Saturday, April 14, 2007

Tennis Week Interview with Oscar Wegner

Tennis Week has an interesting interview with the Oscar Wegner, who is somewhat of a lightning rod.

In the main, Wegner is plainly right in criticising the obsession with the minute details of tennis technique and expecting students to be able to think about, and consciously control, them without stumbling and completely missing the ball.

But I am unable to nail down just what all the controversy about the Wegner tennis teaching method is about.

"Hitting the ball early is a concept that needs to be debunked, even at the highest level of the game," Wegner writes in his book "Play Better Tennis In Two Hours". "I have seen too many players experience off days and not know exactly why. It is one thing to advance on the court to cut your opponent's time or to hit on the rise, putting pressure on your opponent, but it is another thing to start the stroke earlier than needed."

Look how the third sentence contradicts the first. Which one are we to go by? Is he debunking the concept of "hitting the ball early" or of "starting the stroke earlier than needed"?

If it's the latter, does he mean the whole stroke? Or just the the forward swing?

You can't prove a person right or wrong when you can't nail down what he's talking about. Now, this is quoting from a published book, so presumably this isn't mere misspeaking on Oscar's part. So, is he deliberately being ambiguous to make his idea sound controversial, or what? What is he talking about? "Hitting the ball early" or "beginning the swing early"?

One minute it's one thing, the next minute it's the other = constantly shifting ground.

What I taught Guga was to change his timing and to track the ball to give himself more timing.

More literal nonsense to confuse the issue. Talk like that can't be proven right or wrong because it can't be proven to mean anything. "More timing"? What does Wegner mean? Better timing? Or more time?

If you prepare too early you can end up rushing the stroke and you become more mechanical as a player. But if you track the ball from baseline to baseline you have much more time and you can wait on the ball.

"Track the ball"? What does he mean by "track the ball"? Watch the ball? Everybody watches the ball from baseline to baseline. So, what's new here, besides the word "track" instead of "watch"?

At clinics, I do a drill where I have a coach stand on one service line and I stand on the other and I have him serve right at me and I volley the ball back because I am tracking it and have the time to do it. I taught Kuerten to do that when he was 12. I used to tell him "wait longer".

Hold the phone. When did "tracking the ball" transubstantiate into "waiting longer"? The last thing needed at this point is more confusion of one idea with another. Unless you want your argument to be so hard to follow that people just give up and assume it must somehow make sense.

Continuing...

He would say "How long do I have to wait?" I used to say: "Wait until you feel a panic." Another example is Bjorn Borg. I worked with him on his second comeback. After a few days I said "Bjorn, you are rushing. You are too early. The more you wait for the ball the more time you will have." He looked at me and said: "that's not logical."

Thank you, Bjorn.

It's logic by eggbeater - so scrambled that most people just gape and blink, not quite sure what just hit them.

Then Wegner finally says what he means - I think. He says that preparing too early can actually make you late and have to rush your stroke.

Ah, now that is true. But if that's all Wegner's saying, where is the controversy?

Most thinking tennis coaches agree. I myself have pointed this out with regard to raising your arms too early for an overhead smash and in eliminating most of the backswing as though it is unnecessary in the serve. In both cases, you then start the forward swing from a dead stop so that you don't build up enough racket head speed. Result: though you start it early your swing is late!

It is wrong to teach tennis beginners to instantly swing their racket arm back and hold it horizontally as they chase the ball = before it bounces. And many instructors did, and still do, that. But it's also wrong to teach them not to take the racket back before the ball bounces.

And, when you listen carefully, it isn't clear whether that is really what Wegner advocates.

The illusion of controversy is a figment of confusing the unit turn with the backswing. By turning your shoulders you take the racket back. Even if your arm is immobilized in a cast, turn your shoulders and your arm moves back. Pause.

Then, when it's time to swing, the tennis racket drops down through a loop (which you may lengthen by taking the arm further back for added power) accelerating into the ball.

Where exactly does the backswing end and the forward swing begin in that loop? That's where the confusion in the issue lies. The whole loop, from the moment the racket head starts to drop (usually as or after the ball bounces) is FORWARD swing, not backswing.

Joe Dinoffer has a good article in TennisLife magazine that clears up the issue.

So, there's little real substance to this "controversy," it's just hyped to sound like one. Therefore, whether the general's command is "Racket back" or "Wait on the ball," you had better be exactly sure you know what he or she means by that.


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