitting with authority when the weak ball comes back.
If they combine three elements – such as height, spin and court position – the ball doesn’t come back.
Lesson 4: Rally length
Winning the short rallies is the best way to walk off court with a victory. The study of rally length started at the 2015 Australian Open and shook the foundations of the sport because of just how many short rallies occur.
Rally length
[Whisperer: Impact of powerful racket technology and advantage to server. Corollary: get into the point as much as possible. Use typical Djokovic/Medvedev strategy of deep returns to put server off balance to nullify server advantage.]
Rally length is predicated on the ball landing in the court, not hitting the strings. So a double fault has a rally length of zero as the ball didn’t land in, and a missed return is a rally length of one as the serve went in and the return was missed.
Seven points out of 10 are contested by players hitting the ball a maximum of two times each (four-shot rallies) in the court.
The data also blew the doors off the myth that winning long rallies equated to winning matches. There are, typically, not enough long rallies to make a difference.
Lesson 5: Mode
The mode simply means the most common value in a data set. We can predict with certainty that the most abundant rally length at this year’s Australian Open will be the same as last year, and the year before that. One shot in the court. No more. No less.
Ask someone which rally length is the most frequent, and the typical answers are from four to eight shots. You can tell them that Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray thought they played more four-shot rallies than anything else. They were very surprised, like all players, that they play more one-shot rallies than any other. That equates to a made serve and a missed return.
2015 Australian Open men: Most common rally lengths
As you can see from the table above, one-shot rallies are incredibly frequent in a match (30 per cent). The next closest rally length is three shots at 15 per cent.
Notice that three-shot rallies occur more than two shots, and five-shot rallies occur more than four shots. That’s because of the halo effect of the serve, or how long the influence of the serve lasts before things become even in a rally.
[To repeat. Whisperer: Impact of powerful racket technology and advantage to server. Corollary: get into the point as much as possible. Use Djokovic /Medvedev strategy of deep returns to nullify server advantage.]
Lesson 6: You win a higher percentage at the net than the baseline
The baseline seems like a safe haven for players, while the net seems a risky place to win points. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The baseline as a safe haven?
If you rally from the back of the court, you are lucky to win half of your baseline points.
[WHISPERER: Volleys are an ESSENTIAL stroke for any serious tennis player, and particular for junior development, not an afterthought. Moving forward to the net (from GHOSTLINE) wins about two out of three points.]
The net has always been a fun, prosperous place to win points and nothing has changed statistically to think otherwise.
Lesson 7: Serve and Volley works
No tennis strategy has been more maligned and misunderstood than the serve and volley. Pundits say it belongs to another era and is too difficult to employ in today’s game. It’s simply not so.
Serve and volley works
Both men and women won about two out of three points serving and volleying at last year’s Australian Open.
That is a far superior tactic than serving, staying back and trying to eke out a living from the baseline to hold serve.
[WHISPERER: Enhances probability of winning the point because of the geometry and physics of relative court positions of each player]
Tennis Whisperer
Source: Craig O’Shannessy, SMH
Moneyball Comes to Tennis
/in Ask the Pro, Goss/by RobTennis is on the verge of a belated Moneyball revolution. In the northern spring, the Association of Tennis Professionals, which runs the men’s tour, is planning to open up ball-tracking data from every match to all its players and coaches.
The shift will do much to level an uneven playing field. Until now, millionaire players such as the “Big Four” men have had the opportunity to buy better-quality data analysis than their less wealthy rivals.
One might imagine that access to data would be a basic right for all leading professionals. In fact, anyone wanting to use the information gathered by Hawk-Eye, the leading ball-tracking provider since 2014, has had to pay a £150 ($263) processing fee per match. On top of that, tour rules say you can order data only from matches you played in.
In April, this will change. “We want to give players more equal access to this information,” says Ross Hutchins, the Association of Tennis Professionals’ chief tour officer. “We believe it will improve performance levels. We are looking to bring player and ball-tracking online from every ATP tournament. We’re hoping to make this happen by the second quarter of 2023, and then bring in wearable technology, such as heart monitors and GPS location devices, by the second half of the year.”
Despite the relatively large amount of money at stake, tennis must rank as one of the most backward major sports when it comes to sophisticated data analysis, mainly because there are few economies of scale.
