The Receiving Loop

In the 2011 Miami Final, Rafael Nadal hit a winner past Novak Djokovic that looked rather strange on TV (the point). The ball landed quite close to him, at least, close in the scope of professional tennis. It appeared to be the kind of shot that Novak had successfully retrieved countless times throughout his career, but in this instance, he didn’t move. The ball flew right past him, and he didn’t take a single step.

So what happened?

In a word: attention. Novak was distracted by the fact that he thought Rafa’s previous shot was out. That was all it took for the best retriever in the world to let a relatively innocuous ball blow completely past him for a winner.

Attention and Intention

Some players are naturally great retrievers, but for most, the skill doesn’t come so automatically. They’re vaguely aware that they’re supposed to watch the ball and move their feet, but that’s about it. The receiving loop transforms this vague understanding into a specific, repeatable, trainable process, which, once habituated, will drastically improve your performance.

Here’s the loop:

1. Look
2. Split
3. Probe
4. Hit
5. Move + Look

At step 5, the loop repeats, with the end of one iteration merging with the start of the next. While moving after hitting, you are both finishing your actions for this shot, and looking across the net to receive the next one. The receiving loop is an attentive process. At each step, your attention is directed at a certain set of stimuli (and diverted from others), and because of that, you succeed.

1. Look

Imagine it’s championship point in a tournament you really care about. Your opponent has an easy forehand, and you have to defend. You’re going to be focused on your opponent, eyes primed for any sign or signal of where the ball might go, so that you can somehow return it and stay in the point. That level of attention, that level of visual focus on what your opponent is doing, is what you need to produce when receiving every ball, not just balls on important points.

Watching your opponent’s contact often requires intentional, deliberate attention. It’s easy to get distracted by how your last shot felt, or how it flew, or whether it’s going to be in or out, or what you think is about to happen. Ignore those distractions, look across the net, and prepare to react.

2. Split

As your opponent is hitting, split-step. Your goal is to land right as you learn where the ball is going, and then explode towards where you want to be. The split-step’s timing is determined by the visual information you’ve gotten from Look. A good starting point if you’re new to actually split-stepping: split-step such that you’re at the apex of your jump when your opponent contact’s the ball.

We want to be on balance when we split step, able to easily explode in any direction as we land. Try to get stopped before you split. If you’re still moving from your last recovery, at least stutter step and slow down a little, because the more momentum you have when you split, the more awkward it will be to move in certain directions.

(The split-step can be skipped in very defensive situations. Instead of splitting, guess where your opponent is going to hit, and move there before they contact the ball.)

3. Probe

Probing is the act of spacing your body with respect to the ball, with the goal of intercepting it in the center of your string bed, and delivering to it the strike you want to deliver. It is an intentional, urgent, visually-anchored process. That little yellow sphere flying across the net is your only attention anchor as you probe. Actively receive it into the spot you want.

Fight for your desired contact point. Fight with your feet, fight with your legs, your knees, your butt. If, once your feet are set, you’re still out of position, lean with your trunk, or even contort your arm. Everything you do during probe is for the purpose of intercepting the ball, which you’re visually anchored to, so you can maximally comfortably deliver the strike you want to deliver.

If you find yourself getting lost during this step, work on discovering (or habituating your understanding of) exactly where, in space, you want the ball to be such that your swing is maximally comfortable. In order to fight for your contact point, you must understand your contact point, and that’s not a trivial task.

Fight for your desired contact point.

Stroke preparation also happens during this step, but it should be automatic. Your desire to strike the ball in a certain way will cause you to turn, cause you to prepare your hand, and will naturally initiate any backswing. Your focus during probing is, I reiterate, external, anchored solely to the ball. Any attention spent on your own body will be detrimental to performance. Such attention is sometimes necessary for refining your mechanics, but that is an attention pattern better reserved for the practice court, not a match.

4. Hit

Hold your gaze still and hit the ball. Intercept the ball on the center of your stringbed, delivering the strike you intended. The fewer verbal thoughts during the striking process, the better. The ideal number of verbalized thoughts is zero.

