Is Tennis Teaching Turning into Golf? Too Technical?
Todd Widom
For some of you who follow me on social media, you know I have a passion for golf as well as tennis. I grew up playing golf with my father at six years old and have continued to play for fun. When I retired from the ATP Tour in 2010, I was able to compete with many high-level golf amateurs in my community, which raised my level further.
Some of the amateurs played on professional golf tours, so for me to be able to compete with them; I had to improve my skills. This was a chance to see how good I could become and have some fun in competitive games outside of tennis. When I was a child, golf was used as a way to spend some time with my father and to take my mind off tennis.
The basis of this article is to go over what I see all the time from junior tennis players and tennis coaches from a teaching perspective.
Has tennis turned into a highly technical sport like golf? I can tell you from experience that when you are playing golf whether you are hitting long shots or short game shots, if you are off by fractions of an inch, you are not going to hit a clean shot and you may be spraying golf balls all over the place.
This is not the case in tennis. Tennis is too fast to be thinking about whether this or that is in position properly to produce a solid hit tennis ball. I am seeing all these complicated steps to hit a forehand, backhand, or serve and the other shots in tennis. This merely produces more money for your child’s coach.
That is right! Your child is going to go through all these highly technical tennis lessons, the camera may even come out and you can hit balls for the hour trying to perfect a little technique. The next lesson will be the same and so on after that.
I have trained juniors that have been brought up this way by their former coach and I can tell you from experience that the kids look like a bunch of stiff technical robots. Every time they miss a ball they are not sure if it was the angle of their wrist, angle of their head, or even if their right foot pinky toe was pointed correctly.
Do you understand my point? Then, when they play a poor match, they come back to their coach and this or that was wrong technically and they go through the whole process again with all these super complex steps to hit a ball. This equated to more money for the coach.
What this produces is a dependence on the coach that is unhealthy, because every time they miss hit a ball or something goes wrong, they need a camera and a lesson to fix the issue and it becomes a never-ending cycle of highly complex tennis lessons.
This is exactly why I constantly see juniors that have hitchy and stiff strokes. The strokes are not natural and there are way too many thoughts going on in the junior’s brain to be playing tennis when a ball is coming at you at a fast speed.
When I start working with a player that has all these highly technical thoughts, it takes time to retool their brain. You need to teach them how simple the tennis strokes are but what you also must do is make sure they are not dependent on you. If your child cannot think and make corrections on their own, they are not going to have much success playing this great game. It is only them who are going to be able to win and lose on their own.
My tennis upbringing was with highly physical tennis groups and lessons that taught you swings, grips and movement all at once. It was not a salesman type lesson that taught you one certain technique, and then the next lesson the same and so forth. These coaches were killing many birds with one stone, but they also produced champions.
The sole goal was not to make a bunch of tennis lesson money, but it was to produce high-level players. The money will come when you are producing great players at a rapid rate and not try to sell a bunch of gimmicks to some uneducated tennis parents.
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Well, Todd, your student can’t serve a kick. What will you say to him? Correct by your own?
Tennis is a technically complex sport. It is more challenging than golf as you do not have enough time to carefully choose what “tool” is best to apply in this situation, like it happens in golf.
But without a proper technique your player will always lose to a player, who has the same heart & gaming skills + technique.
My player recently played vs. American opponent, who just graduated from well-known American University, being a part of its main roster for several years. My player was 7 years younger, did not have this collegiate experience, plus player was in the 3rd week or tournaments vs. 1-week of the opponent.
The opponent was a real athlete, with big heart & enourmous wish to fight. But after the first game I said my player just one thing: “Relax. You are playing with an amateur. Just do your daily job. You will definitely win”. It was 6:1, 6:0 for my player.
If you do not teach your students to have a correct technique, you will produce amateurs. They can perform good even on collegiate level. But they won’t have any chance as a pro.
Hi Anton,
Thanks for your comments. In my opinion, having a solid foundation of strokes and grips are very important. This should be set at a young age. Do I fix techniques for many kids that are in their teenage years? All the time. Is it late for them to have to learn new techniques that should have been taught at a young age? Definitely. The basis of this article is coaching all over the internet and everywhere in general that has such complicated steps to hitting a tennis ball, I find to be very confusing. Many times I can’t understand or figure out a purpose of what is trying to be accomplished in a particular training session or lesson. If the junior is trained well, they can make the necessary adjustments on their own because they understand how to fix errors because their coach has done a great job teaching them the game. What you do not want is a dependency on a coach every time something goes wrong technically for juniors. It’s just more lesson money for the pro. Speaking on the technical side of tennis, Jack Sock just won the Paris Masters and there are plenty others that have such unconventional techniques, but it works for them. If some egotistical technical tennis coaching guru was to touch any of these natural strokes, it would destroy their career. Every case is different, so a good knowledgeable coach would see if the technique is a detriment to the juniors tennis. There’s only one technically perfect player ever to play tennis and that’s Roger. Teaching kids how to train, how to become better athletes and movers, have proper attitudes, and construct proper points is much more challenging then teaching technique.
Best of luck.
I definitely agree with you that a pure technique should not be the only thing to be learned from any coach. Tennis is a game, and the crucial thing here is HOW TO PLAY.
What I disagree is the moment that it can be late to fix this or that element of technique. It is never late to make your technique better… Another thing that there are so many ways to reach a goal (win a point, game, set & match). So I believe that a coach should only touch “unusual” technique element if it doesn’t work. But if it works (somewhow) – try to improve, not change because of “academic approach” 🙂