Tennis Players, What's Your Favorite Shot?

an idea short of taking a lesson or two, is to just go to an empty court alone sometime and work on your serve. ive done that occasionally, usually it does help

Lex, my simplest serve advice (I teach tennis professionally) is to point your left foot toward the right net post and allow your tossing arm to follow in that line. Keep it straight and let the ball to roll off your fingertips, placing it slightly right of directly overhead. If you imagine a clock face above you with 12 overhead then that would put the ball at 1. A continental grip is ideal but something closer to a forehand grip will work, too. Toss high enough that you're striking it on the way down with full extension at the top. The continental grip will allow you to come around the outside of the ball and to naturally follow through across your left side. This is your basic slice serve.

Most important is to consistently place your toss at 1 o'clock. If you're chasing bad tosses then everything else you do right goes out the window. Good luck.

ha you're not london-based are you?

thankyou anyway. i should really jot down these tips and just spend an hour on the court. one of the problems is that i need to concentrate so much on the toss to get it even vaguely right that my racquet arm ends up completely out of sync - i think one of the reasons i hate the entire action of serving is that i'll have this weird feeling when my racquet arm is behind me that i can't even sense how fast it's moving or what direction, it's just complete malcoordination. i never know when i should be bringing it round to strike the ball, it never seems to be in the right place at the right time and i can't seem to control where the racquet faces at any point. i once tried an exercise where i tried throwing the ball without the racquet and it turned out that i can't throw either!

recently started taking tennis classes for the first time, about 12 lessons in now and it the most fun i've had in years. still spend a lot of time desperately lurching at balls from out of position but when everything comes together for a point (usually seems to be a running crosscourt backhand, which would be probably more useful if i could run faster) it's the most satisfying feeling in the world.
also seems like i'm pretty good at serving compared to people at my level. we were first told to practice throwing the ball as high as we can vertically because it's a similar motion to serving, so i guess there's a correlation between throwing and serving ability

OTM Lex. I'm pretty bad in general but my serve is particularly awful. For a while I just hit as hard as possible and like 1/10 would pass (with an ace often). But lately I have tried to improve my other shots and somehow, as a result, my serve is now totally deconstructed and éventuel worse with no power, acuracy, nothing ! Quite depressing. I'm thinking about booking courts alone just to practice since I can't bother serving when I play with friends anymore.

indoor season starting up again, i think im physically in better shape rn or maybe just have minimized amts of nagging injuries so thats good. also my backhand is improving

played a good opponent last wk, prob 1 of hte best dudes reasonably at my same level -- won the first set 6-3 and proceeded to win one more game the rest of the match lol

then tonight i played the old man s-v player that i described upthead - won 6-7 (6-8), 7-6 (7-4/5?) 13-11 in a 3rd set 10-pt tiebreak

was a real weird match, i m/l neutralized his s/v game but my serve was reaally off and a double faulted a fucking tonne. felt like i shdve won the first set, then was up 5-2 in the 2nd and had to sweat out a breaker there. then he was up on me 8-4 in the 3rd and i came back but also got a touch lucky, i thnk he got a lil tired and was hitting some lobs late hoping id hit errors(?) idk :)

fuck me where i serve, im on like a monthlong rough stretch. might be like 1 win, ten losses idk dont want to check details. literally every match (before my last one where i played terribly lol) has been close, won a set a lot of the time and the only other scoreline that looked bad (6-1, 6-2 iirc) was against one of the best players ive ever played and i was in every game about and had several break pts

im back tennis bløøgin, played the dude from my 10/22/2015 post again, had a break pt to go up 5-1 in the first set, didn't get it, and ended up losing the set in a tbreak, and the next set 2-6; played decent tho, it was def a competitive match

def my strength rn is court coverage, in my last match a really pivotal pt was like me getting back an extra ball or two and allowing my oppenent to hork it

happy to see this thread revived. i teach tennis and play USTA 5.0. i mostly stay on the metal threads but will gladly offer any insights if needed.

nice! i'm a 4.5 but hardly ever get to play these days

hit me up if ever you're in seattle.

im prob like 3.5 maybe 4 on a good day

i also recently played and beat this kid prob ~15 yrs my junior, plays currently in college but coming off a bad shoulder injury; he shd of killed me but it was nice playing counterpuncher to someone w real pace & he also then hurt his knee and was hobbling late in the match.. nevertheless i felt good beating him

rematch vs 11/3 guy, ill call him gerry; his game is so nice, easy smooth groundstrokes w easy power and he moves good for someone prob ten yrs older than me

def competative again, tho lost 6-4, 6-3; i hit some good shots man but he can usu cover them; he hit multiple short angle like chip lob passing shots on me from deep in his b-hand ct, those are so devastating and pretty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFxs8r5BEKE

Always good to see this thread updated!