Immediately post hit, your match process and practice process should often diverge. In practice, viscerally feel the result of your strike. Feel the swing, the contact, the spacing. Register how close the result was to your intention – what went well, what didn’t. This processing will cost you around 300 ms, so it is not appropriate for all situations.

In a match, immediately discard all of that. The instant you hit the ball, look back across the net, and get ready to receive. Actually, you can move your attention back across the net before you’ve even hit the ball. There’s a moment, about halfway into your swing, after which you can no longer alter it. Once that moment of full commitment is reached, context switch from striking to receiving.

5. Move + Look (looping back to the beginning)

There exists no relaxation period after hitting a shot in tennis. After you hit, recover with as much intensity as you used while striking, and simultaneously begin your receiving loop anew with Look.

Recover intentionally, regardless of difficulty. Sometimes, your desired defense location will be close to where you already are, and you won’t have to move very far. Other times, you’ll need to sprint back into the court. Your best defense location is determined by the geometry of your opponent’s possible shots, and that changes based on the shot you’ve hit. For example, on a standard cross-court rally ball, you’ll prepare for the next ball pretty close to where you hit from, because your opponent has better access to cross-court angles than inside-out angles, but other recoveries are more complicated.

After Lorenzo Musetti plays the drop shot pictured below, he needs to Move a lot, because his optimal defense location is no where close to the location he hit from.

The Move step is easy to lose, especially if you often practice by grinding cross-court shots, for which the recovery is rather trivial. Build a habit of intentional, active recovery, which is driven by what you’re seeing across the net. This dovetails into our other critical habit: immediately Look across the net after you Hit and start your receiving loop again.

Repeat

That’s it. If you’ve done Move right, you’ve combined it with Look, and you’re successfully into your next iteration of the receiving loop. You’re ready to Split when your opponent hits, Probe the incoming ball, Hit it, and then repeat again.

Practice the ENTIRE Loop

Non-professional players frequently unintentionally neglect parts of the receiving loop as they practice. The feed in a coach-fed group class is a particularly insidious instigator here. The feed is slow and predictable, so your success rate can be high even without well-oiled receiving, and that fosters bad habits early in the receiving loop.

Look – Even if you aren’t watching the coach strike the ball, you’re probably not going to be late, because the feed is slow.

Split – The feed will come right to you. You don’t need the elastic energy boost from a split-step to get to it.

Probe – Again, because the feed comes right to you, you can get away with lazy, non-intentional probing.

Because the feed doesn’t differentially reward good receiving, you could easily hit 200 feeds over the course of a 2-hour class, but on those 200 shots, never practice your receiving loop a single time, and because you’ll probably make 180 of them regardless, you won’t even notice.

The solution is to perform the entire loop attentively, even though it’s overkill for the feed. Look at your coach’s feeding motion as if they were your opponent. Try to split, even though the extra boost isn’t necessary. If you can’t split, at least start in an athletic stance. Actively probe the ball, even though it’s coming right to you, and then, of course, hit it, move, and look across the net like always.

The Verbal Brain is Slow

This article is written with words, because words are how we communicate, but verbal processing is quite useless while actually playing tennis. This post is meant to help you identify weaknesses in your receiving process which you can then habituate with carefully designed practice. It is not meant to be thought about while playing.

The “Hit” Drill

Here’s one such practice drill. Say “hit” the moment your opponent’s strings strike the ball. The exact moment, not a moment sooner or later. Many of my younger students aren’t great at refocusing on their opponent after they hit, and this drill forces that context switch from Hit to Move + Look, with the goal of ultimately habituating it.

Your executive function resources are limited. If, during a match, you have to mentally say “hit” to force your context switch, that’s a great temporary solution, but it still steals attention which would, ideally, be used elsewhere. Receiving drills make you a little better overnight, but the real magic comes once the skills they reward become habits.

Even Djokovic lets the occasional rally ball fly past him due to lack of attention. It looks strange, because his attentional control is so dialed-in 99.9% of the time, but everyone’s human. Figure out where your attentional control is lacking, practice it, and your receiving skills will thank you.