Every Tuesday, this site looks at a training or technology concept that shapes how tennis is played. This week’s topic was inspired by Serving First: Charlie Pasarell and a Life of Service to Tennis, which I recently reviewed on this site. One passage describing Pasarell’s development as a junior player reinforced my longstanding love for the tennis backboard and the idea that it may be one of our sport’s most useful training tools.
Pasarell’s book credits the coach Welby Van Horn with building the foundations of his game while he was growing up in Puerto Rico. He notes that his lessons were relatively brief, but estimates that for every moment he spent in formal instruction, he spent ten times more hitting off the backboard. It is a training tool that enables an extraordinary amount of repetition.
More importantly, those hours were not spent simply hitting balls against a wall. Van Horn taught Pasarell to evaluate his strokes through the feedback each swing produced. He believed players could learn from the feel and sound of the ball coming off the strings in addition to watching its flight. The backboard is particularly well suited for that approach because every shot immediately produces another data point to evaluate.
Hitting against a wall provides a lot of feedback. Clean contact sounds different from a mishit. The rebound location immediately indicates directional control. A ball struck with too much or too little pace changes the timing of the next shot. Poor footwork frequently creates an increasingly difficult sequence until control breaks down completely.
I’ve previously documented my love of hitting against a backboard on this site. One of my favorite exercises is the Backboard Alley Drill. Rather than simply sustaining a rally, I try to make every ball bounce between the lines of the doubles alley. I generally allow two bounces because that better approximates the rhythm of baseline hitting and makes the landing location easier to evaluate.
I have been spending a lot of time hitting off a backboard lately to round out solo training sessions of hitting baskets of balls at serving targets. Unfortunately, the backboard at the public park near my house does not extend across either alley. Consequently, I have been doing this drill with an even narrower target, trying to make each shot bounce on the center line of the court.
Whether the target is the width of the doubles alley or the center line, that changes the nature of hitting off a backboard. Every stroke produces information about whether the trajectory was controlled well enough to put the ball where it was intended. As consistency improves, I can alternate forehands and backhands or increase the pace while maintaining the same constraint.
Pasarell’s description also identifies another benefit that I have experienced during backboard practice. He credited those solo hours with developing concentration in addition to footwork, balance, and consistency. My own Backboard Alley Drill can become almost meditative once I establish a sustained rhythm. Attention narrows to movement, contact, trajectory, and preparing for the next ball. There is very little opportunity for the mind to wander because the wall keeps sending another ball back.
That makes the backboard an unusually efficient way to extend formal instruction. A coach can identify a mechanical change or establish an objective during a lesson, but eventually the player needs repetitions. Pasarell’s experience provides an extreme example. A few hours each week with Van Horn supplied the instruction. The many additional hours against the wall gave him the opportunity to work through those lessons independently.
Obviously, a backboard cannot reproduce everything that happens on a tennis court. The rebound also arrives much faster than a ball struck from the opposite baseline. However, that doesn’t diminish its usefulness for practicing skills that benefit from large numbers of controlled repetitions.
Pasarell clearly reached a similar conclusion about the importance of those childhood sessions. More than 40 years later, when he designed the Indian Wells Tennis Garden, he made sure that two of the courts included backboards.
Additionally, if you have ever wondered why the backboards at Indian Wells are adorned with the words “Welby’s Wall,” now you know the rest of the story.
