Updates on What I'm Learning (Summer 2020)

 My Tennis Struggles

Two important moments:

1. Playing a member/guest tournament in summer 2019 and feeling like I wanted to kill myself and never play tennis again, esp in match against Flanders and Chads daughter.
2. Playing Steve Heath in summer 2020 and successfully implanting my strategy to win the first nine games in 25 min and then going on to lose the match in three sets.

I did not play much singles during my key developmental phase and so never quite developed strategies for winning at singles. I believe my confidence level and maybe more importantly comfort level when stepping on the court to play doubles is higher than in singles. I think I know how to win when I play doubles. I think I have a clearer sense of what to do. This feeling is not there in singles. (Also there is another person there to share the burden with in doubles.)This problem is compounded by the fact that I am a teacher of this game and so the assumption is that I should have this, i.e. how to win, figured out by now and that if I don’t I am a fraud.

So, frequently I have no plan for winning at singles and I have long felt that my style of play, aggressive forehand and serve, higher risk shots, etc is somehow “wrong” because at some point I internalized the message from my H.S. coach that I need to be more patient and hit more balls to win points. My style was somehow “wrong.” Matt’s style was somehow “right.”

I always had the feeling that my HS coach felt that my doubles partner Matt was the better player of the two of us. I think I often felt that in singles I was not quite measuring up. I have a fleeting memory that the coach even felt that Matt and I should have been broken up so that Matt could have a shot at singles. All of this is compounded by the fact that I was cut from the varsity team my freshman year and Matt was not. This was my “punishment” for playing basketball that year and not just tennis. I think this translates into a feeling of insecurity when it comes to my singles play, and maybe a feeling of inadequacy, like there is always something I have to prove to someone else.

Maybe what much of this adds up to is a feeling of real helplessness? I should be able to win in singles because I am a instructor after all but I don’t really know how to win in singles. And so every match is a kind of test or reminder of what I don’t really actually know that feels very public in one of two ways—I seek the approval of an other (surrogates today are

Maybe Mike or Mark) and my reputation as a professional is always on the line. No wonder I find myself during some singles matches experiencing utter misery and promising myself that I will never put myself in this situation again. There is so much on the line for my ego. So much to prove to other people—I AM as good as Matt, I DO deserve the title of professional. 

BIG PICTURE: I don’t know how to do what I am supposed to know how to do and everyone is watching and keeping track of my performance.

As a side note, the fact that I keep watching tennis videos and drawn especially to ones about strategy says a lot. This is a sign of my efforts to try to learn what I don’t actually know.

Also, I won’t learn the things I need to learn and be able to put all of this behind me if I don’t start playing more singles matches in order to find ways to work through these struggles. Until I find a better way to approach singles play and experiment with implementing it these problems will persist. 

I have learned one thing, though, and that is that thinking about the score of the match and measuring my success against the metric of the score is the greatest mistake. I think I have learned that in order to move beyond these struggles I must teach myself to think about different things during the match, things that aren’t related to the score. The only one I have right now is strategy. What is my game plan to win, maybe 2-3 things, and am I

Implementing those things successfully? That really, I think, needs to be the metric against which I measure my success. 

Another thing though is getting more attentive to my opponent and what he is up to. A great victory for me came last summer when I realized I had an opponent in doubles who didn’t want to stand at net and so started drop shorting in every return. I never do things like that—find out what my opponent doesn’t like to do and try to put them in the position of doing it. That, in itself, is a kind of strategy and one I don’t think about enough.

9/24/20

Yesterday I played a match against Steve Heath again. This was our third match in a few years. The first time we played we split sets and he called it a day. I think I lost the first and won the second. The second time we played was a month or more back when I had a complete breakdown. Up 6-0, 3-0, I lost my mind and went on to lose the match in the third set. Yesterday we played abbreviated sets, first to four. I lost the first two games of the first set and then went on to win the next 12 games in a row to win all three abbreviated sets. I am incredibly proud and pleased with this outcome. 

Why?

