Bailey’s Blog

I was watching the latest “Fame” movie and loved one of the quotes from one the teachers to his students and thought it really applied to tennis. “Fame” is a movie about a bunch of students studying their chosen profession be it acting, singing or a music at a New York performing arts school.

The teacher was talking to his students who are busy practicing a set piece of music but one student is off on his own tangent and not focused on the task at hand. The teacher says-

“Study, drilling and technique do not stifle talent they free it!”

So in other words if you are a student of the game, if you train properly and professionally with great attention to detail (good progressive teaching with no short cuts) then you create an ability to be instinctively creative on the court.

You become ”Federer free” (Roger Federer’s’ greatest strength is he is so spontaneous,reactive yet relaxed when playing). But you know what!!….this strength is never free it is a earn’t through very hard yet smart studying, drilling and technical work.

The next three blogs are taken from 2 great tennis autobiographies and relate to fitness and footwork. The books are “Pete Sampras- A champions mind” and “Open” by Andre Aggasi. Both are great reads!

This first blog was a simple but interesting  method that was used to develop Sampras as a junior (at this stage he was eight years old)-

Robert Landsdorp was his forehand and ground-stroke guy

Pete Fisher was his serve coach and overseer of Pete’s development

Del little was a local coach but was the footwork and balance specialist

Larry Easley was the volley coach

He would play matches 3 times a week and play tournaments on the weekend

What I found interesting about this is that tennis is notorious for not having specialist coaches. They do in so many other sports why not tennis?   

“A terrible thing in tennis is when you start losing your legs. If your legs get heavy and you lose the spring in them than your game inevitably declines. You no longer get up as high on your serve, and you don’t get that explosive step to the ball. you don’t move corner to corner effectively, or change direction that well. And when your opponent sees that, he uses it as emotional fuel, even if he’s also tired”

When Andre Aggasi first meets Gil Reyes (his fitness trainer and mentor for over ten years) there is something that Gil says that makes lots of sense to Andre. The conversation was about his fitness training-

Gil: How much do you run each day?

Andre: Five miles.

Gil: Why

Andre: I don’t know

Gil: Have you ever run five miles in a match?

Andre: No

Gil: How often in a match do you run more than five steps in one direction before stopping?

Andre: Not very.

Gil: I don’t know anything about tennis, but it seems to me that, by the third step, you’d better be thinking about stopping. Otherwise your’e going to hit the ball and keep running, which means you’ll be out of position for your next shot. The trick is to throttle down, then hit, then slam on the brakes, then hustle back. The way I see it, your sport isn’t about running, its about starting and stopping. you need to focus on building the muscles necessary for starting and stopping!

Andre laughs and tells Gil that “that might be the smartest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about tennis”