Archive for category: Tennis Meditations

The orthodox approach to teaching tennis is antiquated and unsophisticated — it’s as if the entire industry got caught inside a circa-1955 time bubble.

My evidence is as follows, Your Honor.

First, none of the teaching pros I know routinely use video technology despite its being immensely helpful (although usually quite sobering).

Second, most health professionals require clients to fill out an intake form before they get started. Not tennis teachers, though, although it’s their job to make their students’ tennis game ‘healthier.’ The typical tennis teacher’s intake consists of, “Hi, I’m Joe. What would you like to work on today?” Useful and even vital information isn’t surfaced because of the utter absence of pre- lesson input:

• Context. Why does the student want to take lessons? Do they want to work on just one stroke or get better across the board? Do they want to get a little better or a lot better? What’s their time window for seeing improvement?
• Motivation. Why do they play the game? Is it for social reasons? To win a championship? Because they have a growth mindset and are playing a ‘long game’ to get better as a person?
• Effective Teaching. What is their learning style? Is it kinesthetic? Verbal/metaphorical? Different learning styles call for different approaches to imparting information.

Similarly for post-lesson ‘post-play.’ Workshop teachers typically have their students fill out post-gathering evaluations. What worked and what didn’t? How do you feel about what you just experienced? Do you have feedback about how your learning process might be accelerated? This is all useful information, but it is rarely elicited — and it is never elicited, so far as I know, as part of a formal pedagogical process.

Put all these factors together and the current conventional approach to teaching tennis emerges as both simple and simplistic. It treats the game as physical (“Watch the ball! “Turn your shoulder!”) and tactical/strategic (“When you hit that shot, you should have followed it up to the net”) while ignoring the uniqueness of the student as well as the game’s inner dimension with its mental, emotional and spiritual components.

In sum, today’s shrunken tennis-teaching canvas falls short in two ways. It disregards the student’s individuality and unique needs, and it also fails to honor the fundamentally integral nature of the game. To excel at tennis, or even just to get better at it, people have to develop a stronger inner game in addition to improving technically and tactically. Unfortunately, the inner dimension is largely or totally disregarded by orthodox tennis teachers unless their niche requires them to help their charges get better at competing — high school coach, university coach, tennis mill employee, etc.

I understand the logic for this — “We tennis pros are jocks, not shrinks! We shouldn’t be getting out of our lane. We should be staying with what we know” — but the approach is old-fashioned and outdated. ‘Circa 1955,’ right? Which was before the explosion of introspection in the 1960s and 1970s that gave birth to Gallwey’s Inner Game, launched a thousand other personal-growth ships, and started us on the road toward fully integral thinking, which — to oversimplify immensely — builds both depth and growth into our model of the human psyche.

I’m really taken aback at how the critique I’ve laid out appears to be absent from the current tennis culture and community. Maybe it’s out there and I’m just not plugged into it. Still, from where I sit (and stand, and whack tennis balls), this strikes me as a massive tennis-culture blind spot.

What would an integral approach to teaching tennis look like? I started writing about this in an earlier post (“Tennis as a Secular Martial Art: A Curriculum”) and I’ll elaborate on the subjet in future meditations. For now, I’ll leave it at this: It would include everything that the current orthodox approach does, and build and expand around it.

Does the current approach to teaching tennis seem optimized to you? Have you ever wished for something different, something better? In the rest of your life, do you tend to accept orthodoxy or to challenge and re-vision it?

Tennis is a game of virtuous and vicious circles. I hit a great forehand and that emboldens me to hit another great one. I miss badly, that renders me insecure, and so I execute my next shot tentatively and screw up even worse.

Up the good ladder, down the bad one …

Today my practice partner hit a big topspin backhand deep into my backhand corner. I’m a one-handed backhand guy, so shots like that spell trouble for me. (It’s how Nadal beat Federer for years, so it’s not exactly an embarrassing confession.)

When I saw that big, heavy topspin coming at me, a neon “uh-oh” flashed through my mind.

(Okay, I’ll be honest: It was more like, “Oh, f–k.”)

It’s not an impossible shot for me to return, but it’s a tricky one. The timing is delicate and it’s really hard to get the weight shift right. And of course, the alarm bell going off in my mind made it worse. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about without being a little bit panicky!

There’s a fix for this, as there is for most mental issues on the court. Turn threats into a positive. Instead of “oh, f–k,” how about this for a replacement: “Oh boy, I get to try something really challenging!”

It’s a quite simple program, really: Replace fear with excitement. Replace anxiety with opportunity.

I’m reminded of a joke my dad used to tell me. A family has two boys. The parents are concerned that one is too pessimistic and the other is too optimistic, so they decide to give the pessimist boy a bicycle for Christmas and the optimistic boy a bag of horse manure.

The pessimist boy sees the bike and goes, “Oh no, now I’m going to fall off it and break my leg, and I’ll be crippled forever.”

