so you can't hit the ball hard you're not one of those baseline blasters who can just hack
people off the court or if you try to hit the ball harder to match whatever your opponent is
throwing at you you're just missing the ball all over the place in this video i'm going to
show you what other tactical measures you can use to throw your opponent off rhythm
and create opportunities for you to put the ball away even if you're not hitting the ball as hard
the first weapon that you have if you can't hit the ball as hard is to use the width of the court
now especially hardcore players tend to blast the ball through the length of the court i grew up on
clay court and you just couldn't put balls away as easily so you had to be a little more creative
on opening up the court and creating the space so that yeah even i could put the
ball away and i did every now and then so you want to open the cord with angles
i'm going to show you progression drills with which you can do that so the target that you
want to go for is a ball that bounces of course in the singles court and then cuts the singles line
and the doubled alley before it passes the baseline because that is guaranteed to give you a
weak reply so make sure when you see your opponent sliding out having to get in this court into the
green of the court behind the baseline you want to scoot up a little bit because the other side is
way open and you don't want to miss your chance to put the ball away first drill is just battleship
angles and short court and as you see all you're trying to do is hit the cones of your partner
it's also a great warm-up drill you're working on adding spin and getting to the outside of the ball
second drill as you see we put the cones in the middle of our respective halves and you're trying
to stay out of the middle and make sure that you recover all the way back to your bisector
of an angle because a lot of times when people do these kind of drills they're kind of starting to
hang out more in a doubles position rather than a singles position
don't give them the same ball twice and one great tool to accomplish that is to mix it
up you can add more spin you can hit it flatter or you can slice it and what you're doing with
that is you're messing with your opponent's rhythm because for instance a slice usually sits lower it
usually is a little slower and it has a completely different spin if somebody wants to roll over that
ball they have to work extra hard to overcome that slice that backspin first drill to work on mixing
things up is one partner can slice only even on four hands and the other partner has to hit
everything with topspin and then of course you're switching that up and change rolls
the second drill is that one partner in this case this is me here in the foreground
is hitting whatever ball they want and your partner on the other side has to hit the opposite
spin so if i'm hitting topspin mo in the back has to slice if i slice mo has to hit topspin
who wants to hit every ball from back here uh the short answer is no one so nobody really wants to
come from a regular rally position having to move back hit the ball back come forward so on
and so forth they're going to do it a couple of times but they're probably not going to be ready
to really do that for three sets if you are willing to buckle down i'm talking about outright
moon ball sometimes especially when you're playing defense when you're being pulled out wide
hit a moon ball nobody cares we're not out of here to win the point purdy we're out here to
win the points period and a moon ball qualifies sometimes as a great defensive play the other
times that you want to hit a higher ball you're using heavy topspin the bounce is extremely fast
off the bounce there's a lot of action on the ball and the balls most likely if you're hitting
it well go above somebody's shoulder if they're not willing to move back or hit a higher risk play
moving up and taking them on the rise so it's a great tactical measure to drive somebody absolute
batty so this is a fun one here brings back some memories of junior days in this drill you're
trying to push your opponent off the baseline with high heavy balls but you have to come forward to
the baseline again and touch it because otherwise you're getting stuck in the back fence of course
you can just set out cones try to hit deeper than the cones in this drill we're making it one
step tougher you have to alternate four forehands and backhand so you hit one forehand and then no
matter what you have to step around hit a backhand so that you're not just favoring your forehand
now what's the last thing that you can work with depth and if you're playing heavy topspin you
automatically will get more depth because you have a higher net clearance the ball lands deeper in
the court and it stays in because of the topspin but i'm not just talking about moving people
back i'm also talking about using again angles because they have different depth of the cord
but also the drop shot the drop shot is such a fantastic tool and you know it's fantastic to see
when somebody starts getting to some drop shots but then over the duration of the match they're
not even trying anymore so the drop shot is a fantastic tool and here's a drill for it
so if you're doing all these things a you're going to get completely into your opponent's head and b
you may get what i consider the best compliment i have ever received when
i played and that was somebody yelling she's not doing anything and you know what i beg to differ
i did enough to really make you mess up and you know what whether you hit a winner or
you're making them miss shows up the same on the scoreboard so let's get out there mess with them