Six-figure sums for data
If you are lucky enough to come from a grand-slam nation such as Great Britain or the United States, you can usually dip into your federation’s sizeable dataset. Otherwise, the only way to gain access to more than a tiny percentage of matches is to hire one of the big analytical companies, such as Golden Set Analytics (GSA), which used to charge Roger Federer a six-figure sum annually for exclusive access to its scouting and performance reports.
“In tennis, the teams are smaller than most other sports, and almost everything has to come out of the player’s pocket,” says Philip Mauerhofer, who runs a well-regarded analytics firm called Tennis Stat. “Unless you’re at the top of the game, adding more expenditure to your coaching and your physio and your fitness training is always going to be a stretch. So to have a trove of data available on every player would be a game-changer.”
Agent Patricio Apey welcomed the ATP plan. One of Apey’s clients – America’s Sebastian Korda – has been able to benefit from his close relationship with the United States Tennis Association, which logs all the information from its home tournaments and has a data-pooling deal with Tennis Australia.
But another of Apey’s stable – Greece’s Stefanos Tsitsipas – has had no such support. Tsitsipas thus needs to spend considerably more to gain the same level of tactical insight. As a top-five player, he can probably afford the difference. Those lower down the ladder are not always so fortunate.
“I’m cautiously hopeful that the governing bodies will see that making this information available to all players and their teams will only make the sport better,” Apey says. “Look at how sophisticated Formula One is when it comes to using data. Maybe in the future we will see cutting-edge analysts in the player boxes doing their work in real time and passing useful feedback to coaches and players during matches.”
Test run for courtside coaching
Tennis has many governing bodies, and at the moment only the Association of Tennis Professionals – as opposed to the grand slams and the Women’s Tennis Association – is committed to opening up its dataset. But the scenario Apey mentions is already here, even if it was used only on an experimental level at last November’s ATP Next Gen Finals in Milan, where coaches were allowed to advise their players during matches, as is becoming the norm on the ATP Tour, and at the two hard-court slams. They were also given an electronic tablet showing live data from the match as it progressed.
“It was challenging to use at first,” says James Trotman, the British coach whose player, Jack Draper, was eliminated in the semi-finals of that event. “There was so much data, whether it be the direction of the serve, the accuracy of the return, or the speed of each player’s forehands and backhands.
“I had to keep it simple, so I just focused on the first of those categories. There was one opponent who was always serving in the same place, so when it came to the tie-break I was able to tell Jack to sit on that return, which helped a great deal.”
Four years ago, Germany’s No. 1 Alexander Zverev said that “all the big guys are using data analysis, they just don’t like to talk about it” – and leading players are still coy about their data support. A rare exception is the world’s best player, Novak Djokovic, who allowed his former analyst, Craig O’Shannessy, to speak publicly about their work together.
The bigger your database, the easier it is to supply reliable scouting reports on every opponent. GSA says it has an automated algorithm that “scrapes” data directly from TV coverage, but for the smaller operators, many thousands of hours have been spent on hand-tagging matches. The going rate for a one-off scouting report from these lesser outfits is $US300.
So what kinds of insight can a big company provide? “A lot of added value is obtained from using data richer than anything the human eye can detect,” says Ben Depoorter, GSA’s vice-president of player analytics. “Hawk-Eye’s ball-tracking system generates millions of data points. And the insights that show up are not always what you might expect.
“Contrary to most expectations, Djokovic is outstanding with his backhand on fast returns hit towards his feet, and weaker on loopy balls that land short but with more of an angle, because he likes to hit on the rise. People come in with set ideas about what works – and the only way to disprove their preconceptions is with data.”
Source: The Telegraph, London
6 Gadgets Which Improve Your Tennis (Maybe??)
/in Ask the Pro, Goss/by RobIf you want to get better at tennis and improve your fitness, these gadgets maybe a starting point?
Tennis is a very physical sport. For example, the tennis serve represents a complex movement that requires muscles throughout the entire body to rotate in unison to deliver accuracy and power.
Whether you’re new to the game or a seasoned veteran looking to get just a little bit better, there are a handful of tech gadgets you should check out.
These gadgets can track and analyze your swing, keep track of the score, and measure the speed of your serves, among other things.
1. Sony Smart Tennis Sensor
2. Zepp Tennis Swing Analyzer
3. Babolat Pop Tennis Wristband
4. Ball Coach Pocket Radar
5. Hit Zone Air Suspension Tee
6. Scoreband Play Wristband
Read more –>
Don’t overthink each point | AskThePro
/in Ask the Pro, News/by RobI know this sounds pretty crazy, but you should not be trying to think while you are playing a point.
