In short, you are almost certainly not good in practice either. Re-contextualize the information you receive from practice, and you’ll stop being confused by your match level.
How You Start Matters
It’s the start of practice. You hit your first 10 forehands, and they go alright. You mishit one or two – always need to get calibrated on that side. On the backhand, it’s similar. You mistime a couple, but after about 20-30 strokes, you’ve got it. After 45 minutes, you’re cracking the ball, and you continue to do so for the rest of the session.
The next day you play a match. In the first game you mishit a forehand+1 and lose serve. In the second game, you mistime an easy backhand return on break point, and your opponent holds. You’re confused, because two days ago, you were crushing those shots. What went wrong?
Here is the critical distinction: yesterday, you were cracking the ball at the end of practice. Not at the start.
It’s easy to forget the first 10-20 minutes of practice, during which you were making the exact same kinds of errors you made in the match. The second half of practice, when you played well, produced far more dopamine and registered itself much more vividly in your memory. Most players file away the first 30 minutes as “just warming up” and the rest as “their true level,” but the truth is the opposite: the first 30 minutes of practice is much closer to the match environment than the rest, and therefore it is the first 30 minutes which best approximates your match level.
Matches Destroy Rhythm
In matches, you’ll routinely go full minutes at a time without hitting a certain shot, and under that constraint, you still need the shot to succeed. For example, you might go three minutes without seeing a short forehand, and then need to hit a forehand winner on break point. If you can’t execute your short forehand after a 3-minute break, don’t expect to hit many forehand winners on break point. Success out-of-rhythm is a fundamental demand of the match environment.
Test yourself. Warm up your body physically, and then walk onto the court without hitting a single ball. Can you:
- hit your first serve at 70% of your usual speed
- not double fault if you miss it
- time the resulting short ball
- follow it into net, then knock off the easy volley
If you can’t, consider yourself as not having that ability in matches. This re-framing alone will resolve 90% of your practice-match confusion.
Practice-Result to Match-Level Examples
Below are three real-world examples of a practice result, the resultant incorrect student perception, and then the actual corresponding match-level.
Low Contact Training
Practice: A player is standing a step inside the baseline, and I am dropping low balls for them; we’re working on their topspin contact. They hit 20 great ones, lose track of the feeling for a bit, miss 8 of the next 10, then find it and hit another 20 great ones.
Perception: The player remembers being good at the low forehand, because they remember how good it felt at the start, and that once they lost it, they were able to find it again, and it felt good again. They “have that shot.”
Reality: In the middle, they missed 8 of 10. In a match, those 8 misses would cost you at least 2 games, likely 3-4. Flipping three games turns a 6-3 win into a 3-6 loss, and a 6-1 win into a 4-4 battle. You are at a completely different level without the lapse in the middle.
Short Approach Patterns
Practice: I feed the ball to the service line with a small amount of underspin. The player attacks the ball, moves forward, and then finishes off the subsequent volleys and overheads. At first, they miss the approach about half the time. Eventually they’ve got it, and we start working on the volley follow-up. By the end, they’re routinely getting through the 3-ball pattern of approach+volley+overhead, striking all 3 with quality on 9/10 reps.
Perception: The student remembers the end, so they think of themselves as “good at approach patterns,” and they expect to win roughly 9/10 points in similar situations.
Reality: The beginning of the session, during which they missed 50% of the low approaches, is their current match level. Over the course of ~1-2 months practicing this pattern, that 50% success rate will climb towards the 90% clip (of which they’re already physically capable after an hour of drilling).
Cooperative Rallying
Practice: Tom is cooperatively rallying with a friend. The friend slightly mishits a slice, and it lands at the service line instead of deep. Tom half-heartedly moves forward, and so he ends up shanking the ball into the bottom of the net. Throughout the practice, Tom’s forehand feels great.
Perception: Tom believes his forehand is strong.
Reality: The next day Tom plays a match, and his opponent mishits a slice. Tom runs forward for real this time, swings at the ball for real, and misses. The next ball, his opponent moonballs, and Tom makes clean contact with it, but sails it just long. Then Tom has to play a running forehand, which he doesn’t quite space properly, and also misses.
Tom is confused, but if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that none of the shots Tom was forced to play in his match were actually practiced during his hitting session yesterday, and even the one that he could have practiced – the awkward short slice – he chose not to.
Practice Showcases Skills, Matches Require Habits
Let’s take the overhead as a final example. Many players possess the physical skill to produce a great overhead, but for few is it habituated. If you drill 10, 20, 50 overheads, you’ll get the feeling down, the spacing, the movement, and you might hit the last 10 in a row perfectly, but the ability to come out cold, minimal warm-up, and crack the first 10 in a row? That’s rare.
In matches, you often go 10-20 minutes between overheads. You’ll hit one at 1-1, the next at 4-3, and the third on set point in the tiebreak. So ask yourself this: which practice overhead is more predictive of your level under those conditions? The first overhead of the day, when you were out-of-rhythm, or the 50th, before which you’d just practiced 49?
