It is advisable to introduce the tactical part of playing tennis early in your coaching sessions, to augment the technical and fitness part of your programme.
In this blog we will discuss the relevance of the strategy of taking the ball early, this tends to put pressure on your opponent as he will have less time to plan his return.
Taking Time Away From The Opponent
Denying your opponent time on the ball has been a winning strategy in tennis for a long time. One way of achieving this is coming to the net, and allows you to win the battle for time and space.
Serve and Volley players have been admired for a long time as being tactically aware and having an all over great technical game. There are many players nowadays who rely on pure fitness to wear opponents down, and there are basically two ways of defeating them. One is to hit the ball harder, the second is to play the ball earlier.
What You Need
To play this sort of game two things are important. Firstly your position is key, and secondly you need to be full of confidence to take balls early at high speed.
Technically you also need to develop a short back swing and a compact motion. Good examples of this are Federer’s forehand and Djokovic’s backhand.
Justine Henin
Justine Henin was one of the players in the ladies game that was a fine exponent of this sort of play. She was able to take balls early on a consistent basis. Her excellent heavy topspin shots allowed her to take balls extremely early, almost half-volleying from the baseline in order to get past opponents.
Evolution Of The Game
The professional game is increasingly getting better and better and faster and faster. Players are now able to hit aggressive shots from positions that former players would not have dreamed attempting.
Therefore it is only natural that we will see the taking balls early strategy becoming more popular.
This technique is extremely difficult and to take balls early requires both good technique as well as good coordination. Developing players should practice doing this but only bring it into their actual play when they have perfect the art.
It is probably a tactic that should be really left to the pro’s, who have all the tools of the trade to carry the difficult technique off properly. Having said that if you can develop a way to take certain balls early then you will have achieved a great weapon in your armoury.
