An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
Since the moment they first appeared, I have been a huge fan of the Bag Check short segments that run as commercial fillers on the Tennis Channel. Once you cut through the blatant product placement, some genuinely useful objects are frequently revealed in the series. This presents is the perfect opportunity to take a closer look at some of the gems that have emerged from the professional player’s bag over they years.
The “Cone Game” is one of my favorite tennis practice drills. In fact I carry a set of orange cones in my portable ball hopper at all times. Whenever a week passes when I don’t engage in this drill, I detect a perceptible drop in consistency during match play. The cone game may be the most essential drill that I perform on a regular basis.
The tennis players that are playing in this year’s Australian Open series recently exited a fourteen day mandatory quarantine period required of everyone who enters Australia. While in isolation, some of the players were allowed to leave the quarantine hotel for a few hours each day under controlled conditions to train and receive treatment. However, many of the players were forced into a “hard” quarantine after others on their chartered flights tested positive for the COVID virus on arrival. Those players were not allowed to leave their rooms at all.
Fiend At Court spent a virtual six weeks with Dennis Ralston in 2020. To be more precise, this site spent six weeks on a structured improvement program inspired and derived from Six Weeks to a Better Level of Tennis, a book he authored with Barry Tarshis. Unfortunately, Ralston passed away last month following a long battle with cancer. Revisiting the Fiend at Court “Six Weeks” project became compulsory with his passing.
At some point in the near future I will most likely rebrand the Fiend at Court Tuesday content theme to “Tennis Technology & Training.” In the meantime, I am going to lean forward a little bit and talk about a training topic this week.
If you have ever seen a dude carrying a jar of pickles around at a tennis tournament and wondered what that was all about, there is a two word explanation: Muscle Cramps. Pickle juice is widely regarded as a magical cure for muscle cramping within tennis circles for a very simple reason. It works.
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The Inner Game of Tennis is the only book I will make the following statement about. You can say that you are serious about improving your game, but if you have not bothered to read this book, you’re kidding yourself.
In my junior development days, there were basically only two drills that the coaches used for conditioning. The first was to line the kids up on the outside of one of the doubles alleys and have us “run lines” which is essentially just a series of short sprints. The second was running some number of specified laps around the tennis center, or later when I was playing scholastic tennis the adjacent track around the football practice field.
As I was watching “Schroders Battle of the Brits” a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Andy Murray was wearing what I assumed to be a back brace during one of his early matches. I was trying to figure out the exact nature of his new apparent ailment before I noticed that all the other players were also wearing the same device.
I am in the middle of a six week structured improvement program inspired by one of Dennis Ralston’s books, Six Weeks to a Better Level of Tennis. During this time, I am publishing a status update on the effort every Sunday. This week as I reviewed the inventory of all the training activities that I had devised for myself as a part of this project, I came to the realization that I had not touched on the creation and practice of match routines that would directly lead into better footwork patterns.