Play

Coaches, it's my view that the professionalization of instruction is ruining play and ruining childhood. 

With parents wanting "what's best for their child" and without the option of just sending the kid outside to play with other kids, they turn to adult professional teachers and instructors (of tennis, golf, baseball, basketball, chess, piano, you name it) to teach their kids how to play. What a bad joke. 

Now both parents and instructors are invested in the system, the professional instruction system. "I know I'm something of a car salesman, but I have a mortgage, a wife and two kids," said a local tennis professional to me. "I know this system sucks, but it only has to last about ten more years then I'll be done," said another.

Does the current system produce great players of these games, great athletes and musicians? Sure (see here). But all that excellence hides what is not seen.  All those who achieved greatness in this hyper-professional system stuck it out. What's not seen are the millions of kids who quit playing, because they weren't ever really playing. What's also not seen is the developmental damage done to children who grow up in a system where almost all play is structured and supervised by adults (lots of information on play and development here).

Kids who come to professional instructors are not coming to play. They are coming to work. Just like we are.

Service Academy Tennis

TennisRecruiting.net goes back to the high school graduating class of 2004. I grabbed the top 10 in each class from 2004-2007 and pasted them below. The class of 2004 has been out of college for six years. The class of 2005 has been out for five years.  Those players would have finished their five-years of guaranteed military employment if they'd chosen a service academy. Perhaps they would now be in the civilian work force. The classes of 2006 and 2007 would be serving in active duty.

Treat Huey makes a living playing doubles. Any other players on that list that have covered their expenses playing tennis?

Most of them probably went to college. Some won NCAA titles and a lot competed for conference and national titles. I'm not saying they all made a mistake not going to Navy, Army, or Air Force. But even for the highest rated recruits, playing tennis at a service academy while setting themselves up for the next five (and possible 20-40) years of their lives looks like a pretty good option relative to pursuing a career playing tennis.

If it's true that the top 10 should reasonably consider playing at a service academy, is it any less true of the rest of the top 50 or 100?

In the current environment where a) college tuitions are outrageously high and scholarship money for men in tennis is limited (the academies pay 100% of the cost of attendance for every student), b) prize money in the minor leagues of tennis is not sufficient to cover the costs of playing (service academy graduates have among -- and specifically Navy the -- highest average salaries five years after graduation), and c) the job prospects for college graduates are not great across the board (all academy graduates are guaranteed a minimum five years of full time employment in a field for which they are trained), I think EVERY male junior tennis player should take a look at what the service academies offer and see how that matches up to your life prospects outside of a military career. 

A military career, even one as brief as five years, isn't for everyone. But it is a great option for many of the top 100 players every year.  At the three NCAA DI academies, there are at most nine slots realistically available each year. Those slots should be very coveted by players inside the top 50 every year.

2004

1		Phillip Simmonds	VA
2		Daniel Yoo	FL
3		Brendan Evans	FL
4		Scott Oudsema	MI
5		Treat Huey	VA
6		Robert Cameron	TN
7		Yevgeny Supeko	MT
8		Gregory Ouellette	FL
9		Travis Helgeson	KS
10		Monte Tucker	AL

2005

1		Michael Venus	FL
2		Matt Bruch	IL
3		Clancy Shields	CO
4		Andrew Orban	NC
5		Sasha Ermakov	TX
6		Marek Czerwinski	MI
7		Bryan Koniecko	NY
8		Brett Helgeson	KS
9		Conor Pollock	TX
10		Kevin Fleck	NC

2006

1		Marcus Fugate	NY
2		Kallim Stewart	CA
3		Dylan Arnould	MA
3		Attila Bucko	FL
4		Holden Seguso	FL
5		Jamie Hunt	TX
6		Mike Gurman	CA
7		Nathaniel Schnugg	OR
8		Alexander Kharkevitch	TX
9		Christopher Racz	PA
10		Justin Kronauge	OH

2007

1		Danila Arsenov	FL
2		Kellen Damico	CO
3		Clint Bowles	FL
4		Jeff Dadamo	FL
5		Adam El Mihdawy	NY
6		Jason Jung	CA
7		Reid Carleton	FL
8		Jordan Rux	TX
9		Dennis Lajola	HI
10		Gonzalo Escobar	FL

Losing Good Points

The better you get at tennis, the more comfortable you must become losing well-played points.

Assuming you're playing competitive matches you will lose at least forty percent of the points you play. A sixty-forty match is a beat down. The winner has won fifty percent more points than the loser. Yet the winner has still lost a ton of points. How has he/she lost those points? Well, the better the player the more often the lost points were won by the opponent through good play.

Good players play good points by definition. You don't see tons of double faults and unforced errors in matches between good players. Most points end with one player hitting a fair number of winners and most often forcing errors from the other.

