Mis-hit Syndrome

Always embarrassing and often tragic, failure to hit the ball solidly is a particularly vexing and common problem for those of us who are evolutionarily challenged. The ability to bring the tennis ball together with the sweet-spot of the racket is a tremendous advantage in a tennis match. When I taught tennis to children, I could easily identify the little tykes who were destined to go from beginner to beating me by the end of the summer. Even when they were hitting moon-balls over the fence, they always hit the ball in the dead center of the racket with a lovely and (for me) annoyingly perfect "ping".

This magical match-making of ball and strings has been called "addressing the ball", which is a boring and loquacious phrase but apt. The key is obviously to anticipate where and when in timespace an oncoming ball, accounting for its pace, spin, the wind, bounce yadda-yadda, is going to be when it is available for you to strike it. Right. Of course, we don't even know exactly where or when that will be or if the ball will ever actually reach an accessible location in spacetime. My point, I think, is that there is no figuring this part of the thing out. It is a miracle every time the racket finds a ball. Some are blessed with the ability to create more and better such miracles than others, and I am not one of them. Still, there are good habits you can learn to improve your ability to address the ball and bad habits you have now that you can identify and eliminate. If you learn to minimize miss-hits, you can save yourself a ton of embarrassment and win a few more matches.

Tracking the Ball

The simplest and most direct correction you can make in this context is to stop trying to track the ball with the head of the racket Guiding the racket face to the ball would seem the most logical way to arrange a meeting, but the plain fact of the matter is that you are not in direct control of the head of the racket.

    Miss Hit Syndrome
  • Chief Complaint
    • "I cannot make solid contact!"
  • Symptoms(Sx):
    • excess vibration on contact
    • shanks and whiffs
    • feeling cramped or rushed
  • Signs(S):
    • shanking on groundstrokes
      • into alley
      • off tip or bottom of racket frame
        Pathophysiology(Px):
      • swinging too early or fast
        • trying to add more topspin or pace
        • driving through the ball
        Treatment(Rx):
      • Relax immediately before contact!
        • hips and shoulders slow down
        • "let the racket do the work"
        Pathophysiology(Px):
      • no control over timing
        • not stepping or leaning in
        • failure of footwork
        Treatment(Rx):
      • Translate hips and shoulders during stroke
        Pathophysiology(Px):
      • bent elbow at MOC
        • attempt to "reign in" stroke for 'control'
        Treatment(Rx):
      • fully extended at MOC
        • lock elbow
    • shanking on hard volleys
        Pathophysiology(Px):
      • prognostication
        • committing to a POC too early
        • panicking
        Treatment(Rx):
      • don't panic
        • take your time
        • meet the ball
        • don't just "stick out your racket"
  • Differential Diagnosis:
Hello
Tracking the Ball: The hand and racket head follow different orbits around the body as the hand pulls the racket across the path of the incoming ball. Solid contact comes from getting the orbit of the head to coincide with the incoming flight path of the ball. The rest is timing.

Look where your hand is - it is on the handle - clear on the other end of the racket from the sweet spot. From the handle, your hand can certainly influence the trajectory of the sweet spot, but it cannot directly control it. Try writing your name with your hand at the eraser end of a three-foot pencil. That is what you are trying to do when you imagine guiding the racket face to the ball. That is not to mention that you are simultaneously trying to develop pace, spin and manage control forces. Not even the talented are that talented. What you should be doing is guiding the handle to the ball. After all, you have pretty good control over the handle. If you can get the handle to be somewhere in the spacetime vicinity of the point of contact a few milliseconds before the moment of contact, you know that the head and face of the racket are not far behind. You know that because you are pulling the racket head into the ball from the handle, not pushing it. In the long strokes, the serve, overhead smash and topspin groundstrokes, you aim the butt of the racket at the expected point of contact early in the lag phase (see "Flashlight Forehand"). Ultimately, and in all strokes, you define an orbital path for the racket head, and all you need to do is to make sure that the orbit you create coincides with the flight path of the incoming ball. The rest is just timing. Your hand needs to pass the point of contact a few milliseconds before the ball gets there. Yes, that sounds like astrophysics, but it is not rocket science. There are only two things to focus on, the orbital path of the racket handle and how early the racket handle passes through the flight path of the ball; both under your full control.

Staying On Track

Sometimes we have the ball zeroed, and at the last second, we pull the racket off of the ball. We change the orbit of the racket head, usually tightening it up so that we catch the ball on the tip or frame of the racket This can be hard to differentiate from mistiming the ball, specifically swinging early and just catching the ball on the fly-by. The confusion is important because it affects how we treat the condition. The first, tightening the orbit, is a problem of space and the treatment is a matter of distance - we need to reach out more, extend and lock the elbow. The second, mistiming the moment of contact is a matter of time, and we have to treat it time-wise by slightly slowing down the swing or leaning into the stroke more. Differentiation is, unfortunately, a matter of feeling; do we feel cramped or rushed? I accuse the talented with being way more in touch with their 'feelings' than I am, so this frustrates me, but even a dullard like me can respond appropriately to these internal harbingers if I know what I am looking for. Ideally, we identify these feelings and act on them before you start making errors. When all else fails, try all treatments and see what works.