Special Guest: The Ball
The execution of a tennis stroke should be characterized by a series of sensations that follow one another in sequence.
A succession of phases all internal, comparable or assimilable to the concatenated scenes of a movie, frame by frame.
In the cinematic field, there exists, and is used for some scenes or moments of the film, a technique called “time dilation” which consists of slowing down the unfolding of scenic actions to emphasize certain situations.
And here we come to the crux of the matter.
To truly understand and then learn a movement, it could be functional to mentally decompose it into its phases, without precluding its form, i.e., an optimal fluid motor execution.
As proprioceptive abilities develop and consolidate in the athlete, making him more aware and involved in the movements of his own body (especially in cases where such movements are quite complex and combined as in tennis), one feels the sensation of acting as accustomed to a sort of “slow-motion effect,” although in reality the execution speed of the stroke is quite accentuated; it is about “feeling” the energy that gradually and increasingly intensely crosses the body, starting from the ground, from the feet, up to the impact.
Ah, the impact…
In this case, it might be said that one needs to be “wristy”!
The wrist is fundamental for the sensations that the ball manages to transmit to us and is the main contact medium between it and us, considering that tennis is a sport with equipment that does not involve direct physical contact with the opponent.
In this regard, a sports psychologist once told me that tennis is a “deceptively violent sport” because it does not satisfy the instinctual need to release energy, tension, by hitting the opponent directly; the player must instead try to attack the opponent’s court through a ball for who knows how many times, all mediated by the use of a tool. Therefore, “holding” the ball more or less on the strings, even if with infinitesimal fractions of time differences, with the exacerbated speeds of modern tennis, becomes synonymous with the ability to control and manage the ball itself, so that it goes with contained margins of error to a specific point of the court and in a given way, thus with a certain effectiveness.
In today’s tennis (unlike the now “historical” tennis of yesterday), at any level, from beginner to pro, it is almost impossible to understand just from observing the opponent where the ball will go.
One of the many reasons lies in the fact that technique is taking on ever more personalized and nuanced aspects, although increasingly accredited physical-scientific studies on high-level tennis try to confer more or less general parameters to which professionals can refer in teaching tennis.
Having to deal with heterogeneous but individually specific situations, how can one regulate accordingly?
A method in response to this question could be to communicate with the ball (remembering that communication as such is bidirectional and implies the co-presence of two entities, both agents, sender and recipient of the message).
Only from careful and meticulous observation of it throughout its “life cycle” (from the exit from the opponent’s string bed to our impact and return) can we intuit its characteristics, i.e., trajectory, length, rotation, speed (accelerations and decelerations), direction, sudden shifts, to react and act appropriately towards it.
Those being coached, through the correction of the coach or individual self-correction, should take as a constant reference during the exchange (extending this approach also to the specific match situation) the “live” ball, until it ceases to travel from one half of the court to the other, modeling their cognitive and motor responses on it.
In doing so, the coach or opponent become intermediaries in the communicative exchange between ball and player; and at the same time, the latter has the opportunity to express more and more his game without being influenced by who is in front of him, becoming director and protagonist of his match, which regardless of the outcome (victory or defeat) will surely be a happy-ending story, a constructive experience lived firsthand.