I see a lot of junior players and pretty good college players who have trouble coming to grips with playing a good point a losing it. They even have trouble distinguishing a good point from a bad point independent of who wins the point. Too often the mindset is simple: My point = good point. That's not even close to correct.

Winning tennis, in my view, is the accumulation of small advantages. Like the casino in Las Vegas. In every game in the casino, the house has a slight advantage. People win and lose all the time and the casino draws as much attention as possible to the winners. But over time, the casino's small edge means dollars accrue to the casino, not to the gamblers in aggregate. Same with tennis. Points are won and lost throughout the match. The player who plays slightly better will win the vast majority of matches. That advantage accumulates over points and games. Upsets happen, of course. Better players can have bad days. Lesser players can play above their level. More irritatingly the better player on that day can lose. The player who won more points does sometimes lose the match. But over lots of points and certainly over lots of matches, tennis identifies the better player extremely well.

So the better you get, the more comfortable you have to become playing good points and losing boatloads of them. The trick is not to become too emotional when you lose points. Play good shots. Play good points. You'll get good results over time.

USTA Player Development

Minor league tennis players want more prize money. The men and women who toil on the Futures circuit play for purses of $10,000 and $15,000 per tournament, unchanged from thirty years ago. They claim that many of them must stop playing prematurely because they cannot fund their continued play from prize money.

Meanwhile, the USTA spends $15 million per year on player development. The $15 million goes mainly toward coaches' salaries and the operation of national and regional training centers.

What if?

What if the USTA got out of the player development business and got back simply to running tournaments and leagues like it did for most of its history? How would that $15 million look in tournament purses for the minor leagues of tennis?

I assume entry fees could cover the operating expenses of minor league tennis tournaments just like they do for tennis tournaments at all other levels. So for $15 million the USTA could double and triple the prize money to $30,000 per event and host 500 more tournaments per year. Or they could raise the purses to the $50,000 paid at many Challenger level events and host 300 of more of those tournaments each year.

Anyone think USTA Player Development's current use of $15 million per year produces more and better professional tennis players than all those tournaments would produce?

Shot Location Charts

I grabbed a few more shot location charts off of recent tennis telecasts. I thought I'd post them here for purposes of easy access.

Nadal

Dolgopolov

Gilles Simon

Djokovic

And below, for reference, is Naomi's Circle. Naomi's goal is to hit balls that land outside this circle and inside the court. My error rate shoots through the roof when I try this.  

Naomi's Circle

(More like Naomi's Elipse, roughly (x^2/110.25 ft) + (y^2/225 ft) = 1)

Perhaps such hitting outside this circle is necessary, at times, to succeed at the highest levels of tennis. My collection of ATP Tour players hit far more inside the circle than outside it, but perhaps they are able to hit outside the circle when the opportunity arises. They do hit a lot of shots outside Naomi's Circle.

Here and here are a couple of old posts showing more shot location charts.

What does all this mean for a player? I'm not sure. I think aiming neutral balls outside Naomi's Circle is suicide. Aiming outside Naomi's Circle on easier incoming balls where your goal is to seize control of the point makes more sense – if you are tremendously skilled. I think for the vast majority of tennis players, ever aiming outside Naomi's Circle is a bad idea. Getting an easy ball and taking an enormous risk looks like a recipe for failure to me.

Instead, my philosophy is to aim for the center of the ATP Tour player's shot location scatter diagram. There are two distinct areas they aim for: roughly five feet inside the sideline and six to nine feet inside the baseline on each side. They do not appear to target in the middle very often.

By aiming for these relatively safe targets, players will reduce their own errors. This alone is enough for most players to win most matches. By win, I mean allow the opponent to lose.

For players who need to hit winning shots to win points and matches (less than 20% of all players at a minimum), the conservative targets still make sense. As their shots miss their targets and scatter, roughly half of the misses will be closer to the sidelines and the baseline. Those happy accidents present a chance to take control of the point with more forceful shots, but still aimed for conservative targets. Perhaps those happy accidents will produce balls short enough to attack and finish at the net. Perhaps they will elicit looping replies that can be taken out of the air with overheads or drive volleys from the mid-court.

What about the half of the errors that stray further from the sidelines and the baseline? Well, for 80% or more of players, those are just fine. They are still in play. Sure they may present the opponent an opportunity to take control of the point or attack. But most players lack the skill to do that, so such an opening does them more harm than good! For the highly skilled players, some of these errant shots into the middle of the court will put them on the defensive. That's why we practice defending with looping balls, slices, passing shots, and lobs. Defense is part of tennis, too.

If you aim near the lines, you had better be very highly skilled or comfortable with losing. And from the looks of those charts, the best players in the world only occasionally hit, much less target, near the sidelines. So "very highly skilled" may mean "more skilled than Nadal, Djokovic, and Federer." If that's you, thanks for reading this, and start composing that Hall of Fame induction speech!