If you are serious about taking your game to the next level, which I hope you are, then you need to be serious about moving up in the court. Moving forward is not limited to getting volleys and overheads. It is about winning a court-positioning battle within the match. If you can win the court-positioning battle, everything else in the match gets a little easier and your likelihood of success increases.
When you are able to move up in the court, you put pressure on your opponent in a few key ways...
- You take time away without even hitting the ball harder
- You can make your opponent move more through access to more angles
- You appear bigger and the court appears smaller by cutting off angles
All of these combined make it very difficult for your opponent to win points. They need to move more, they have less time to react, and they have smaller windows to make their shots. If you can do this time and time again over the course of a match, your odds of winning more points increase significantly.
The other side of this is that moving forward in the court reduces pressure on you...
- You don't need to swing as hard to make your opponent uncomfortable
- Your margin of error improves, resulting in fewer misses
- You don't need to move as much or play as long of points
Think about it this way, the tennis court is 78-feet long from baseline to baseline and is rectangular in shape; this is never changing. If you are standing 5 feet behind the baseline, you realistically need to hit a rally ball 78 feet in order to stay neutral. Much shorter and it will likely be able to be attacked by a good player. It is extremely difficult to hit your target consistently from 78 feet away. Now let's say you move up 3 feet inside the baseline to hit the ball (maybe you're taking the same ball on the rise instead of on the descent). Now you only need to hit the ball 70 feet to have the same effect: you've moved up a total of 8 feet. Realistically, due to the amount of time the ball is in the air, your margin for targets can also be safer, so let's decrease that 70 feet to closer to 68 feet.
Will it be easier to hit your targets from 68 feet away instead of 78? Absolutely. Is there added risk to taking the ball on the rise? Yes there is. But the better question would be, is the added risk worth the reward to improving margin, moving less, and taking time away from your opponent? That's up to you, but I know that the stats and data say yes. I also know from my coaching and playing experience that the answer is definitely yes.
Be willing to take some risks in moving forward in the court in order to relieve some of the added pressures that come from moving back. By moving back, you're buying yourself time, but staying back over and over again is delaying the inevitable: losing the point. Win more points and boost your game by moving forward and winning the court-positioning battle.
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