The first two games were terrible and I had no plan at all. But then at one point I noticed him make a mistake. So, this made me feel better. An error. How many times will he make an error? Let’s try again. It was a little experiment. The last time I played him I rushed things a lot. My strategy was simple: hit as many balls as possible to his backhand, esp serves. It worked brilliantly (until it didn’t). I went on the offensive with my forehand and just completely dominated for the first nine games. I wish that I could remember what exactly changed after that, how the momentum shifted when I had the finish line in sight. I think that he started getting more balls back and I wasn’t able to adjust. I wasn’t able to put the point away as quickly and this throw me off and I don’t think I had a plan B. 

What I realized yesterday going into the match was that because I haven’t been playing as much, it will be high risk to try to go on offensive in the way I did last time. That’s a hard strategy to implement when you’re not on the top of your game. You make a lot of errors going for big shots early in the point. It’s a strategy to avoid long rallies, to cut them off before they happen because you know that if they happen you’re unlikely to win them.

So I didn’t think I could do yesterday what I did last time. And I didn’t really have a plan to replace last time’s plan. Suffice it to say I started the match with no real game plan (unlike last time) and this was probably not a good way to begin. Hence, losing the first two games.

But then I began to see that he would make a mistake if I kept him in the point long enough. I began to adopt this strategy: If I can keep in the point to a 4-5 ball rally, he will make an error. So that’s what I did, and it worked. But it wasn’t easy and it wasn’t my preferred way of playing.

The problem was that he’s kind of a grinder. He doesn’t hit with big pace or topspin, but he gets a lot of balls back. So I’m a bit out of my element because the quality of the rally is not what I want in terms of pace/power/spin. Still, I tried to focus on a few things:

1. Play to his backhand when possible, lots of balls, high and looping occasionally.
2. Mix in shots coming to the net in each service game. Not serve and volley every point, but at least once a game and not always when I’m up. It would be interesting to know what my win %age was on points where I served and volleyed. 
3. Serve big when I’m on the shaded side and try to win a few free points on serve. 
4. If I double fault, I MUST try to get the first serve in on the next point by taking pace off and hitting more spin.
5. He doesn’t like big spin on serve, so give him high bouncers, esp to his backhand side (strategy carried over from last time). 
6. Don’t bother trying to hit over backhand with topspin. It’s not going to win me points. Go with what I can do successfully, lots of slice backhands. I think I can beat him in a head to head on backhand and I think I mostly did. 
7. Don’t go for high risk aggressive forehands but rather just use the forehand to try to move him around and pick on his backhand. If the opportunity arises to put the ball away with the forehand, do so.
8. Do my very best to get every return back into play. So many points are lost in the first shot. Don’t give away free points by missing returns of serve (esp since his serve is not hard).
9. And the big one—make him hit another ball. 

What concerned me about this strategy is that my game is more of an attacking game and so it worried me to be shifting into a more passive, wait-and-see kind of strategy and I wish there was someone I could speak to about this. I think in the end what I did was effective because I won points and the strategy essentially worked. He eventually made mistakes, but this is not my preferred way of playing tennis, for sure. 

Finally, my macro-level goal for myself when playing singles is to try to focus on the process of how to win and not not the score. I did this quite well yesterday. I was always aware of the score, but I tried to not let it dictate my emotional experience of the match. My metric for success was whether or not, once I identified what I thought could be a winning strategy, I could implement that strategy effectively. In this way a loss would not be a failure if I effectively implemented my strategy and if I effected my strategy and won, well, winning was the byproduct of doing so.

Another thing I thought about yesterday and since is the idea of playing the match as a process of trying to solve a puzzle. This seems like a powerful way to think about playing a tennis match. Instead of, here is my game plan and here’s me trying to implement it, it’s more like, my game plan is usually to try to set up my forehand and to win with my forehand and serve BUT, what can I learn from paying attention to my opponent in order to adapt or adjust my play to what I think it will take to beat him. In this way, playing the match is a kind of process of discovery, to learn how to win it. This interests me and it’s not at all a way I’ve ever approached a singles match before. 

From a guy online: 

Ben “Green shirt guy” is the exact opponent most 3.5 - 4.5 players should be playing frequently if they want an accurate barometer to measure themselves against as a total tennis player- where their strokes, fitness, strategy, and mental toughness games are at.  What do you gain by playing someone who can just blow you off the court with power and superior technique?  Or someone to whom you can do that to?

Win or lose, this type of player will highlight areas you need to improve.