(Inspired by the podcast episode #71: “Navigating, Interpreting & Implementing Data in tennis” with Mike James on The Adam Blicher Show — Dissecting High Performance in tennis)

The classic one, when I go into academies or other centers, and I see the coach ,I call “Playing to the balcony”

So the coach took the 50 euros for the training session. The parents are watching on the balcony and really the coach is more focused about the player hitting a lot of balls, make the player sweaty, say as much as possible showing of all of his/her knowledge and the player comes off court and they’re like, “I worked really hard today”, but actually for that hour. You haven’t trained the game that you are going to play on Saturday.

It’s like a soccer team going out to practice on a Wednesday and they are only rolling the ball up and down the pitch and keeping the ball at their feet. Of course they are not only going to that!

They are practicing free kicks, Corners and penalties and they are breaking it all down so it is relevant for the match in the weekend, but somehow we don’t always do that in tennis.

We will do a one hour session. Fifty minutes will be from the back of the court training volume and then maybe 10 minutes at the end practicing the serve and if we get really fancy maybe a tiebreak at the end.

We practice the serve when the player is tired. Why do we not practice the serve at the beginning of the session? And why don’t we use the serve to feed the ball in all the time?

Credit to Craig O’shannessy here for his comment where he talks about the practice court is broken. I totally agree.

I think in every tennis session we need to train attack, neutral and defence. We need to keep the focus always around the serve and the return if we are going to develop very good tennis players.

Remember that the most common rally length in tennis is 1.

Some coaches will argues that it’s not true, but let me explain; The serve goes in. It’s an ace (1). The serve goes in and the return goes to the net (1). By far and away, the serve is the most important stroke to focus on. Then the return is the second most important.

So, for me the mentality needs to change on the practice court. That doesn’t mean that we should solely focus on the serve, return + 1, but today it’s under prioritized.

Additionally we need to have drills and train patterns in the five to eight zone, but when I see rallies going on, 25, 30 shots, it is not the game of tennis.

I’ll give you one more stat. That is a rough stat, but it’s pretty on the money. The U.S. Open 2015 men’s tournament. How many rallies were over 30 shots? ……9

There were over 31.000 points played. So why are we so often doing a drill where the player is hitting 25, 30 balls?

It’s not relevant. It’s not the game.