Tip of the Week

Today’s playing tip, Play Like the Pros, comes from Oscar Wegner. To learn more about Wegner, go to www.tennisteacher.com.

Tennis has been considered for a long time a very difficult sport to learn. One has to mind where to place the arms, the feet, watch the balance, weight transfer, how you take your racquet back, etc.

This is false, cultivated from the late 1920s on, and still very much in vogue in most of the world. The truth is that tennis is a simple game and easy to learn. Just watch the top players to see how loose, natural and fluid they play.

Of course at that high level there can be great effort both to get to a distant ball and to impart velocity to the shot. But, in terms of attention, all the player's concentration is on finding the ball well and playing it back with the racquet as if they were doing it with the hand.

Those players don't worry at all about body position, and use it instinctively solely to help their stroking, either when they are standing or on the run chasing the ball.

This can be easily learned if you simplify things from the beginning, playing while you walk forward, backwards, or to the side, without any attention to your feet, as if you were walking in your kitchen or running at the park. This teaches you immediately a total independence of the arms and hands from the rest of the body.

Unfortunately, standard tennis teaching is opposite. You learn to put a foot here, the other there, and many other complications.

Already in 1968 at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club in California, and then much more widely in 1973, as national coach for Spain, I broke away from tradition and had players focusing mainly on their sight and hands, actively promoting their hand-eye coordination above all else. For increased feel and control, I also pushed hard on ball rotation on groundstrokes and serve.

The results were admirable, and this is the basic reason for the massive Spanish success at the professional and junior levels in the last 28 years.

In 1982 I did the same work in Florianopolis, Brazil, with Carlos Alves, the director of a children's tennis academy. In this program was born and nurtured the game of Gustavo Kuerten, three-time French Open Champion and No. 1 in the world in 2000.

A recent study found similarities in other sports. It was learned that Michael Jordan, perhaps the best athlete in the world during his playing career, focuses all his attention above his waist.

Summing it up, not only in tennis, but in most sports where hand-eye coordination is a must and you run after a ball, the way to get better is to focus only on this and let the rest of the body find its own way in a natural way. This way there is no mental interference with instinct and with movements and balance you learned when you were perhaps two or three years old.

Going back to the tops pros, you can study them following the player rather than the ball, and see how natural they move and play. As if they were doing it just with the hand.

Bob Larson - Publisher
Cort Larson - Editor
Steve Pratt - Editor, Variety
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