This idea goes against what our mind is telling us as well as what it is trying to do. We will usually have the tendency to try to work things out in our head during the exchange of shots in a point. Unfortunately, this will have a negative impact on all of the practice and training we have done, and it may cause us to make errors due to indecision.
It is much better to just play the point once it starts. [Just focus on bounce hit: Whisperer]
Before the point, choose one technique idea and one strategy idea to remind yourself how you would like to hit the ball and play the point.
After the point is over, assess what has just happened and repeat the one technique, one strategy idea. You may have to make some adjustments based on what the last point was like, but try to keep things simple.
On the changeovers you can have a little more detail in your own self-coaching, but overall, try not to over analyze.
Letting your body react automatically and instinctively gives you the best chance to execute your shot and play the point the way you want to. To do this, we need to have less going on in our head.
Don’t think during the point!
Steve Annacone, USPTA Pro
MLTC Seaside Results
/in Ask the Pro, Whisperer/by RobCongrats to a number of our club members who did very well. Bede, Matthew & Milton were amongst the event winners.
Tony Vo [1]
Lochie Mortensen [6]
Bruce Hinchcliffe [3]
Sylvain Sommacal [8]
Adam Walters [3]
Joel Hieswanto [5]
Nicholas Tozer
Luka Drazic
Petar Vuceta
Daniel Curran
Jesse Gothelf [2]
Minhoon Lee
Matthew Curtis [6]
Eitan Smith [4]
Lachlan Ming
Matthew Baker
James Nicols
Scott Browne
Adam Tomka
Ethan Elliott
Patrick Jonathan Anderson
Michael Ian Ridley Taylor [3]
Zedrick Chan
Mahim Khan [2]
Cameron Edward Smith [3]
Eric Tripathi [8]
Jordan Smith [1]
Sam Wensley
Matthew Holl
Jay Andrijic [2]
Nathan Boniel
Ashton Mcleod
Damien Connelly [1]
Elton Richard Stoney
Wayne Pascoe [4]
Tim Sedgwick [5]
Kirsty White [1]
Payal Chandra [2]
Ashleigh eve Robson
Shelley Parsons
Amy Gray
Ashlee Narker [3]
Zarifa Ahmed
Linda Huang [2]
Natalie Gaft [5]
Ruby Quigley
Renee Mcbryde [1]
Kalina Aleksandrov
James Delohery [2]
Andrew Stevens
Ryan Ataii
Lochie Mortensen
Brett Harris [1]
Tony Vo
Aaron Tian [3]
Adam Tomka
Matthew Curtis [1]
Bede Kirwan
Arden Asilo
Geoff Asilo
Byron Waller [2]
Gavin Waller
Eitan Smith
Minh Vu
Joel Hieswanto [2]
Sam Wensley
Nicholas Connellan
Reagan Cooke
Matthew Holl
Chen Liang
Leroy Sze
Nicholas Tozer
Blake Smith [4]
Cameron Edward Smith
Paul Howe [3]
Eric Tripathi
Jay Andrijic [1]
Jordan Smith
Nicholas Turnham
Dimitri Vidin
Milton Da Rocha
Wayne Pascoe
Andy William Phelan
Clive Wilkinson
Manuel Radic [1]
Greg Westwood
Tim Sedgwick [2]
Matt Taylor
Michaela Haet [1]
Renee Mcbryde
Tyra Calderwood [2]
Ashlee Narker
Lia Koulias [4]
Sofia Thorne
Melissa Anderson [3]
Lucia Gonzalez
Kirsty White [2]
William Alan Yang
Ruby Quigley
Bede Kirwan
Lisa A Hartley [1]
Adrian Sturrock
Shelley Parsons
Tim Sedgwick
Linda Huang [2]
Adrian Correa
Tyra Calderwood [1]
Jay Andrijic
Susannah Su [4]
Luke Mcmillan
Hannah Taleb
Daniel Jankoski
Tennis Intelligence: It Takes Pyramid Power | ATP
/in Ask the Pro, Whisperer/by RobToo often, the average player’s focus is on their “Hardware” — coordinating muscles to hit the ball. True, for most, just coordinating your body to consistently hit the ball week in and week out is difficult to say the least. It quickly becomes very frustrating when playing in the wind, changing court surfaces or against, what I will call, an awkward opponent. And escalates even faster as we age and our muscles lose strength and coordination.
