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How to be Your Own Best Tennis Pro

Table of Contents
Sample Chapter
What Some Famous Pros Say About the Book
About The Author

You've had what seems like a million tennis lessons, but you get out on the court and it all goes away. You revert back to old habits and what made sense in the clean green and white world of the tennis pro is lost out there on the gritty high school courts where you are losing again to Hacker Charlie. You get steamed, throw your racket and go home frustrated.

My book, "How To Be Your Own (Best) Tennis Pro" addresses the problem of getting what you learn in lessons out onto the court where you are hitting the ball with an actual opponent.

Don't get me wrong: this book won't replace actual instruction. But it will help make that instruction stick as a permanent feature of your game. That's because this book empowers you to take charge of your own growth as a tennis player with a system of "point projects" that will enable you to systematically gather tennis knowledge and effectively incorporate it into actual play situations.

This system is applicable to tennis practice, practice matches, match warm-ups, and during competitive match play. The book includes a number of sample point projects for you to try for every major tennis stroke, plus a goal-setting chapter to give you the beginnings of an overall plan for self-improvement built around your own list of point projects.

You can buy it here (for less than the cost of one tennis lesson):

Table of Contents

• How to use this book
• Preface
• Introduction
• Becoming Your Own Tennis Pro
• Introduction to Point Projects: takin' it to the streets
• Point Projects in Practice: Doing What the Man said
• Point Projects and Competitive Matches (Or, how to use everybody else to get better)
• Point Projects in the Gap Between the Strokes
• Point Projects for the Forehand
• Point Projects for the Backhand
• Point Projects for the Serve
• Point Projects for the Serve Return
• Point Projects for the Overhead
• Point Projects for the Volley
• Now What?
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• About the Author

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Sample Tennis Chapter:

Chapter 2: Introduction to Point Projects: takin' it to the streets

The concept is simple. You take some aspect of the game, some instruction that you have received, and focus on that particular item while engaged in practice or match play. For example, your tennis pro may have taught you to get your feet set before hitting the ball.

Of course, he may also have told you to get your racket back quickly, keep your eyes on the ball, make a shoulder turn, bring your non-dominant hand back with your other hand, change grips properly, do a skip step as the opponent hits, hit the ball out in front, hit from low to high, bend your knees and then straighten them on the hit, follow through high, and a number of other things. But instead of trying to remember all of that, you are simply going to play a tennis point, or rally with someone, with the emphasis on one of those projects, i.e. -getting your feet set before hitting the ball.

With this single "point project" in mind, you simply make sure that, regardless of whatever else happens, you WILL get your feet set before hitting the ball, if at all possible. You may miss the ball completely, you may hit it over the fence, you may do any number of other things wrong, but at least for this one point you promise yourself that you are going to have your feet set when you hit the ball.

There are several good effects of this practice technique. First of all, you feel successful no matter what happened to your tennis shots. Sure you want to get the ball over the net, sure you want to send it scorching past your opponent, but, regardless of the fact that you muffed the ball into the net, if you accomplished your point project, you have achieved some level of success. You may have lost the point, you may have forgotten for the moment every other point of instruction that you have ever received, but you did (to some degree) achieve your project of getting your feet set.

Having stabilized that, you can move on to the next variable.

It's like building a house from scratch. First you have to make one good brick. Then you have to make another good brick, and then another. And then you have to put in one electrical wire that works, and then hook up a light bulb. Just keep doing one good thing at a time, building on the foundation of the other good things and eventually you have a house (hopefully with a tennis court out back).

What a point project does is give you a handle on the complicated behavior of taking a stick in your hand, running, stopping, turning your body and hitting a little round fuzzy thing back over a net to a planned destination on the other side of the net to a person who hopes you won't be able to do it. You just stabilize one of those behaviors at a time and eventually it all becomes smooth.

The other good thing about point projects is they are generally things that help get your shot over into your opponent's court. In other words, it's not just that you feel good that you achieved your point project of getting your feet set, it's that the by-product of achieving that point-project is the effect that achievement has on your stroke, i.e. - you are far more likely to hit a good forehand with your feet set than if you are hitting it on the dead run.

So, we break the complicated behavior of tennis down into little pieces, get good at the pieces, and then reassemble it all as a total tennis game.

The other big effect of point projects, and the key to becoming your own (best) tennis pro, is the power that this method gives to get things that you learn in lessons out of the abstract and into your real game day play. It's one thing to learn some new skill or principle in a tennis lesson, but it's another thing entirely to remember that point when you are playing or even competing with another person. But that is the best place for applying what you have learned.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that you should spend every competitive tennis match focusing on whether your feet are set. As a matter of fact, it's much better if it has become an automatic habit, and you don't have to think about it at all. It's just "on the way to automatic" that we want you to use the technique. When you're competing it's probably better that you just enjoy yourself, let your skills express themselves, and analyze later.

You might ask how this is different from what we are already doing. It’s a subtle difference, but subtle things can be powerful. To understand this, we need to look at how lessons are taught, since, in a way, lessons are both good and bad for you. In order to teach the absolute beginner we normally simplify the tasks. Maybe we don’t even try to have you hit over that net. We show you how to hold the racket. We introduce you to some strokes. We drop the ball nicely into your hitting zone so that you can practice that stroke. Then we move twenty feet away and carefully toss the ball toward your hitting zone. Then we have you start moving to the ball, getting your feet set and hitting the ball that you have to run for. And we progress from there.

Throughout this instruction you will hear any number of comments from your pro, such as shoulder turn, racket back, low to high hit, eyes on the ball, etc.

