angle shots hit from the Baseline either with your forehand or your backhand are
super effective tactics to get your opponent off the court and create offensive opportunities on
the next shot and sometimes angle shots can turn into winners themselves what you need to keep in
mind when you're hitting an angle shot is twofold there needs to be a difference in the angle of the
racket face so when you make contact like this obviously the ball is going to go straight so
the angle of the racket face has to be forward in the sense that the tip of the racket is going
to be pointed slightly towards the Net post now the difference is not as big as you think it is
there's often a misconception that you have to hit the outside of the tennis ball to create an
angle remember that if you hit the outside of the tennis ball the ball will go straight that
way so you are not hitting the outside of the tennis ball the difference in angle is minuscule
a contact that's slightly different from your regular contact and that is by letting the tip
of the racket head get slightly more ahead and what happens is that you create a more sharp
angle and it works the same way on your forehand and your backhand now one thing to keep in mind
on the backhand side is that when you have two hands the angles are more difficult because the
two hands are fighting each other one thing about angle shots is that your swing path is naturally
going to be more shallow it's not going to be as full as it is normally so when it comes to the
backhand side the one-handed backhand is actually a lot easier to execute when it comes to an angle
shot compared to the two-handed backhand so if you happen to have a two-handed backhand you
have to make sure that you use your off hand if you happen to be right-handed it's going to be your
left hand working a little bit more to create that shallow swing path and finish across the body in
this way so I start off the lesson by showing Sara how to execute the angle shot so she has
a better understanding of what she's supposed to do with this drill you can see that I set up the
cones at a diagonal angle from the corner of the service box they're generally a good Target area
to aim for if you are able to hit your angle shots in that area it will either result in a
winner or if your opponent gets to the ball you'll have the entire court to work with so Sarah in the
beginning had some trouble with getting the ball to angle off a lot of her forehand angle shots
we're going to the Target area but they were a little bit towards the center of the service
box so I explained to her the concept of angle the racket face at the moment of contact in a
more shallow swing path with topspin this is a finesse shot that doesn't require a lot of
body involvement this is a stroke that's executed with the hand it goes into the category of a feel
shot or a touch shot and this is a very important distinction if you attempt to hit an angle shot
with full speed with full body involvement this is going to be very difficult to do
now it's important that the angle shot has a lot of topspin so vertical swing path is crucial
and this is one of the rare circumstances where you can work the ball more with your forearm as
opposed to a regular forehand where you should try to get the power from the entire body and not the
wrist or the forearm so the first progression is just out of a stationary position trying
to get the target area and once Sara was able to master that the next progression was to get her a
little bit on the run and try to execute the angle shot on the Run generally the more off the court
you are in other words the closer to the double alleys you are the easier the angles become on
the other hand the closer to the Baseline you are the more difficult it is to create angles
so this is something that you have to keep in mind when you're playing and that is to not
attempt angle shots when you're in the middle of the court. Once I put Sarah on the Run
it was a little bit more challenging for her at first to get the right timing for the angle shot
and to get the correct angle of the racket face because it's always more difficult to
execute a specific technique while on the Move however after a few reps she got a pretty good
feel for it and now it was time for the next progression which is me feeding the ball from
the other side and giving her more Pace similar to a drop shot the more Pace the incoming ball
has the easier it is to execute an angle shot because the angle shot belongs to the Finesse
category of Strokes it is very useful to do an angle shot in conjunction with hitting the ball
very hard players have to have the ability to switch from hitting their normal speed on the
ground strokes to be able to switch to a finesse shot and angle the ball off the court so in this
drill I instructed Sarah to alternate between hard shots down the line and angle shots cross court
so now it was time to move over to the backhand side and interestingly as I stated in the intro the
two-handed backhand provides more challenges when it comes to creating angles simply because
the hands are fighting each other when we attempt a very steep vertical swing path it is for that
reason that angles are a lot easier to execute either with a one-handed slice backhand or a
one-handed topspin backhand there we have the freedom to be as vertical as we want to be when
executing the topspin shot or the slice shot having said that it is not impossible to do an
angle with a two-handed backhand and Sarah did a pretty good job and the progressions were the same
as on the forehand we started with drop feeds then we progressed trying to execute angles on the Run
and then of course I give her more Pace with a feed from the other side where she was trying to
angle the backhand off into the target area some female players will seldomly utilize
slice backhands and that is the case with Sarah I attempted to teach her the slice angled backhand
and I demonstrated a few so she can get an idea of what this shot is supposed to look like but in
this case her one-handed slice backhand technique had a lot of fundamental flaws in it and it's one
of those scenarios where it would be wrong to try to learn an angled slice backhand before learning
the fundamentals of a regular slice backhand so we're going to feature that in another lesson
working on Sarah's one-handed backhand slice and once she gets comfortable with that we can start
thinking about some variations of the one-handed slice backhand so we tried a few more two-handed
angled backhands and she did a really good job getting the balls into the Target and now it was
time to try to hit forehand and backhand angle shots on the run which was the final progression
Sarah did a phenomenal job angling the balls off on the run which is something that's very
difficult to do and requires a high skill level I encourage everyone to practice angle
shots because if you don't practice angle shots you are very unlikely going to pull
them out in a match situation you should widen your repertoire as a tennis player
as much as possible and remember when you work on different aspects of your
game they are more likely going to appear in a match situation and help you out tremendously