Hitting the ball softly is just as important as hitting the ball hard. Many
times in a match you will find yourself in situations where you need to hit the
ball soft and this is where mini tennis can help you develop soft hands and it
can be a great benefit to your game. In this video I'm going to show you some
great drills and games where you can improve your mini tennis skills and
let's start off with the technique on how to actually hit the ball when
standing on the service line. So the first thing you want to pay attention to
is having a shorter backswing. You don't want to take the racket all the way back
like this. This is very unnecessary because you're hitting the ball very
gently and you do not need a back swing and there's two ways on how to strike a
ball from the service line. You can apply a lot of topspin basically go vertically
over the ball or you can gently push on the ball. This might be good for
beginners or intermediate players. Hitting right down the center with both
players positioned at the service line is how every mini tennis session should
start and basically you're going to rally very gently back and forth with
the other person they're going right down the middle and trying to minimize
mistakes. Now you can do this maybe for a minute or two it doesn't need to be
longer than that. Now we're going to get the feet involved and it's going to help
us get our body warmed up and maybe even get a sweat going. So one player is going
to go cross court while the other player goes down the line.
It's important to incorporate slicing into mini-tennis often from these type
of situations in a match you will be forced to hit a slice forehand and a
slice backhand so the same game we did with topspin we're going to now do with
slice
Now we're going to get into some games this is one of my favorite games it's
called rollie ball. Basically, you take the ball and you put it on the net and then
with your racket and you bang against the net and that will get the point started.
What's important with this game is that you hit the ball very close to the net
and you hit it very gently. If you hit it too hard this game is not gonna work and
you sometimes don't realize how many times in a match you get balls that are
very close to the net and so you have to learn the skills to be able to handle
those type of balls.
The next game is something I like to call the bounce game and you see this
game played at the professional level very frequently and basically you want
to bounce the ball on your own side before it goes over the net. And the
rules of this game are at the advanced level once the ball goes over the net
you have to take it in the air and if you were more at the intermediate level
you can try this game and allow the ball to bounce once it goes over the net.
The next game is a double hit game it is a great game for any level of
play and basically you're going to take the ball in the air but you're going to
bounce it to yourself before hitting it over the net. On the receiving side you
can actually take the ball in the air or you can let it bounce.
And just after 10 minutes of mini-tennis you can see that I'm thoroughly warmed
up and I got a pretty good sweat going. So in addition to it being a great
warm-up it is a fantastic way to improve your feel and also being able to handle
situations in a match where the ball is being played around the net. And while
situations like that might not happen that frequently in a match they might
happen at a very crucial time. So it is very important that you develop a full
repertoire in your tennis game.