8 – Decision making: Approaching the net to the open space or hitting “Wrong foot” and staying at the baseline.
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Description:
The coach organizes games, points or “Games”, where a player will have to recognize an opportunity to attack being inside of the court. When recognizing this oppotunity players have to decide if they want to hit to the open space and approach to the net or go wrong foot and stay back.
Goal of the activity
The goal is to learn with experimentation the following aspects:
- Recognize which balls we have to mantain a consitent rally from the baseline or which balls we can step in and approach to the net.
- Recognize when we can hit to the open space and go to the net or when is a better option to play to the wrong foot.
Key aspects:
When deciding if we are going to hit to the open space or wrong foot is important to be aware how much time the opponent will have to recover. If the opponent doesn’t have enought time to go back to the middle, it’s better to play to the open space and go to the net. If the opponent will have time to go back to the middle because he was not that forced or because his defense is slow and gives him enought time it’s a good time to play to the same place and try to wrong foot him and stay back in the baseline.
Organization and development:
Integrate brief competitive activities into trainings (isolating different game situations).
The idea is to recreate different situations that will later happen in the real game and where the players carry out short competitions, competing against each other (defensive, offensive game, building points etc …). Players will learn to compete, competing “learning by doing”.
Coaches can record (or not) the results, in order to establish statistics and subsequent reports of what is happening.
During these competitions we work on mental aspects of tennis, focusing on concentration and emotional control, tolerance to frustration and improvement of body language.
Practical examples
Decision-making: “approach to the open sace or hit the wrong foot and continue with the baseline game”
“Playing Up to 7 or 11 Points”:
Start of the Game: One player feeds the ball to the Forehand of the opponent and both initiate a cross-court rally (trying to recover the baseline after every stroke) until one of the players recognizes a short ball. After recognizing the short ball, the player has to make a decision of hitting a winner shot to the “Wrong foot” and stay at the baseline or Approaching the net to the open space; playing out the point up to its termination afterwards.
Rules: If one of the players hits a Backhand- that player automatically loses the point.
Scoring: +1 extra point (2 points total) in case any player executes a Winner shot or finishes the point at the net.
Variants:
1 – 1st and 3rd point: Forehand vs Forehand Cross-court
2 – 2nd and 4th point: Backhand vs Backhand Cross-court.
3 – 5th point: Backhand vs Forehand Down-the-line
4 – 6th point: Forehand vs Backhnad Down-the-line.
5 – Start over in the same order.
Decision-making: “approach to the open sace or hit the wrong foot and continue with the baseline game”
Same as above but with backhand.
Decision-making: “approach to the open sace or hit the wrong foot and continue with the baseline game”
Same as above but hitting from down-the-line to down-the-line shots to later hit to wrong foot down-the-line shot or crossed approach.
Variants: alternate both down-the-line sides: the first ball starts the rally “from forehand to backhand” and the second ball “from backhand to forehand”.
Decision-making: “approach to the open sace or hit the wrong foot and continue with the baseline game”
Same as above but hitting to half baseline.
Decision-making: “approach to the open sace or hit the wrong foot and continue with the baseline game”
Same as above but from inside-out forehand to backhand.
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