Anatomy of a Tennis Mini-Game
Tennis not best understood as a single, uniform skill. Rather, tennis exists as an interconnected set of different, related skills. For any given tennis skill, once a certain level is reached, practicing on a...
Smashing Through Plateaus
There are three critical, broad skill classes you need to master in order to be an elite tennis player. In order, they are: If you’re good at these three things, you’ll be an elite...
Is “Snap Your Wrist” Good Advice?
Well… no. Not empirically, anyway. Just look around at your local courts, club, or league, and you’ll see plenty of “wrist snapping,” despite seeing precious little, you know… good serving. The cue just doesn’t...
Losing the Feeling
The perfect forehand release is elusive. That loose, explosive, natural flick through contact feels amazing when it works, and when it’s not there it feels… frustrating. One day you’ll have it, and the next...
“You Can’t Teach That”
What is a “forehand,” really? For many, it’s simply a tennis stroke, but for us, it’s something else. We consider “the forehand” to be a class of related movement patterns. The entire class constitutes...
Develop Your Coaching Immune System
Due to modern information technology, you have literally thousands of hours of tennis coaching at your fingertips, at all times. Go on YouTube and search for something as simple as “tennis serve,” and you...
5 Goals for 5-Year-Olds
The primary goal of a tennis lesson isn’t to make your student a better player in the single hour you have with them. If that happens, great, but it’s a secondary bonus, not the...
What is Proprioception, Anyway?
Proprioception is a sense, like sight or smell. A person’s sense of proprioception is their sense of where their limbs are in space. You might be wondering: isn’t that just a subset of other...
Yelling Isn’t Coaching
Let’s start with a funny story, told by strength coach Matt Reynolds, detailing the absurdity of how Baylor football players are “coached” during their strength and conditioning. Here’s the link to the clip (timestamped...
5 Signs of a Great Coach
A great lesson is worth infinitely more than a bad one. And I mean that literally. It isn’t worth double, or triple, or quadruple its less effective counterpart. No, the difference in value is infinite. With...