What’s unusual about all this is the spoon-fed quality that it all has. The pro hits the ball right to you at a perfect pace (or tries to, anyway). That spoon-feds training is good for a beginner, but unless your pro moves you systematically into hitting balls on the run, you are in for a wake-up call when you try to hit with a real human being. Real human beings come in three forms:

• Superhuman: Your pro who can feed you nice balls all day
• Inhuman: An experienced player, who unless he is married to you, hits the ball too hard and is TRYING to make you miss.
• Subhuman, another beginner like you, who can’t hit the ball back in the same place twice
  

What this means is that we train one way but play another. The idea of this book is to take the training comments that your pro gives you and apply them in playing situations. So, you will take notes on what she says, and when you are playing, you will stabilize those skills in actual game-play situations. With the point project method, you use warm-ups and practice matches to stabilize aspects of your evolving tennis game.

When you analyze your tennis activities, how many of your matches are intense rivalries that demand perfect concentration and performance? A lot, maybe, if you are on a competitive high school or college team, or play in a league of some sort. But probably a reasonable amount of your tennis time is spent playing matches or hitting with people where the outcome isn't crucial to your survival.

In practice matches, and while warming up or rallying with a friend, you can take the opportunity of using that game-like situation to stabilize your new backswing, or incorporate that new shoulder turn, etc.

This tool, while maybe a distraction during match play–anything can be overused–can be effectively applied in a number of tennis situations. For example, when you are drilling with a friend, hitting with a ball machine, hitting against a wall, warming up for a match, when you are in a match and feel like you are losing concentration or not playing up to your usual level, or when you are playing someone on a far higher or lower skill level than you. I will discuss these situations in more detail in later chapters.

There's a story about simple point projects like this, true or not, and it involves Arthur Ashe. The story is that he's playing in the Davis Cup where on-court coaching is allowed, and as he switches sides, he consults with the coach. Then he goes out and wins the match. So after the match, the media guy goes up to the coach and asks what significant tactical insight he offered to Arthur to turn the match around. "What?" says the coach, "Oh, that. No big deal. I just told him he needed to hit the ball more out in front." It's not that Arthur Ashe didn't know the value of that. It's just that in the heat of battle, or against this particular opponent, he was slipping a bit in executing that particular variable until the coach pointed it out.

The point is that the changes needed when your game is developed are not sophisticated changes. When your serve is well established and grooved, the tiniest change has an enormous effect. This type of thing, the little change for enormous effect, is the goal of every tennis lesson and every growing tennis player. When your pro can tell you one thing that all of a sudden makes your serve go in, I can assure you it's a great moment for everybody. You're happy because you are all of a sudden experiencing success, the pro is happy because his teaching is working and the sun comes out on the court and smiles down on everybody.

Maybe you have heard the pro say "turn your shoulder" a hundred times, but when he says "show your back to your opponent before you hit," you finally get it. This is what the pro searches for, the perfect phrase to make the way to greatness clearer to you, the perfect clue that will finally unlock the tennis animal lurking within your game, and set you free to play your best. As players we can sift through these points of instruction, try them out as point projects, until they become automatic behaviors as we pursue the goal of tennis excellence.

If you are struggling on court, the application of one or two of these things will almost always bring your game back to its senses. For me it's keeping my eyes on the ball all the way to contact, turning my shoulder way back, and hitting the ball out in front. Especially on the backhand, I find that early contact on the ball almost always works wonders. You can sift through your point projects as well, and find the ones that are the most valuable, and use them in warm-ups and matches to bring your game to life.

What Next?

To make this book as useful as possible, I have indicated potential point projects in bold face type throughout the book. Anything in this book in bold face type is something that you can apply to your own game, using the point projects method. But the projects that I have emphasized are just a start. Your pro may have many more (and better) points to make about your game. You may have ideas and insights of your own. You may have seen something in a tennis magazine that you want to try out. But regardless of the source or the level of sophistication of the information, the point project scenario is one method of incorporating the new, desired skill into your game.

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“Paul Stokstad's book places responsibility on the player, not the coach, for wins and losses. He also understands that no coach, as great as he/she might be, produces champions. A great coach is one who helps students help themselves to maximize performance and enjoyment of tennis in the shortest period of time. Anyone in the game can get dozens of meaningful tips from this book.”

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About the Author

Paul Stokstad is a creative and friendly type, with an extensive background in professional writing, teaching, and web marketing. He is also a certified USPTA tennis pro (P-1 rating).

He has been playing and teaching tennis for over 40 years (no kidding, he was helping teach tennis clinics at age 12). His father was a successful teaching pro, and both brothers were state and regional tennis champions.

He served as the Head Tennis Pro for the Burlington, Iowa Country Club for four years, and has also been active in the junior tennis clinic program in Fairfield, Iowa for many years. He trained as a clinic pro at the Vic Braden Tennis College in Coto De Caza, California. He has taken USPTA continuing education courses in doubles tactics and System 5 and worked closely with the author of System 5 on clinic support documentation. He has served as an instructor in USPTA advanced junior development player camps, emphasizing the theme of this book.

He also writes poetry, essays, ad copy, movie reviews, stand-up comedy, fiction, literary journalism, a humor column, a web marketing/design columns, etc. He has many interests other than tennis, including improvisational theatre, Transcendental Meditation, poetry writing, and performance-oriented partner dance.

He also consults in web marketing, sitedesign/usability, and search engine optimization/pay per click advertising.

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You can also buy it here (for less than the cost of one tennis lesson):