Too much money and success make one stupid. That's what happened to tennis. The game is played so ineffiently that one would think all coaches are drill sargents.
Three major stupidities in today's tennis are:
1. Too much arm and wrist. The large momentum of the oncoming ball requires the full body weight to counter it.
2. Too much spin. Tennis rackets are not made for spinning ball. Downspin especially is pointless. Being fuzzier than the baseball, the tennis ball is tailor-made to do unpredictable arobatics in the air when hit flat as the nuckle ball in baseball.
3. Too few hands. Whoever designed the one-handed serve must be a sadist. It's the main cause for injury. How few of us are tall and powerful enough to cannon ball the serve? But almost all of us need to trim our belly. So serve with the belly by holding the racket with two hands.
This is the all-two-handed and full body tennis. It has only one stroke, which must be drilled to kungfu perfection. The footwork in charging the ball during rally and the toss/jump in the serve are choreographed to synchronize with the ball.
The departure from the traditional approach is to charge the body into the on-coming ball, instead of pull the arm back to get ready. This way, the ball is not only hit harder and earlier, but much more deceptively. In a way, it's also the only way to consistently avoid spinning the ball, so that the other player is pinned down by the deadest flat ball, whose speed in unestimable as the power is coming from the body.
Three points are to be noted here:
1. Carry the racket with only one hand
when chasing down the ball and move in
the other hand just before striking the
ball.
2. Holding the racket end with the lefthand
to hit a righthand shot and righthand, a
leftside shot. This makes it easier to
press the racket flat thru the ball.
3. Start to run backwards after a stroke is
fully executed. This is safer than running
into the net, since now the other player
cannot pass you. But now you need to
train yourself to run as much forward and
to run backward on the track.
The training consists of 7 stages:
1. Shadow strokes
2. Virtual robot
3. Playback
4. Ball machine
5. Sparring
6. Games
7. Tournaments
Each stage should be perfected before starting the next. Mirrors and videos should be used to saturation.
Initially, this style should be implemented by a dozen father-daughter teams. And the daughters should be picked from the best pingpong players out of elementary schools. Pingpong players at that stage would already have the maturity of adult tennis player and equivalent skills way surpass those of college tennis players. While on the other hand, tennis players, even at college level, would not be mature enough to appreciate the intricacy of the modern style of body tennis, which derived many its techniques from pingpong.
The role the father plays is critical. First, untrue of the dysfunctioning-family view of many westerners, Chinese fathers can exert the most caring discipline on the daughters, reinforced by daughters' desires to please their parents. Body tennis' kungfu-like drilling can best be implemented at home by the father. The father should be the practicing partner(vital for warmup before matches), playing the same style but feeding, not rushing, the ball, which the daughter must do.
And lastly, only father would make absolutely sure that the daughter does not too masculined their body in the process of becoming a champion. Looking back at the father-daughter teams of times past, The Williams, Grafs and Seles produced slim-bodied players, but not Navatorova and Capriati, who are mostly coached by professional coaches.
Three years of training locally and another three years of tournaments internationally should produce a champion in the 2012 San Francisco Olympics.
2.14
BODY SERVER