Coaching Tennis with Drills

Drills are an effective training technique, but I feel that they are overemphasized today and sometimes inappropriately used. The result can be counterproductive. So, here's some food for thought on that subject. I hope it encourages you to carefully observe the effect of drilling on players, so that you get the most out your drills and never have them backfire on you.

We naturally assume that if you drill something into a player's head, he or she then will automatically repeat the pattern during play, rather like an automaton, unconsciously.

Well, that is sometimes true. For example, drilling can "groove" a new or changed stroke, so that the muscle memory instilled becomes more or less automatic. But drilling alone won't give a player that new stroke under match play conditions. At some point you must stop feeding him shots for that stroke and practice executing that new stroke under less-than-ideal conditions, as during actual match play.

Drilling is even less effective when you're trying to teach a tactical pattern. That is CONSCIOUS behavior, involving CONSCIOUS decision making. If you try to drill that tactical pattern into players' heads with mind-numbing repetitions of a drill, you will succeed in nothing but numbing their minds.

In that state of mind a person's state of consciousness dims. So what? Memory of what he's doing also dims. For example, you forget a dream moments after awakening, don't you? That's because it occured while you were asleep -- in a lowerd state of consciousness -- and thus leaves little or no trace behind in memory.

In The Inner Game of Tennis, Tim Gallwey speaks of this phenomenon and its implications. Natural Learning doesn't take place because memory is impaired. So, especially when teaching tactics, you want to RAISE the player's level of awareness and alertness, so that he or she will remember the lesson, recognize that particular situation during matchplay, and recall what to do in it.

Now here's a little story to illustrate what I mean:

Once upon a time, there was a basketball coach who liked the running game. That is, he wanted his teams to fast-break off defensive rebounds, beating the other team down the floor to score by an easy lay-up. He had a good team. In fact, about halfway through the season, it was undefeated. Yet he was frustrated by his failure to get them to run their fast-break during games. One day he said, "Girls, what's the matter? Do you get amnesia out there?"

They felt bad. It wasn't that they weren't trying to do everything he said. In fact, it was quite the other way around: they recklessly "sacrificed their bodies" diving for loose balls to impress him.

His solution, a conventional one, was to "overpractice" fast-breaking. At this point, there was a lull in the schedule. So, for over a week, every practice began and ended with fast-breaking drills. There was a good deal of fast-break drilling in the middle too. In fact, every other kind of practice was minimized to afford over an hour of fast-breaking in every two-hour session. It got so bad that, every time you closed your eyes, you heard "Exit! Outlet!" and saw a replay.

They repeated this drill so often it became like tying your shoes. They didn't even have to think about it anymore. The kid who got the rebound turned, and there was the kid who was supposed to get the exit pass, and she turned and there was the kid breaking for the basket. Boom. They were on automatic pilot, and I thought I was gonna scream if he didn't cut it out already and stop making them run that play over and over and over again.

Not that I didn't expect this practice to work: it's just that it was boring me to death.

Was I wrong! The next game was a disaster. Their whole game fell apart. You could almost see the little cloud around each kid's head. They obviously couldn't even see straight through it because they passed the ball right to players on the opposing team. They did this so often that I was sitting there wondering, "Can't you tell red from white uniforms?" It was THAT bad! (The other team soon learned that they would pass to anyone who waved at them for the ball.)

Run their regular offense? What offense? They forgot their whole game. Shoot? They did everything but shoot. I finally started yelling "Score!" every time a kid had a shot to keep her from just dribbling or passing the ball around some more instead. It was like they forgot that you dribble and pass to get a shot, not just to dribble and pass the ball around. And they never learned from a mistake: they just kept repeating it over and over again.

Astonished, I wondered what had gotten into their heads. I am ashamed to say that enough of it had gotten into my own head that I didn't notice till the second quarter that they hadn't fast-breaked once! And the head coach hadn't said anything about it during time-outs. I kept quiet till I could tell that he hadn't noticed either. Then I elbowed him and said, "They aren't fast-breaking."

He gave me a jaw-drop and that one, slow blink that annihilates what you just said.

It was too embarrassing. So, at first, he acted as though it wasn't happening. But finally, during half-time, he gently called it to their attention that they weren't fast-breaking and reminded them to do so. He reminded them during time-outs in the second half. He was quite patient: he did not get mad at them. But there was no way those kids could remember to fast-break when it was time to — namely, when a defensive rebound came off the board. Their minds were a blur.

So much for trying to drill fast-breaking into their heads.

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