Our Hardware skills pathway includes three essential skills which underpin any tennis stroke: ball watching, balance and rhythm. The basic Tennis Whisperer program teaches the development of the core supporting muscles to both enhance those skills and prevent injury. As an example, just improving your ability to “really see the ball” rather than merely trying to “watch” it during play can go a long way to improving your consistency — at any age and stage of tennis. These basic skills can be taught or refreshed at any age.
But Hardware is only one part of the equation. Hardware is very much about muscles, joints and physical traits. “Software” is brain perception, action and decision making. Software is what often gives a player a head-start on those who might be physically stronger, quicker or, dare I say, younger! And from time to time, a win against the ‘better hitter’.
Your neural system is the third part of this equation, and in basic terms, connects a player’s “Software” to their “Hardware”.
Software should be view as a “Pyramid”. At its base be more aware of your end of the court: basic court positions when returning serve or covering the net. And the positions change depending on the opponent and the conditions. For the more powerful opponent, it’s better to play further back when returning serve — not only to give yourself a little more time to watch the ball, but more importantly to ensure you’re moving forward into the shot to stay on balance. This is why Nadal, one of the best players in the world, plays so far back to improves his balance by moving forward into each shot.
Moving up the Pyramid, and still at your end of the court, where you stand in the court, particularly in dubs, has a huge impact on your ability to stay in the point. For example, at ANY level of tennis, Tennis Physics means that EIGHTY PERCENT (80%) of shots fall in a two (metre) circle around the middle T of the serve line. Merely standing in that circle guarantees you’ll get a shot at most balls — you might not make the shot but you’ll be in the point.
As the Pyramid narrows, and looking at the opponent’s end of the court, action and decision-making comes to the fore. Your focus is on the Hardware of the opponent. Do they have any “obvious weaknesses” — not just the weaker backhand side but where do they consistently return the ball? Any physical limitations in running down lobs? Are they comfortable hitting volleys or overheads? Are they comfortable moving forward, backwards, sideways? What did you learn from the warm-up? [You didn’t try to win the warm-up, right??]
Even further up the Pyramid, and still at your opponent’s end of the court, your focus is on the opponent’s Software. How can you identify and find a way to exploit their limitations? Where do they stand in the court, to return serve, at the net etc? Do they stand too close to the net and therefore are suckers to a simple lob return? What’s their state of mind at different times of the match? Do they rush under pressure? Consistently miss first serves on game and tie breaker points?? How can you adjust your Software and Hardware to take full advantage of your observations during play??
And lastly, at the very Pyramid Top, and now we are back to your end of the court, what’s your decision-making style to analyze opponents during match play. It’s the rare player who can change their Hardware midpoint to hit a different shot under pressure. Even rarer, the player who can consistently play more than one type of game — to unsettle an opponent and match the conditions. For most of us, suffice to say, it’s better to rely on a simple ritual to prepare to play each point — at least to start out each point standing in the right position and with a calm mind.
Tennis is a great game. And you’ll get so much more enjoyment by NOT leaving your Software on the sidelines. And who knows, perhaps a few more wins.
© Rob Muir, USPTA
Tennis Whisperer
Here’s Why You Play WORSE In Matches | ATP
/in Ask the Pro, Whisperer/by RobTalking Shop with Coach Paul Annacone | ATP
/in Ask the Pro, News/by RobTennis By The Numbers | AskThePro
/in Ask the Pro, News/by RobWhen I was a young aspiring player, I often lost tennis matches by being too adventurous, which is my attempt to avoid admitting I was very impatient. I enjoyed playing the front court as much or more than staying near the baseline, and I never saw a short ball I did not want to attack.
Even by the age of twelve I would try and dominate my opponents with strong shots, or I would even serve and volley. Naturally, a game style with this risk profile produces plenty or errors. (In addition to an occasional spectacular play). After lost matches coaches would always tell me the number of unforced errors I had made. I never knew what to do with this information. (It’s not like it was my intention.)
“You made 41 unforced errors today!” a coach would say.
“What does that even mean,” I would respond rebelliously. “You’re just going for too much.”
I struggled with this feedback. How can I learn from this? In hindsight, I wish the coach would have helped me with situational play. When did the errors occur? How long were the rallies before I missed? When may I give myself permission to attack and when is patience more prudent. Certainly, an unforced error at the score of 40-0 is different from one produced at 30-40, don’t you agree?
