Podcast #181: Struggling Against Weaker Players (Part 1)
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Thank you very much for joining me on today's episode of the podcast. I really hope that it's going to be helpful to you, and I think that it will be for a large majority of people because it's about a topic that is very, very common. It really doesn't matter what your level is. It doesn't make any difference. It can always be difficult to play somebody who is not as a good player as you are. And that might seem counter-intuitive, but for whatever reason it can very often be hard and awkward to put away a player that you just know is good as you are. And that can be really frustrating. So without further a due, let's get right into that topic. Sit back, relax, and get ready for some great tennis instruction.
Alright. Had a really good question to talk about in today's podcast, and it comes to us from Eric in Pennsylvania, and he is a 4.5 player. I know that many of you listening are going to be able to identify very quickly with what his struggles are here. He wrote to me and said, I would really appreciate some tips both psychology and mechanics of playing against weaker opponents. I'm a 4.5 level player, and in my league I compete against players with a wide range of abilities, weaker than me, evenly matched, and stronger. I get really frustrated because I end up having better matches and probably overall a better match percentage against the stronger players. Of course I don't always win these matches, but I feel like I play better and do better against stronger as opposed to weaker players. It feels like my main problems against weaker opponents are mechanical as opposed to psychological, but maybe I'm wrong. When my opponent hits with more power, depth, and topspin, my own ground strokes are stronger. It feels like my muscle memory just takes over and my strokes are more fluid and easy. But when shots land well short of the baseline and sit up with very little topspin, my own ground strokes become less accurate and less fluid. With more time to prepare for my shots, I get confused as to what to do with the racket during my backswing, and my strokes often go long. I don't want to just chip these shots back with backspin because then I don't know where to go after I return my shot. I can't run to the net every time. So what tactics and strategies should I work on against weaker players? How can I develop stronger shots when I'm not working with a lot of depth and power from my opponents? How should I change the mechanics of my strokes and my psychology in these matches?
Okay, well Eric, that's a really good question. This can be extremely frustrating because it's kind of counter intuitive, right? It seems like the easier of a shot I get from my opponent, then clearly an easier of a time I should have in trying to come up with some kind of confident offensive reply and be able to pressure my opponent when they give me a weak easy shot. I want you to know that you're not alone in this, and this is a really common problem that players have. It's a big distinguishing factor between where you are now and moving up a level. If you can't very confidently take a weak shot and really hit a solid reply, then you're always going to have a hard time playing up a level from where you are now. It's not uncommon by the way to feel more confident when you're receiving more pace and more spin. So I'm breaking my outline into two main sections. We're going to talk about the psychological part, and we're going to talk about the physical part of it as well. I want to go ahead and just start off by saying Eric I don't think all of these things I'm going to talk about are what your problem is, but they apply to many players listening. And so I want to make sure that I put out some good information here that's going to be for a lot of other players possibly besides yourself. So please keep that in mind as I talk about this. Not that I don't think some of your problems aren't psychological with this. I think they are, and I think they fall under two main categories that I'm going to talk about when it comes to the psychology of playing players that are weaker than you. The number one mistake that I think players make when playing somebody like this is they don't respect this type of opponent, and they basically underestimate their opponent and their opponent's abilities simply because they don't play the way that they think better players should play. Tennis players, they kind of have a pre-fabricated player in their mind where okay this -- for a player to be better than me, they're going to look like this physically. They're going to swing like this technically. They're going to have X Y or Z weapons. They're going to have this looking game. And very often when we go out on the court and somebody doesn't swing like what we were expecting and they don't move like we were expecting, and maybe they don't physically look the way that we were expecting for a better player to look and play, then we automatically don't respect that person in terms of their tennis ability. It's really important to understand that doesn't mean they can't beat you anyway. Just because they don't fit your cookie-cutter type of player that we -- the perfect looking athlete with fluid strokes and accelerates the racket really aggressively. You see that player and think, oh they're a better player than me. Then you see the guy that's maybe a little bit older than you, maybe a little bit more overweight than you are, maybe uses technique that's not very smooth and fluid, doesn't hit with a lot of power and spin. And you think oh great, I'm going to have an easy day today. It's not a 100% correlation between those things. In fact it's very often the opposite that we have more trouble against the latter type of player and less trouble against the former. So don't fall into that trap of underestimating your opponent, and you really need to respect everybody that you play, respect their skills no matter how they look. And something I wrote down here in my notes is it's interesting watching the pros be interviewed pre-match. Even guys like Federer and maybe even especially players like Federer and Nadal. They're walking onto the court first round of the US Open playing somebody that's maybe ranked like 70 in the world, 80 in the world, which is still a great player but compared to somebody in the top 10 -- I mean, we all know sitting at home this is not going to be a close match. We're all thinking that. And yet during the quick 30 second pre-match interview, Federer and Nadal are saying, this person is really playing great right now. They've got some big weapons. It's going to be a really good match today, and I just hope I play well so I come out on top, right? You know exactly what I'm talking about. And then they go out and win like 2,2, and 1, or something like that.
Well, it's important to find out that it's not just BS when Nadal or Federer say something like that. Even though they're walking out onto the court with somebody who on paper is very clearly inferior, it doesn't matter. These players still have skills, and again it's not the same, but you have to almost equally treat everybody with respect because you never know when that person is going to have a great day. Or you never know when their skills might just happen to match up perfectly with your weaknesses. You just don't know. So walk out on the court no matter what the outwardly things like look, respect that player. When it turns out that, oh man I'm having to really fight here just to stay in the match, you don't get upset and you don't get nervous and tight, and you don't lose your ability to perform well. And then one more under the heading of respect all opponents, and again Eric this might not be necessarily what you're struggling with. In fact, nothing in your question led me to believe that, but this is a really big part of it for a lot of players. And so it's really important for me that I go through this. One more little example here under the respect all opponents psychology part of it. There are no illegitimate tennis tactics, unless they are illegal. Assuming that we're staying within the rules, there are no illegitimate tactics even though some of them might be annoying to you. Maybe your opponent just uses a whole bunch of spin, and that's like their primary weapon. Maybe your opponent has no weapons at all in terms of offense, and they just push the ball back into play over and over again with no pace and no spin. Maybe your opponent has really poor, in our opinion, really poor technique. Maybe they like switch hands and hit some shots left handed, and it just doesn't look pretty. It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean that they still can't beat you, and those players are just as much competitors as are the players that are a level above you. You need to get over it, stop focusing on those outward things, and just do what it takes to win. Don't be distracted by stuff like this. So that all fell under the heading of psychological, and this is I think the number one mistake players make playing against someone who is weaker. That is they don't respect all opponents the same way, and that leads to emotional problems. Later on once you start getting annoyed and upset and angry, technical problems.
