"TWACK!" It is a distinctly unlovely sound. It is the sound of misery, humiliation, and defeat. It is the sound of the ball careening off the graphite frame of your $260 racket. The only sound that is worse is NO sound as you completely flag the ball, swatting powerlessly at it as it flies by, unmolested. What is happening here is that you have failed to address the ball.

Addressing the ball means getting the ball into your strings. It is not a matter of degree - you either address the ball or you don't - but certainly the closer you get to the sweet spot of the racket face the better. I am not that picky. As one of the "unchosen ones" I am usually quite happy not to shank the ball over the fence or mis-hit it into the net. Besides, all efforts directed towards addressing the ball will tend to improve ones center-hit percentages.

Defining the Problem

In order to execute any stroke one must successfully accomplish four fundamental objectives. They are adding pace, adding spin, taking control and most importantly addressing the ball. The first three completely depend on the last, not the other way around. You can address the ball without spin, pace or even control and it may still find its way over the net and into play, but if you don't get the ball in the strings, it is usually crying time.

Job 0ne

Breaking it down, job one is determining where the ball is going to be when you hit it. You need to identify the time-space coordinates of an event which has not happened yet, has never happened before, and will never happen again. The inputs to that event include the pace, spin and incoming flight path of the ball, your current position, abilities, and intended stroke choice and all the intangibles of wind, sun, court composition, bad bounces, net straps, etc. This seemingly impossible task is not impossible - as predatory organisms, we are well equipped to compute all of these things successfully as long as nothing is mucking up the computer between our ears. Thus the only advice I can give on this point would be negative; don't think about how to hit the ball, don't get distracted, don't fret, worry or freak out. You don't want to put a layer of conscious thought between intention and action.

Your brain knows how to perform this miracle - all you need to do is stay out of its way.

Job Two

Job two is to get the racket face to the ball. To do this one must plot a path from the end of the backswing proper (or lock phase) through the load and lag phases to the explode phase by which time the ball should be well in your sights. These phases are orbital, not linear. They are built around concentric orbits of the hips, shoulders, wrist and racket.

It is worth noting that while you have some direct control over the orbit of the wrist, you have very little direct control over the racket face. After the load, the racket lags behind the wrist to contact. The actual orbit of the racket head depends on many factors including the inertia of the racket due to its acceleration and its initial configuration just before the power wave hits in the load. You can bet that the racket is following the wrist during the lag and if you have a sufficiently loose grip on the racket how "laggy" it depends on the magnitude of acceleration. Allowing the racket face to follow the wrist freely may seem to introduce an unnecessary degree of uncertainty, but it is hardly uncertain. Your brain knows, better than you do, where the racket is just like it knows where a hammer is when you are going for a nail. The challenge of tracking the course of the racket face is another excellent opportunity for you to step aside and let the parallel processors in your brain figure out where the sweet spot is relative to your wrist. Your responsibility is to guide the wrist along its orbital path such that it passes by the point of contact just before the moment of contact. What I am telling you is that if you are mishitting the ball, stop trying to guide the head of the racket to the ball and instead start trying to guide your fist across the path of the ball, timing that intersection such that the racket face has the highest probability of intercepting the ball.

Job Three

Job three is to resist the temptation to push the ball. Pushing arises largely from the desire to make solid contact with the ball, and it is a throwback to every bit of black-pearl, forever-beginner, “ ;pro's-are-different" type advice that you ever received on or off the court. I realize that the previous talk of orbits and timing is scary but trust me and trust yourself; no matter how bereft you are of true athletic talent, you can track a tennis ball. All you have to do is get out of your own way.

Job Four

Finally you need to understand the importance and meaning behind the phrase; "I felt I was really getting my weight into the ball!" This feeling speaks to the importance of moving your body into the strike and how that relates to addressing the ball. I call that concept "The Propellerater" and I feel it is important enough to rate its own chapter.

Half Volleys

When trying to learn to address the ball reliably, the most terrifying situation is the half volley. Non-A players avoid this issue by standing so far behind the baseline that they wear out their racket frames on the back fence. In a time of heavy, loopy topspins, standing that far back is a recipe for a stiff neck from watching the ball sail over your head. The playing pros have always played close to the baseline and have been slowly creeping into the court over the years. The common wisdom amongst the pros is to take the ball on the rise. This approach has several advantages; better angle, taking time away from the opponent, fewer variables introduced by the bounce, no shoulder-high balls (which are good in the mid-court but difficult to hit with pace in the back-court), and of course more comfort hitting half volleys.

Addressing the ball
• guide the handle, not the face
  • know your orbits
• always pull, never push
• swing before bounce
  • half-volley
  • ball on the rise
• propellerate
• trust the force
  • natural predator hand-eye co-ordination
  • natural predator target prediction
  • regrettably no substitute

The technique for hitting the half volley is simple but scary. The key is to start a full swing hundreds of milliseconds before the ball hits the court. That's it. The stroke is not nearly as hard as we think it is. Actually, you always begin a groundstroke long before the bounce, so the timing is similar. The main obstacle is our fear of misjudging the point of contact, but if you think of the possible paths the ball might take after the bounce as a cone of probability, the base of that cone, where you have to meet the ball, gets larger as the ball flies away from the bounce point. By catching the ball early, you are avoiding the ill effects of a capricious bounce. There will still be the occasional mis-hit, but that is also true when you address the ball at the height of its bounce. Once you have practiced taking the ball on the rise for a while, you may find that you get so good at it that, given a surfeit of time, you can adjust your body position so that you can address high bouncing balls in your power zone (generally between your chest and your hips). That is way more fun than taking them over your shoulders.