Yesterday’s post opened our September “Glow-Up” series discussion of decision-making by examining the pitfalls of results-oriented thinking. Winning a point does not necessarily mean we made a good decision, just as losing one does not prove that our choice was bad. That leaves us with a more difficult question. If the result cannot reliably tell us whether we made the right choice, what can?
For a sport that (mostly) operates without a game clock, tennis does not give us much time to figure things out. During a point, decisions often have to be made in fractions of a second and with incomplete information. We can see where our opponent is standing and observe the ball coming toward us. We probably have some idea what our opponent likes to do. Beyond that, there is considerable uncertainty. We don’t know exactly what shot will come next or how well either player will execute it.
Fortunately, experienced players don’t approach every ball as an entirely new problem. After accumulating enough time on the court, situations start to look familiar. We may never have seen this particular ball against this particular opponent, but we have probably dealt with something close enough that we are not starting from zero. Experience provides a growing collection of patterns that can be applied to whatever is happening in the moment.
When faced with an incoming short ball, a beginning player may simply recognize an opportunity to hit the ball harder.With experience, there is considerably more nuance available. How short is the ball? How high is it? Where am I relative to the court? Where is my opponent? What shots can I reliably execute from that position? Most experienced players aren’t consciously working through all of those questions before swinging. They have seen enough short balls that much of the analysis happens automatically via mental muscle memory.
This is one reason practice matters beyond learning how to hit better shots. Practice gives us repeated exposure to situations and a relatively inexpensive place to experiment with our responses. Eventually, we learn that certain choices work reasonably well for us and others don’t. Some of those choices become defaults that require very little thought during a match.
Those defaults also need to be calibrated to the player actually holding the racquet. There are plenty of theoretically sound tactical choices that make little sense if we cannot execute the required shot. If my down-the-line backhand only goes where intended three times out of ten (arguably a grossly optimistic estimate), its tactical merits are irrelevant. Choosing a more reliable target may give me a much better chance of staying in the point.
This is where honest assessment and awareness of our own games are a key part of decision-making. Most of us know which shots we like, but that isn’t necessarily the same as knowing which shots we make. Practice and match play provide evidence about what we can reasonably ask ourselves to execute. Over time, that information should affect the choices we make.
The same applies to our opponents. Early in a match, we operate largely from what we already know about tennis and whatever we know about the person across the net. As the match develops, we collect more information. Perhaps an opponent consistently struggles with high balls to the backhand or is much more comfortable moving laterally than forward. Those observations can gradually change which choices offer the best odds.
This connects directly back to last May’s discussion of signal and noise. A couple of missed backhands may suggest a weakness, but that is not much evidence to work with. The same is true when an opponent hits two spectacular passing shots. Before changing what we are doing, we need some confidence that we have identified a pattern rather than simply observed normal variation.
None of this requires calculating probabilities while standing at the baseline. Good decision-making often means having done enough work beforehand that fewer decisions need much conscious attention. Practice develops the shots, but it also helps establish what we can reasonably do with them. Experience provides patterns. As those patterns become familiar, we can devote more attention to the unusual situations where the normal response may not be appropriate.
That last category is where things become more complicated. A default can be the correct choice most of the time and still be wrong for the point we are about to play. An opponent may force us somewhere we would rather not go, or the match may reveal something that makes our usual approach less effective. Deciding when the accumulated evidence is strong enough to justify doing something different requires judgment.
Tomorrow, we will finish September’s Tennis Glow-Up weekend with that problem. Good decisions benefit from experience and preparation, but neither can tell us exactly what to do with every ball. At some point, we still have to decide whether each situation is enough like all the others or different enough to warrant another answer.
