Monday, April 02, 2007

Embarrassing

There are some facts reflecting on the way tennis is taught that are ... well ... embarrassing to me as a tennis teacher.

For example, despite all the formal tennis instruction going on, the vast majority of players have played all their lives without ever hearing that, at net in doubles, they shouldn't look back to watch their baseline partner hit the ball.

How can it be that billions and billions of tennis players the world over don't know better than to just park in a certain spot and keep turning their heads like spectators as the ball goes back and forth? You see it everywhere you go. And it's a safety issue on top of it all! So where is the instruction informing players why they shouldn't do that?

Presumably, those who teach the game and write the books and magazine articles see this and don't know that it's wrong. Embarrassing, because that's the first thing to know about playing doubles.

Presumably they don't notice that advanced doubles players and the pros look back but rarely. Yet guess what? If you ask them, you will discover that even those advanced players and pros don't realize that they are doing anything differently. They have learned not to look back by Natural Learning, unconsciously, and are unaware of NOT doing it.

Fine, but those who teach the game should be more observant.

And why do they also never teach players to get out of harm's way by moving to the alley instead of running backwards? That's another thing that advanced players always subconsciously learn, but no one is aware enough to think to teach it to beginners.

Instead we obsess about grips and stances and the niceties of form. With total tunnel vision.

Another example is in the teaching of how to hit an overhead. You're taught that, as soon as you see the lob going up, you should raise both arms - cocking your racket into the back-scratching position behind you and pointing up with your free arm - as you move back to hit an overhead.

How can it be that this bad instruction has such legs? How come it keeps getting parroted round and round the world? Has no one noticed how awkward it is to be looking up and leaning backward as you move back with your racket cocked high behind you and your arm way up in the air? How much more off balance could you get?

But the kicker is that no one with a good overhead actually does it this way. I first noticed this in a film of Billy Jean King, one of very few women with an excellent overhead. She kept her racket down alongside her right calf as she moved back under the ball. She kept her other arm down too.

Watch any pro with a good overhead: they don't raise either arm till they need to. And hopefully that's not till after they've finished moving backward.

In this lesson on the overhead I show an example of a world-class player teaching you the wrong way, apparently unaware that in the same film he hits all the non-posed-for overheads the right way - by disregarding his own advice.

Embarrassing.

How does stuff like this happen? It makes those of us who teach the game look stupid.

If it isn't on some official list of what to teach, it remains a big secret because nobody thinks for himself enough see that he should teach it. If some authority figure says to do it, it must be right, so don't bother to question it and make sure it makes sense or that good players actually do it before you go around teaching it yourself.

Even if you've subconsciously learned NOT to do it that way yourself.

Yet another example is Australian Doubles. Where did people get the idea that it's for drawing an errant service return on a big point? If that's what you use it for, you usually get disappointed. What's so hard about returning serve down the line? More often than not, the receiver will successfully do so. Right?

Then what? More often than not you will lose the point ... BECAUSE you're in the AD formation without knowing how to play it properly.

Admit it, you wonder why anyone would waste their time with this stupid line-up that doesn't magically make the receiver miss like it's supposed to.

But AD isn't a stupid line-up: you just never were told what it's really FOR. It isn't for making the receiver miss the service return: it's for poaching and can also be used to help your server to net safely in serve-and-volley doubles. So, when you play it, you must poach. If you play AD frequently enough for the opposition to expect the poach, then you have to mix in half-poaches to keep the receiver guessing. But you aren't playing AD right if you aren't AFTER that service return.

When you play it right it does win you points.

So, how come billions and billions of players the world over know about Australian Doubles but don't know what it's for? Don't those who teach the game know that?

During the Tennis Boom, when Timothy Gallwey wrote The Inner Game of Tennis, it took the tennis world by storm, because Gallwey put into words and explained what everyone already knows about the way tennis is taught. Yet we heard nothing but a thundering silence from the tennis establishment.

They acted like it never happened and continued teaching the way they always had.

I submit that the tennis culture itself has become ossified into an obsession with form and a resistance to any challenge of conventional wisdom. If some big name said it, don't even THINK of disagreeing with it. The illogic behind that is that you are wrong just because of who he is.

Fortunately, there are signs that some of the gatekeepers are starting to remove the plugs from their ears, and that can't happen soon enough.

True, the big wind they let in the door will contain a lot of noise. People repackaging old ideas in technobabble to make them sound new and people creating illusions of controversy where there is none. But the good stuff comes in too, from the innovative who work harder because they are newcomers. They will challenge these cliches and knock them down, one by one.

Then those of who teach tennis won't have to be embarrassed by them anymore.


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