Must try and play again soon. Only "recent" court-time was late summer 2014 when my playing partner (female colleague from work) broke her foot after 45min. I've been playing a bit of badminton but it's not the same...

wow that's brutal

while playing vs a friend this summer he sortof stepped awkwardly coming in for a short ball & ultimately it was a partial tear of his Achilles tendon :(

I've played some of my best tennis this summer but it's frustratingly one step forward, one step back - some days it feels like I'm hitting the ball super well and then a couple of days later I can't control the most basic rally shots. The shots I like hitting most are FH DTLs, either running around my BH in that corner or redirecting a cross-court on the FH side. My volleys have really improved! And I can even get overheads right on occasion.

I still can't remotely serve but that aside I most struggle with running up to short, slow balls that need to be put away. So frustrating to hit multiple good shots in a row to get the short ball and an open court and 99% I make an error. I also don't really have a BH DTL, can't seem to get the timing right, and in general I struggle with...spatial awareness on that side? In that I can't "see" where the ball is going to land and end up either too near or too far away.

Also in matchplay I am definitely a mentally weak choker (though it would help having a SERVE, I loathe everything about the process of serving, it's really psychologically the worst way to start a point)

Oddity about my serve though: when I'm practising it I miss nine out of 10, and they'll all be long. In a match I'll miss nine out of 10 and almost all in the net. I have no idea why this is. It feels like I'm attempting the exact same motion. I have no awareness of what my body is actually doing when I serve.

been on a good streak, may not have lost a match since the 12/1 post above ~ im in 1st place in my clubs ladder, 13-3 record

there are def like 2-5 ppl no_doubt better than me but they just dont play as often

kinda have had a persistant sore rt groin, is there some common sense treatment for this? it does lessen by just like rest so

sorry to hear that! unfortunately i don't know. great work though--congrats! i've really been working on my strokes to good avail as well.

so i've developed a new forehand. it's something between the grip and the backswing. less of the latter i think. i'm into it.

shortening the backswing is always a great tip for a recreational player. a long backswing adds little if any power and greatly reduces margin for error

i played pickleball this morning for the first time in 5-6 years. great game but i wish there were some younger people there haha

surm - thx !

a few to-be-expected losses since the new year has started.

1 to 'gerry' again, guy is just methodical. he stays v even-keel. maybe twice a match i will hear him say to himself 'cmon gerry' after an error. i do notice if i can get him in close game score situations late in a set he gets satisfied w playing rallies and not going for winners, though its tuff to get to that sitch vs him. looking back, i can barely believe i took a set off him 6-3

im 16-5 now; really only had 1 'bad' loss i think, vs a guy hitting really heavy topspin who ive played better against before, also idk y it only occured to me like once the match ended to hit more to his backhand

there is also a guy ive seen a few times in past yrs who was playing this wk......hes MINIMUM 5 yrs older than me (and shorter) but he played 3 nights in a row this week vs basically the 3 best players on the ladder (one of these being 'gerry') and he beat two of them & in not that difficult linescores

ive really only watched him a few times & cant tell how hes that good, his swing looks awkward

in past yrs ive overheard his name and stuff and remarks abt like "yeah he plays every day for two weeks straight and then gets injured and u wonder why"

one of the best players here who doesnt/cant play often cuz hes a doctor apparently authored this

Lessons learned from my BMW and Ayn Rand, The Christian Century, 2015;132(6):27.

Remember at the club I was a member of in my late teens/early 20s there was this *ancient* (to my eyes) white-haired dude who only really played doubles with a massive Prince oversize racket and barely moved more than three steps either way on court. My old schoolmate - 20yo, six foot three, serve-volley, tried to clobber the hell out of groundstroke - drew him in the last sixteen of the club summer singles event. Lost three and one. "Every ball came back". (I lost the same day two and five to some 35yo guy I never saw there again who had some kind of Woolworths wooden racket from about 1972 and was smoking during our knock-up; leftie - his serve to ad court was like a spin-bowler's slider. I was up against the side fence trying to reach it.) We fancied ourselves as young hotshots but, actually, against steady old geezers who just knew how to slice a ball onto a sixpence we couldn't keep the ball in court enough to win points.

decided to join a ladder because of this thread 8)

nice good luck !

had nearly an identical match (tho he won) vs the same old timer as my 10.22.2015 post; guy is kindof a hardass, I am not sure if it is strategic or like failing eyesight but he thinks every close line call of his shots that I say are out, are in; I wouldn't say it rattles me but it is annoying

it also only just clicked in that his service motion looks so much like gasquet it is uncanny

played 'gerry' again, really good match and I had soo many break point chances, beyond the few I did convert, and like 3-4 really long deuce games on my serve. I remember holding once at love in the 2nd set and every other game was close. I lost 3-6, 6-7 (10-12)

ive also now given him the nickname in my head of the slender man cuz he is long and sallow and soft spoken as to be nearly silent