Last week I was having a conversation with one of my adult clients about her most recent match. She mentioned that she had made too many unforced errors, and then she added a few more stats that she probably got from watching tennis on television. I told her that I was getting the gist of what she was saying, but I still could not get a good feel for the match as stats do not always paint the entire picture. I said that some stats are completely useless, and others can be counter intuitive.
“What ya talking ‘bout Willis?” (she did not actually say this) I continued by asking my Harvard- educated student the following question:
“After the match, what would yourather have the stat sheet say regarding break points, 2/3 or 4/17?”
She looked at me slightly confused (she suspected it was a set up): “I want to say 2/3, but it’s probably wrong, isn’t it?”
“Yes”, I continued. “Think about it, a 66.67 percent success rate (2/3) is indeed much better than a 23.5 percent (4/17), but in this case it is still better to break your opponent’s serve four times, instead of only two”.
She agreed to it being counter intuitive. I only mentioned that my client was Harvard-educated to show that intelligence was not in question here. I wasn’t teaching Penny, the waitress from the Cheesecake factory (no offense if you are a waitress, or don’t like The Big Bang Theory).
For some reason we look at all those break point opportunities and consider it a failure. What can we learn from this? The more opportunities we give ourselves, the better it is. A mindset of neutrality will be helpful here, an unattached approach to the outcome: if the break happens, great. If not, great.
Another stat in this realm is net points won/lost. When you look at a ratio of 4/9, you might judge it as a bad ratio. The player won four points at net, and she lost five points. What if I were to tell you that those four points won were all at break point! Then we might conclude that the nine attempts at net were not enough. If she had attacked the net twelve times for instance, she might not have needed those seventeen breakpoints! Your personal call to courage and to be brave at the right moments is a key strength for a competitor.
In any case, tennis stats are helpful, but have their limitations. Match play will still come down to being patient at the right times, being courageous at the right moments, and staying disciplined all match. Use the stats to dig into those areas more specifically. Answer the questions ‘when’ and ‘why”!
[Our Tennis Whisperer teaches the GHOST LINE strategy to answer the ‘when’ and ‘why’ questions — emphasis added]
Tonny van de Pieterman is a tennis professional at Point Set Indoor Racquet Club in Oceanside, NY. He has previously been named USTA Tennis Professional of the Year for the USTA/Eastern-Long Island Region.
https://longislandtennismagazine.com/tennis-numbers Tennis By The Numbers | Long Island Tennis Magazine
Technique Is NOT The Answer | AskThePro
/in Ask the Pro, Whisperer/by RobOlivier eventually came to understand a vital truth: if technique execution is good during practice but significantly worse during matches you do NOT have a technique problem.
Technique is a fundamental element to tennis success, but becoming fixated on it can cause big drops in match performance!
Source: Jorge Capestany, USPTA
Mental Toughness | ATP
/in Ask the Pro/by RobWhether or not you agree, it’d be tough to argue Serena Williams hasn’t had an impact on women’s tennis and what it means to be an athlete, period. Her 27-year professional career is one of the longest in her sport’s history.
And the mental toughness she’s consistently displayed throughout the decades is certainly noteworthy, says Eric A. Zillmer, PsyD, a licensed clinical psychologist and the Carl R. Pacifico Professor of Neuropsychology and an athletic director emeritus at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
“Some people may be ‘broken’ by a crisis, while others emerge from a stressful experience sometimes even stronger than before,” he says. An abundance of research backs this up.
While mental toughness is talked about often in sports, it translates to everyday life as well. “Mental toughness and resilience can be learned,” Zillmer says. They’re skills and qualities that are accessible to everyone.
Ultimately, it’s about treating yourself well and cultivating a sense of purpose and belonging in the world.
Losing is a key part of competitive tennis. Here are three examples of how to better deal with it….
1. Find Joy in a Highly Competitive Sport — and Show It
It’s no secret that tennis is an especially high-pressure sport. Players compete alone, travel often, and are subject to constant scrutiny by the press and the sport itself.
Williams’s appreciation for all aspects of her sport, not just winning, is key to her success. “Sports by definition is competitive, hard, stressful, and deals with a constantly changing environment,” Zillmer says. Learning to enjoy all the ups, downs, and pressures of the job, at least to some degree, is the very definition of resilience and mental toughness.
2. Find Motivation in Setbacks
Serena Williams wasn’t always great. “When I was little, I was not very good at tennis. I was so sad when I didn’t get all the early opportunities that Venus got, but that helped me. It made me work harder, turning me into a savage fighter.”
