The old mantra is, “don’t miss, don’t miss, don’t miss it.”

It labels errors as bad and losing the point is bad.

Let’s just look at the reality of a match where the number 1 player in the world wins 55 % of all points they play for the year. They lose 45 % of all points.

If you take everyone who won, the match in a Grand Slam versus everyone that lost their match winners are winning. 55 % of their points.

That means that you can lose the match and you’re still probably winning 45 % of those points

On the development curve, what happens before you win the point and you hit the good shot to win the point there’s usually a good era and I (Craig) call it the good error bridge where your life is about improvement and you look to the other side of the river and you see the improved version of yourself over there and you’re on one side. So, each brick in that bridge is a good error. I like good errors. The idea of an unforced error is when you really break it down and understand it, ridiculous. It’s somebody sitting on the side of the court that has to make a judgement on a hard ball. Should the player have made that?

Once we see that 70 % of all errors happen in the first 4 shots with the serve and the return + 1, we’ve got to deal with a lot of power, different court positions and spins.

In fact, in the first 4 shots, the errors are 80 % plus. So it makes no sense to say get all balls in the court, because it’s not reality. It doesn’t make sense to have a mantra where we tell players “don’t miss it”

We need a new mantra.

“Make the opponent miss”

Make the opponent uncomfortable. It’s far more repeatable to force your opponent into an error than to hit winners. Quite often match losers hit more winners than the match winner. It’s all about the error count. Winners is 30 % of our sport, errors are 70 % of our sport. Players that focus on the 70 % will do far better than players that focus on the 30 % and forcing errors of the opponent. Making the opponent uncomfortable is what tennis is all about.

(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