The optimist boy sees the bag of horse manure and says, “Oh boy, oh boy, I got a horse, but it ran away!”

When you switch from fear to opportunity, you’re switching from pessimist to optimist. You’re turning your anxiety into eagerness.

There’s an entire school of psychology built around this. It‘s called ’positive psychology.’ It’s not about going into denial about what’s bad and frightening. It’s about consciously choosing to make the most out of what life hands you.

Practicing positive psychology has been shown to help enormously when it comes to getting into flow.

‘Flow’ as in, that state where things come easily and effortlessly, where you feel like you’re performing at your best.

Flow as in … the infamous zone.

And it starts with undoing that toxic “uh-oh.”

Do you manage your fear or do you let your fear manage you? Do you have an escape hatch when a vicious circle closes in?

You probably know the expression, ‘Less is more.’ It applies to tennis and much more. Today I asked myself: In what ways is this true for tennis? Because we can probably agree that the game is like the proverbial onion that you can keep peeling, layer after layer. Beneath all that, though, it ultimately reduces to ‘less is more:’

• Simple technique is better than complex technique. The less convoluted your mechanics are, the less likely they are to get screwed up.
• A relatively empty, ‘less is more’ mind is better than a jampacked one. To be clear, the counsel “don‘t think when you‘re playing a point” isn‘t realistic, if by “don‘t think” you mean, “Have a completely empty mind.” If you’re not visualizing a target when you‘re playing a point, you’re not thinking enough. You need to apply tactics, court awareness and technical corrections on the fly (or lope, or stagger), so don’t listen to those folks who say, “Don‘t think when you play.” “Think less” does make sense, though — and so does, “Don‘t think mechanically.”
• It sometimes helps to take time off. I’m a bit compulsive about my game. If I’m working on something and I feel like I’m making progress, I want to keep at it until I believe I’ve got it down. This compulsiveness can be counter-productive. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve taken a couple of days off, and during that time I integrated the changes I was working on faster than if I’d kept plugging away. Down time is learning time, too. In our puritanical work-ethic culture, it can be easy to forget this.

There is endless complexity within tennis’s different aspects — technique, strategy, the inner game. It’s important to remember that at the end of the rainbow, things can get luminously clear, straightforward and simple to execute.

There‘s a term for when you get there. It‘s The Zone.

I suspect that our profoundest sages experience life as a permanent Zone state — as less beneath the endless more, as simple and straightforward beneath everything.

Do you get stuck inside complexity? In what ways can you simplify your tennis game — and your life?

After I lost my quarter-final match at the New England Slam a couple of weeks ago, I headed off to a nearby cafe and treated myself to a modest repast of two pecan squares, a piece of raspberry-crumble coffee cake, and an iced latte with no restrictions on the sugar other than its being Sugar in the Raw, a bow to virtue that was basically my little bargain with the god of diabetes.

Yum, yum, yum, this little piggy said, as he drove all the way home …

I didn’t — and don’t — feel an ounce of guilt about what I did. I enjoyed those treats, I knew my self-indulgence wouldn’t last beyond those brief stinging hours post-defeat — and, most importantly of all, I felt as if I’d earned all those yummy calories.

Now that a couple of weeks have passed, I’ve come to see that those pecan squares and that raspberry-crumble cake were talking to me. “You may not have admitted it to yourself,” they were saying, “but for the last two weeks or so, you were building your life around this tournament. You were trying to peak your game — you were keeping an eagle eye on your diet — the tournament was the center of your life. And now, my friend, it’s over. It’s time to celebrate and move on!”

With that dive into self-indulgence, I was honoring the fact that I’d been really intent on doing myself proud at the tournament. I’d been soft-pedaling that reality to myself, but beneath the superficial ‘Aw shucks, it’s just a l’il ol’ supersenior tournament’ attitude I’d adopted, I was taking the event very seriously.

I’d fallen short of my goal, but that wasn’t why I went hog-wild. I did it because I’d been much more invested in success than I was letting on to myself. “Carl,” all those sweet things were telling me, “you’re not the cool cat you pretend to be.”

I’ve been watching the Netflix series Break Point about world-class tennis players. They don’t pretend to be cool — they want to win, they want to be the best, and they want it badly. They are, in this sense, out of the closet. Not infrequently, they leave the court weeping when they lose.

I wouldn’t let myself do that. It doesn’t seem seemly. The competitions are too small-time for that — and besides that, I think of myself as a philosopher, and philosophers should transcend, right? Right??? But Mr. Pecan Square and Ms. Raspberry-Crumble Coffee Cake were telling me something different. They were telling me, “You really, really wanted it, pal.”

And they were also telling me: “And now, my friend, you are free.”

Do you play it cool? Do you really own and embrace your desires? How willing are you to want something passionately, knowing that failure, despite what the gurus tell you, actually is an option?