TENNIS SPOTLIGHT Greg Prudhomme,

Top 10 Tips to Improve Your Tennis Game

Tennis is truly the ‘sport for a lifetime’. Not only is tennis extremely fun, but it provides many social, mental, and physical benefits. The sport promotes healthful exercise, tactical thinking, challenge, and spending time with friends and family. Another element that adds to the enjoyment of tennis is improving your game. When most people think of improving their tennis game, they often simply think of improving their technique. Although better technique is helpful in playing good tennis, there are numerous other ways to make improvements. Read below for 10 tips that can make you a better tennis player and add more fun on the tennis court:

1. Tennis Lessons: Athleticism, emulating other good tennis players, and repetition can certainly help improve your game, but lessons from a tennis teaching professional will help with learning the important fundamentals of tennis that include technique, tactics, strategy, mental skills, positioning, and more. You can find an experienced tennis pro at the Villages!

2. Technique: You will learn from reading this list that there are many areas in which you can improve your tennis game beyond tennis technique, but the technique is still very important. Getting technical instruction from a tennis professional can help ensure that you are using a fundamentally sound technique for all your tennis strokes. Learning the proper technique will help prevent injury, improve accuracy, increase consistency, add spin, and increase power. Adding these elements to your strokes adds to the fun of the game!

3. Percentage Tennis: In addition to tennis technique, there are rules of tennis tactics based on physics, geometry, and data that are very important to know and integrate into your tennis play. Following these rules will reduce unforced errors and help play more purposefully. Some basic percentage tennis principles include using good net clearance, aiming shots far from the lines, and hitting cross court more often than down the line. Be sure to pay close attention when your coaches are discussing percentage tennis and shot selection in your lessons and clinics. Knowing when to hit is a crucial aspect of good tennis.

4. Court Positioning: A tennis player with average strokes in good positioning can beat a player with good strokes in average positioning. If you’ve ever felt like the better player, but still lost, it could be because your court positioning is working against you. Be sure to serve from the proper position, prepare for ground strokes in the proper position, and volley from the proper position at the net. General rules include serving from near the center of the court in singles while serving from closer to the sidelines in doubles. Prepare for ground strokes a step or two behind the baseline and prepare for volleys approximately halfway between the net and service line. Additionally, there are defensive and offensive positions on the court that a player must know to be well-rounded. Ask your coach to analyze your positioning next time you play.

5. Off-Court Training: If all things are equal between tennis players’ level of play and experience, the player who does more off-court training will win most of the time. There are countless areas in which tennis players can spend time to become better and to help win more often. These include cardiovascular endurance, agility, speed, strength, flexibility, and reactions. Talk to your tennis coach and see a fitness trainer to come up with a customized plan for you.

6. Serve Practice: Rod Laver said, “A tennis player is only as good as his or her second serve.” In other words, someone with a good second serve is a good tennis player and someone with a weak second serve might be a weak tennis player. A second serve must be reliable and not easy to attack by opponents. When this is the case, players can hit their first serve with less pressure, which leads to winning more service points, winning more service games, and then returning serve more relaxed. Serving is one of the strokes we can practice ourselves. Go to the courts 15 minutes early a few times a week and serve a basket of balls. It won’t take long to experience better results.

7. Strategy: In addition to knowing how to play high-percentage tennis, it is also important to know how to adjust your game plan when playing against different styles of opponents. As you know, you could play against the retrieving/lobbing styles, attacking players, or all-court players. There are many subtle tactics and adjustments that can be made to your game plan for different style opponents, but when playing against retrievers/lobbers don’t take the bait. It is important to get into the rally with these types of players as they win their matches due to their opponents’ mistakes. If you get into the rally rather than getting trapped into over-hitting, you can experiment with a variety of tactics such as using underspin, bringing them to the net, and hitting short balls...

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