I think im like 21-9 now? idk

Played tennis a lot between ages 12 and 18, picked the racket up again last year only to tear my achilles' tendon during my second training session :-(
Got back on the court 6 weeks ago, started on a gentlemen's team two weeks later and am slowly getting back into it throughout the league matches. Not the most logical way to go about it (also so far I've lost all my matches) but it's been fun nonetheless. Am at/just past (I hope) that point where you've taken up something technical you haven't done in years where you think "I used to be quite good but all my shots are hopeless now wtf". Played a free session yesterday evening with a team mate, just 90 minutes of battering away and it was so much fun. Making adjustments to/optimizing my strokes, footwork, swing, grip. Trying to get more consistent, basically. Re-discovering how much it helps to play as "loose" as possible. It really feels great to play again.

my game is def prone to longer rallies (beat a dude last night who def mumbled "pusher" to himself under his breath and got salty and threw his racquet a few times) but one good technique ive worked on is on short balls to return deep, generally @ my opponents BH side @ rush/sneak in to the net behind it, its v effective when I can execute

No shame in being a pusher. Just get it back. You’ll win, especially at many levels of recreational tennis.

I got called worse, because I just had an ugly game. Could never overpower anyone, so I hit basically all junk shots, spins, weird bounces, drop shots, boring you to death by just hitting lobs. Whatever it took to win.

yea i draw the line at lobs but otherwise vary speeds/spins as much as i can

whats the move when playing another guy who just gets the ball back a ton also? I couldnt figure out a great strategy..

semi-mad @ myself cuz I was 4-0 to start this season, w some good wins, & last night lost to a guy I should've and have mostly beaten. had a 4-1 lead in the first but hit a long skid of unforced errors & dropped it 4-6. came back to win the second 6-2, all closely played games, then just got behind in the tiebreak 3rd set and couldnt catch up~

"slender man" got me again, it was a really fun match tho; scoreline of 7-6, 2-6, 6-2; every point was p hard fought and I was wiped the fuck out by the third set, happy to even get two games there, esp cuz I was down 4-0 and held serve twice

no earthly idea what my record is this season anymore, not sure they are keeping it, & been somewhat up and down but still playing usu twice a wk

played a dude who looks like a younger paul giamatti 2night, lotta pace which was good; after 2-2 first set i won the next 8 games, ultimately winning 6-2, 6-1; giamatti got on tilt and just hit a ton of errors; hope i play him again

last match i got back a ball on a stretch backhand that i was super proud of also btw

fun couple weeks, posting so i remember:

vs youngish nondescript polish guy - split sets then lost a super tiebreak 12-10; this guy is p robotic, hits topspin off both wings; takes forever to serve

vs pakistani guy ive played a bunch - feel like i shdve won in straights but i lost a 2nd set tiebreak and then f'd up the supertiebreak w a lot of dumb errors; i was serving really well/hard this match & had 5-6 to-my-eye-on-a-line aces all of which he called faults, tho in the past hes always been fair tbh; he was also getting over the flu and coughing between every pt so, props

vs tall skinny bald dude -- hadnt played this guy in a couple years; he got up on me 5-1 1st set & then i won 7 games in a row; ended up 7-5, 6-2; he plays just fast paced & think i was playing too fast early on; forgot a bit what its like to play someone who can't really hurt me/doesnt hit winners;

vs semi-crotchedy older dude -- he got up on me 4-1 1st set & i came back to win 7-5, then second set i won 6-0; good match, competitive pts, he hits like squash-ish shots, also rarely hits winners except sometimes on nice angles; this guy used to serve & volley more but only tried it a bit this match, his serve isnt good enough for it to work rn; 2nd set was more competitive than the score,i did hit 4-5 good forehand winners

vs tough, prob 15 yrs older than me ex-military brazilian dude tnight, i came back from down 1-4 in the first set to up 6-5, though down break pt & we had a looong rally where he ran down like 6 balls....ultimately to go for a drop shot where he lost his balance and rolled headlong into the net, it was gnarly (he got the ball back but right to me m/l)

after that he was kinda cooked, i won 7-5, 6-0

Loving these bagels to finish!

there is also a guy ive seen a few times in past yrs who was playing this wk......hes MINIMUM 5 yrs older than me (and shorter) but he played 3 nights in a row this week vs basically the 3 best players on the ladder (one of these being 'gerry') and he beat two of them & in not that difficult linescores

ive really only watched him a few times & cant tell how hes that good, his swing looks awkward

in past yrs ive overheard his name and stuff and remarks abt like "yeah he plays every day for two weeks straight and then gets injured and u wonder why"

― johnny crunch, Friday, January 20, 2017 7:39 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i finally played this guy for the 1st time. he is 20 years older than me. i took the first set off him but then i was fuckin gassed & couldnt put up a tonne of resistance..scoreline was 3-6, 6-1, 10-1 he won; he hits a lot of diff spins and gets a lot back, few winners but does occasionally pound a forehand; nice enough dude but hes the type that doesnt really listen in a convo and is only waiting for his turn to talk again

good match yesterday vs another lefty (im a lefty btw), hard fought match, i won 6-3, 6-4; he served really predictably idk for a purpose of trying to go at my backhand but i was fine w it as i would know it was coming and could easily block it back; i also hurt him repeatedly by hitting my forehand down the line when he was cheating to cover cross court; he moved & hit well tho for being older than me + kinda stocky