Playing Ball: Your Brain on Coaching

No topic in tennis, not even steroids or the GOAT debate, is guaranteed to generate as much outrage and disgust as on-court coaching. Witness the reaction last week to the WTA’s announcement that it had found a sponsor for the once-a-set visits the tour allows. Next year, SAP will provide statistical information to coaches, which they can share with their players on the sidelines. The story, while a happy one from a monetary standpoint, was viewed by most fans as one step closer to the end of tennis as we know it.

I’ve never been in favor of on-court coaching, but I’ve never been against it, either. The pros are already coached all day, every day, for 11 months of the year; to me, a few extra words of encouragement on court isn’t enough to make the game any more or less “individual." Also, I know that those few extra words rarely change the outcome of a match by themselves. If you've followed the WTA the last few years, you know that coaching can hurt a player as often as it can help. And if you’ve ever been coached while you’ve played a match, you know that the result of every point is still entirely up to you. Only the player can swing the racquet and choose where to hit the ball.

Sometimes, while I’m playing, I wonder if it would have been better to have had no coaching at all. To have never had my backhand tweaked by a resort pro on my vacation; to have never paged through a magazine featuring “589 tips to make you a better player RIGHT NOW!” How many nuggets of wisdom can you juggle in your mind while you’re playing, and still find time to actually play?

From what I’ve seen over the last year or so, WTA coaches have eased up on the amount of information they try to stuff into their players’ heads during changeovers. But what about your own head? Here’s a look at the self-advice, picked up from various and often random places over the years, that typically runs through mine over the course of a match. This is my brain on coaching. You can judge for yourself how useful it is.

“On the first ball in the warm-up, hit it straight down the middle and watch to see which shot your opponent uses to hit it back.”

This has been said many times by many people, but I seem to remember first reading it in an article by Nick Bollettieri. The idea is that your opponent will naturally gravitate to his or her favorite shot, thus telling you right away where you shouldn’t hit the ball. This is clever, and certainly plausible; I like my first shot of the warm-up to be my forehand, which is my stronger side. But even if I take it with my backhand, that's not going to fool any halfway sentient opponent of mine for long. As soon as my first slice backhand floats high in the air and lands unthreateningly in the middle of the court, he'll know exactly where to hit the ball, every time.

“Never let the ball bounce twice in the warm-up.”

In theory, I can’t argue against this one, either: It will get you on your toes right away. And I might try to adhere to it if my matches still counted for anything. Now, though, when I stretch to reach a ball on one bounce early in a warm-up, too many parts of my body feel like they might snap in the effort. Whenever I find myself worrying about how well I’m preparing before a match, I think back to a kid I played in the 16-and-unders who ate a Danish while we were warming up and nearly beat me love and love. Maybe I should try that one of these days.

“Never, ever let me see you taking a practice swing during a match!”

I add the exclamation point here because that was how this gem was delivered to me as a 15-year-old, at a week-long tennis camp in Monroeville, Pa., in the late 80s. The head instructor at the camp, who also worked with a few pros, gathered all of us Middle States juniors together one afternoon for the sole purpose of screaming this sentence at us. He believed that thinking about technique was what you did in practice; during matches, you had to focus on tactics. His screaming worked; 25 years later, I still don’t take shadow swings during matches. The only problem is, I never practice, either, so I never end up thinking about my technique at all.

“Make a C with your slice.”

This is the advice coaches give to those of us who tend to hack down on the ball to get underpin on it. The best slice motion, according to the experts, follows a C pattern: You start with the racquet high, bring it down in a smooth arc, and follow the ball forward on the follow-through. It’s that last part that many of us forget. The trouble for me is that by the time I think about making a C, it’s too late, the ball is gone. But that still doesn’t stop me, even after the ball is well on its way toward my opponent (or into the net), from changing the arc of my follow through and duly completing my C. It obviously has no effect whatsoever on my shot, but it makes me feel better to do what the coaches say.

“Think ‘shoulder over shoulder’ on your serve”

The serve, of course, is the coaching equivalent of quicksand. As a player steps to the baseline, he'll have hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of tips on the best way to hit it floating around somewhere in the back of his mind.

“Always toss the ball with the tips of your fingers (or is it your palm?)”

“Always make contact at the apex of your toss (or is it just as the ball starts to drop?)”

“During your motion, bring your back foot up behind your front foot (or do you keep it where it is?)"

“Toss the ball behind your head to hit a kick (or are you supposed to be able to hit every serve with the same toss?)”

“Use a Continental grip (or is it an Eastern grip? or is it an Eastern backhand grip? or is it none of the above?”)

Needless to say, I try never to let any of this enter my head during a match.

I learned to serve by watching two players, and reading a third. I copied, without thinking about it, Boris Becker’s deep knee bend and Goran Ivanisevic’s very simple, very easy, just-throw-it-up-and-smash-it technique. And I read an article by Arthur Ashe in Tennis Magazine where he said the best way to extend up for the ball is to pretend that you're “throwing one shoulder over the other.” Somehow, that image has always helped me.

“Approach down the line”

This is undeniably good advice, until it isn’t. I’m usually OK going down the line with my slice backhand approach for about three games; then my opponent will camp out in that corner and start to pass me. So I switch over to the crosscourt, only to be rudely reminded of why I wasn’t doing that in the first place—the whole court is essentially wide open for the other guy. The real key to the approach, it seems to me, is to emphasize depth. Whether you go crosscourt or down the line, you’re only going to succeed by putting the ball close to the baseline.

“Hit the ball crosscourt nine times out of 10.”

Does that sound like too many? Judging by my own game, it may not be enough. At my level, I’m almost certain I would win more matches if I hit 10 out of 10 crosscourt. But what kind of life would that be? Changing directions and going for a forehand winner down the line is too tempting, too exciting, too much fun if you make it—it’s a tennis player’s chance at freedom and rebellion. Every time I do it and miss, I wonder why I would take such a dumb risk. Then I do it again. Maybe winning isn’t everything, after all.

“Focus on the process, rather than the result.”

Did I just say winning isn't everything? Forget I ever mentioned it. The fact that the above piece of (no doubt wise) advice is the hardest of all to follow shows just how much winning and losing matters. If I’ve won a match, I’m definitely focusing on the result afterward—why play, otherwise? If I’ve lost, and I say to myself, "Focus on the process, don't worry that you lost," my reaction usually goes something like this:

“Ha!"

Like I said, coaching in tennis only gets you so far.

Have a good weekend.