The Practice Court #4

6/10/09  Wednesday  12noon

Chico Racquet Club

Yesterday, I was working out on the ball machine trying to master my newly reconstructed forehand drive when all of a sudden I had another tennis stroke revelation.  Basic and simple, but meaningful to me and maybe to someone who reads this website.

The ball machine is presently not working very well and consequently it is tricky to set the ball trajectory exactly the way you want it.  It’s hard to adjust the flight of the ball in terms of where it lands and its height.  So I had set the machine the best I could.   Some balls were landing sufficiently deep and the height I wanted in order to practice my forehand drive, but some balls were randomly landing short and not carrying back to the baseline where I wanted to strike them.

I began to notice that any ball that landed short and was descending when I struck it almost always went long, out of the court.  It suddenly dawned on me after hitting a number of these short descending balls long that I couldn’t hit the forehand drive that I was working on.  I realized in an instant that that short descending ball was a different stroke!  If I wanted to get that ball back into the court I had to abandon my forehand drive and hit that descending ball differently.

Something very basic and maybe very obvious had occurred to me:  it depends where you take the ball!  If I want to hit my forehand drive, I need to take the ball on the rise or at least at its peak.  The swing path of the penetrating forehand drive is structured in such a way that the ball has to be taken on the rise or close to it if one expects to put that ball in the court.  So it goes without saying, then, that any other ball not in that perfect strike zone will require an adjustment in the swing path in order to get the ball back in the court.  This may seem obvious and very simple, but it matters.  As such this realization will affect my movement on the court, especially my footwork.  It also gives me clarity in realizing why some of my shots go long.

REVELATTION:  it matters where you take the ball in your strokes!