Looking at the practice court players are often okay to be 2 meters behind the baseline rallying back and forth. They’re hitting a bunch of balls and they’re being very consistent. The players are happy. The coach is happy. Mom is sitting on the side of the court and I (Craig) make this analogy but beautiful Tuscany. Mom is happy drinking a glass of chianti on the side of the court because she sees her boy or girl hitting all these balls back and forth and getting a sweat in.
The perception is that working hard equals getting better. The thing is, everyone has this massive comfort zone in Tuscany, rallying back and forth. But they’re not hitting serves and they’re not hitting returns. They’re not under the pressure that they are in Switzerland at the start of the point in 0–4. I call that part of the rally Switzerland. Imagine these people climbing an ice glacier. You’ve got this rugged mountain; you’ve got this ice face that looks rough, it looks really dangerous and it looks very difficult, that is 0–4. In general, in tennis, you’re at 70 % errors, but in 0–4, you’re at 80 % errors. So, what happens there is when the serve is missed, the number 1 rally length in our sport is a rally length of 1 when the serve goes in and it’s not returned. So, there is many more errors and a ton of these short points. So, it’s very much like Switzerland. So, serve +1 and the return +1.
Typically, a 1-hour lesson all over the world is 50 minutes of Florence where the players are grinding forehands and backhand and it’s all consistency work. At the end we throw in some volleys, serves and maybe a few points at last. We’re not going to find more time to go and practice. We’re still going to have that 1-hour block. The player craves touching the ball, the player craves feeling the ball and feeling good on the court and having a rhythm. You don’t need 50 minutes to establish that. You can bring that down to 10 minutes. When I’m working with a player and we’re working on consistency, a lot of times I’ll put a line out halfway between the service line and the baseline and have them hit 40 balls back in that deep area of the court and the players working on the consistency and the touches and the field. Further I’m also getting the depth out of it. So you can have that period of time, set aside for consistency but then you’re going to need time to work on serves- and returns + 1, patterns of play and playing the game.
The point is going to start in 1 of 4 ways. It’s going to start with you getting a 1st serve, you serving a 2nd serve, you returning a 1st serve or you returning a 2nd serve.
So, when you go to the practice court decide which one of these battles you will be working on. You want to play a lot more 3 shot rallies and you want to approach the net a lot more. The number one time you will approach in a match is on a rally length of 3, which means the serve went in, the return came back short and then you go to the net. That third ball will go in and quite often the fourth ball will be hit. But it’s not hit back in the court. So, you want to mirror that, instead of being in the practice court and hitting 8–10–12 balls and then finding your way to the net. That happens sometimes, but by far, the better way is to have players, serve, and the coach can feed the shorter ball. Make it a quality serve and then you feed a realistic ball so that you’re approaching immediately. So, a lot of times on the practice court, when we’re practicing 1st serves, we’re not practicing it with the sense that the ball’s coming back and the ball’s coming back short. Then going straight to the net when that’s the reality of matches.
Sometimes we will be working on approaching where we feed the approach and come in. That’s okay. A little bit of that’s fine, but probably the best way to work on your approaching is to hit a 1st serve at a target and then feed the short ball and then come in on that.
(Inspired by the podcast episode #76: “It’s not only about 0–4, but… w. Craig O’Shannessy on The Adam Blicher Show — Dissecting High Performance in Tennis)
Want to listen to the full episode: http://shorturl.at/jktA8
