Jim McLennan

My journey as editor of TennisOne has reawakened my interest in styles of play, as well as methods of teaching and learning. We receive a constant (and welcome) stream of articles written from differing points of view, all attempting to clarify some aspect of the game. Interestingly, the author's point of view influences their language, and often the resulting language either does or does not enable the reader (either you or I) to see things in a new and perhaps clearer light.

So one of the elements I now contemplate concerns the evolution of the game, both from a player's as well as a teacher's perspective. Now there is more topspin, more power, and somehow less net play than in the 50's 60's and 70's. Better racquets and better conditioning may have influenced these trends. But how will the game be played 50 years from now? Similarly, modern coaching appears to embrace more variations in style and grips than in the 50's 60's and 70's. And a pertinent question is whether the teachers have led this evolution, or rather is it the players who have evolved these new styles and the teachers who have observed the changes and incorporated these elements within their teaching efforts? The martial arts have evolved over many centuries and presumably the teaching of the martial arts have changed and kept pace, then what of the tennis teachers in 50 years?

Click photo to view James Blake in T1 Super Slow-Mo Video.

I suspect the teaching will incorporate the sights sounds and feels of tennis, and will move away from verbal description and the resulting command style of coaching. Certainly there are youngsters modeling their game after Federer, just as he emulated Edberg. Sampras watched Laver, and I suspect, without an interminable stream of language from a teacher interpreting what Pete saw. The picture tells the story. Similarly, one can see the balance, the posture, the simplicity, and the whips in Roger's game and any attendant explanation may actually obscure the vision. But now, in high speed photography, playing the images backward and forward on your computer screen, the pictures tell an entirely different story.

So, I believe we have a magnificent tool for visual learners (and remember initially we were all visual learners, for no one described how we might take our first walking steps). You see and study many new things with super slow-motion video. What may have been just “words” is now translated into crystal clear imagery: balance and footwork, split-step, racquet take-back, coiling, contact point, pronation, follow-through, and recovery can truly be seen and modeled.

Here are a few of my initial guideposts that may help along this learning journey. All the professional examples demonstrate incredibly efficient strokes. Efficiency concerns the energy put into a system and the subsequent output. So we are seeing a tremendous amount of racquet speed, generated effortlessly and timed to peak within the contact zone. As you watch our clips, note the acceleration and deceleration of the racquet, but equally note the contribution of all body parts to that swing. The fancy name is “kinetic chain” where the forces from the legs move to the torso, to the shoulder, to the upper arm, to the lower arm and to the racquet. But just like children playing crack the whip when ice skating, it is the combination of the forces from all the children that fling the last kid hopefully into a snow bank rather than a tree. But what I personally see in these images is that no one link in the chain dominates or overpowers the others, the transmission of power is smooth rather than forced.

So, find an image that “speaks to you” and watch it so many times that you can see it in your mind's eye. And then when on court, do not measure or evaluate how your stroke feels in comparison, rather monitor what you feel and specifically where you feel the effort. Generally, whatever part of the stroke feels most effortful indicates that previous elements were not fully engaged. Then revisit the super Slow-Mo of that stroke and look again to see how those “previous links” are used, and then return to the court.

I think the teaching will evolve into such a “language-less” learning system, and if so we will all be the richer for it.

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