Podcast #159: Raise Your Tennis IQ (Part 1)
Welcome to the Essential Tennis Podcast.
If you love tennis and want to improve your game, this podcast is for you. Whether it's technique, strategy, equipment or the mental game, tennis professional Ian Westermann is here to make you a better player. Now, here's Ian. Hi and welcome to the Essential Tennis Podcast. Your place for free, experts, Tennis instructions that can truly help you improve your game. Today's episode of the podcast Is brought to you by Tennis Express and Tennis Tutors. Thank you very much for joining me on today's episode. I can't wait to get to our topics on today's show. Our new topics, yes, I am recording a new show today. Before I get to that, I want to let you all know about the next Essential Tennis clinics. I've done clinics all around the country now for listeners of the podcast and fans of Essential Tennis in general. I really love doing them because it's so great to work In person with people that are fans of the sites. They are players that's always worked really hard, are great listeners and I just feel like a lot is always accomplished at these weekend events. The next one is going to be in New York City, April 16th and 17th; actually in the city. I don't have full details and sign up available yet on the website, I am working on that. I am going to have full details available next week but if you want to email me in the mean time and kind of get yourself on the list right away, you can do that. There's only going to be seven spots available for this clinic. If you're in New York City or in the New York City area, please shoot me an email at Ian@essentialtennis.com and I can give you more information as it becomes available. Let's go ahead and get to today's shows. Sit back, relax and get ready for some great tennis instruction.
Alright, our first topic on today's show is coming to us from Andrew S in Chattanooga, TN. He wrote to me and said: I am a 3.0 player and with the exception of my serve, I have the foods of being a 3.5. When I am hitting with my 3.5 friends, I do great. I can hit good shots from all part of the court but when it comes to match play, I have a really tough time winning. Even against a weaker 3.0 player, I lose and sometimes, very badly.
I've played basketball since I could walk and can beat guys that are much more skilled than I am. I guess in basketball, I just know how to win. I get so frustrated when I play tennis and lose to a player I feel I have competitive advantage over. To sum it all up, I guess I just need to learn how to win in tennis. Do you have any tips in helping me raise my tennis IQ. Thanks a ton, Andrew.
Andrew, that's an excellent question. Basically, what you are looking for, is the most essential elements to being able to go out there and just win. There's a lot to be said for what you are describing; being able to be a player who is more “skilled” than you are is definitely possible and everybody listening that has much experience in competing in tennis, knows exactly what Andrew is talking about. We have all lost to that player that has ugly strokes, doesn't look like he or she is real a good player in general but for whatever reasons, just knows how to win. So, what are those elements that kind of make up for that, that lack of skill? What are the elements that really are…can explain the ability to just know how to win in tennis?
Andrew here, I assumed is looking for singles, specific advice, which is what I am going to give him today. We are going to break this down, pretty quickly, into three main areas that I feel that you really need to understand the most, Andrew, and you need to develop and be aware of the most, to be able to have that…. kind of inherent ability to just know how to win matches, even if you are not the most skilled person on the court.
We are going to break this into three areas. The first one has to do with Consistency. At most levels of tennis, consistency is king. You need To really understand that fully, especially around your level. Once you start getting up into stronger 4.0, 4.5, definitely stronger 4.5 or 5.0 player, you need to have some weapons for sure. Once you get up into those ranges of ability levels because if you don't, they will, most likely. At a 5.0 level, you are not going to play many players whose main skill or main way of winning, is just putting the ball in courts. They are going to have some way of hurting you and someway of having offense, to be able to put the ball away. But at a 3.0 level or 3.5 level for sure, consistency is really the foundational skill you need to develop now, It's what you are going to build the rest of your game on top of as you can to develop and continue to move up in level and so, you have to learn consistency now. If you don't, if you are not able to just put the ball in court reliably now, and you instead work on weapons, impressive shots and ways to just finish playing and put the ball away, you are going to very one dimensional and you are going to have a very hard time beating players that are smarter than you or have a higher tennis IQ, than you do, as you put it. It's incredibly cliche but as I already said in tennis, the last person to make a shot wins. Whoever puts the ball in the court last, wins the points. That's the case for the match as well. Whoever put the ball in the court last in the match, Is the winning player. I am not going to go into detail in technique but you need to learn solid fundamental technique and you need to repeat it enough times that you can reliably do it at a moment's notice and to be able to just make a forehand, make a backhand and just make your serve, etc, etc. So, you need to develop your consistency.
A motto that I am consistently repeating to myself when I compete at my level of play is make him play, make him play. This is something that I especially repeat when I am returning serve. When I have a break chance, which is big at a 5.0 level, being able to break your opponent's serve. I repeat myself again and again as I am getting ready to receive that serve, “make him play, “make him play, make him play.” I want to make sure that, even if I don't hit a really big impressive, you know, something that you would consider a 5.0 level return of serve, even if it's not that, I want to be absolutely certain that I make him hit some kind of shot, because the pressure is on that player. If you can go through an entire match that way, and just make your opponent play consistently. Every single point, make him play, make him do something, you are going to find yourself winning more points and more matches. So that's number one, consistency. I am not going to get anymore specific than that right now.
Number 2: Understanding the percentages and play them almost exclusively. This is a topic I am not going to get into a lot of detail on either because I have in previous shows, but understand that from the base line, most of your shots should be going cross courts, most of the times. There are exceptions to t hat but majority of the time, you should be aiming cross court because it is a higher percentage shot, It makes your opponent move more because you are hitting at an angle and that's all I am going to say about that. Follows the directionals. The directionals don't say you should always hit across but the majority of the time, that's where you should be aiming, it's cross-court from the baseline. When you approach the net, the vast majority of the time, you should be aiming down the line.
Honestly, if you just follow those two rules; if you hit the majority of the baseline shot cross court, the majority of your approach shots down the line and you make a high percentage of your serve and a high percentage of your returns, you are going to be really hard to beat.
Honestly, if you just do those four simple things, and I don't mean to say simple like it's easy to do b ut it's simple in terms of concept. Conceptually, it's a very simple thing, t hings you can really work on. They are tangible things you can developed and practice and really focus on doing match break that are very, very directly related to your success. Now, if you like more in-dept information on why you approach the down line and why you should hit most shots cross court, listen to Podcast 156 and 157 and there's more, there's many more Podcast as well that covers these topics. You can look at our archives at Essentialtennis.com/ podcast and I think there's a category just for singles tactics, yeah, there is. So you can look under that category. There's going to be hours of contents there about those topics. That's number 2, understanding the percentages and playing them almost exclusively.