She’s fought her way out of many scoreboard holes to win matches (including, famously, the 2012 U.S. Open championship match), and has been dubbed the “queen of comebacks”.
That kind of determination in the face of adversity is part of what defines mental toughness. Rivalry is a great way for people to learn resilience starting at a young age. Learning to cope with failure early on, and even be motivated by it, is another thing that sets certain individuals apart.
3. Lose With Grace
Losing is part of ALL sports. And Williams has lost many tennis matches throughout her career. She does it with grace — even when she lost the (presumed) final match of her career.
“Dealing with winning is easy, but losing is tough,” Zillmer says. If and when a loser does muster up that good sportsmanship, s)he actually has a lot more to gain by doing it graciously than sorely.
“In sports psychology, losing graciously can also help someone maintain belief in themselves, even after (or because of) a setback.” It can help keep your confidence up, which makes you more likely to succeed in the future.
Extract: Christine Byrne September 8, 2022
How Ajla Tomljanovic Faced Down Serena Williams and 24,000 Others
/in Ask the Pro, News/by RobWhen Ajla Tomljanovic was a little girl, she asked her father about a prized photograph of him holding a big trophy on his head. Ratko Tomljanovic was a great professional handball player, winning two European Championships for Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, and was the captain of the Croatian national team; before that, he was a member of the Yugoslavian team.
His daughter wanted to know where that shiny trophy was, because she had never seen it in their home. Ratko Tomljanovic explained that it had been a team award, and that he did not get to keep it. Unimpressed, Ajla told him that she would not play handball.
“I want the trophy just for myself,” she said.
So Ajla Tomljanovic chose tennis, and she is still striving for that big trophy, for a professional championship. She has shown the talent for it, though her nerves have betrayed her at times — what she calls “the bad Ajla.”
But on Friday night, Tomljanovic, who is ranked 46th, demonstrated to herself and the world that she had the mettle and the shotmaking ability to win a trophy of her own. If she wins four more matches in the coming week, it will be one of the most coveted in sports.
That night, Tomljanovic beat the six-time U.S. Open champion Serena Williams, 7-5, 6-7 (4), 6-1, in front of a raucous, partisan crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York to advance to the fourth round of the U.S. Open for the first time.
“I feel like I belong here now,” she said.
That was not necessarily what she was thinking in the moments before she took the court.
Tomljanovic was nervous, and for good reason. Williams was her idol, and Tomljanovic had never played her before. She had never played in Ashe. In fact, she had never even practiced on that court. She had asked tournament organizers if they could find a time for her to hit some balls in the largest tennis stadium in the world at least once, but nothing was available.
Then there was the matter of her playing the role of villain, of facing down nearly 24,000 fans, virtually all of them screaming for Williams to win, and millions more watching on television. It would make anyone a tad nervous.
Tomljanovic confided the anxiety to her father, who was happy that his daughter admitted to the nerves. Better than hiding them, he thought. Ratko Tomljanovic also knew about playing in hostile environments, especially in Europe, where handball is intensely popular and the stakes are high. He tried to calm Ajla by evoking the almost comical role of the hard-bitten veteran of scrappy handball matches — the kind of yarn he had spun to her and his other daughter, Hana, many times before.
“Don’t tell me you are afraid of the crowd,” he told Ajla. “I played in some terrible places with 5,000 people booing and spitting, and one time the crowd came on the floor and there was a big fight. Don’t tell me it’s hard because some guy in the 35th row is yelling at you.”
It was not exactly Mickey yelling at Rocky. It was a speech designed to lighten the mood, and it worked. Ajla laughed. “She doesn’t care about what I did, at all,” Ratko said, chuckling.
But then he brought out another motivational tool. He mentioned one of his favorite movies, “For Love of the Game,” in which a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, played by Kevin Costner, reflects on his life and career in the midst of a perfect game.
“But she didn’t know the movie, so I had to explain it to her,” he said. “I told her, ‘You have to be Kevin Costner today.’”
In the film, he told her, the pitcher focuses explicitly on the catcher’s glove and ignores everything else in the stadium. Ajla understood, and she followed the advice with her own unique resolve.
She blocked out all the noise, the roars for Williams, the indecorous cheers when Tomljanovic missed a serve, all the celebrities in the stands, the video tributes to Williams and her own childhood adulation for Williams, a 23-time Grand Slam champion standing across the net and playing as well as she had in years. But Tomljanovic was better.
“From the first moment I walked on court, I didn’t really look around much,” she said. “I was completely in my own little bubble.”
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