WEAPONS

If you want to really be a player, then you need weapons.
Yes, you can just run all over the court and not miss, but even as a rabbit you need weapons. After all, rabbits have great speed, agility, determination and usually annoyingly good passing shots and concentration.
But a more obvious way of developing a weapon is to have a big shot. When I was a kid, it was all about the forehand. Agassi, Courier, Lendl etc were showing that stepping around and whacking the first ball with your forehand was the baseliner's equivalent of hitting the wide serve and volleying to the open court. My favourite exponent of this was Agassi.
And this just wasn't because of the fake mullet, jean shorts, bandana and colour configuration that made him look like a human peacock ... but that certainly didn't hurt his case either. And yes, you better believe I had some Agassi gear in my wardrobe as a kid.
I just loved Andre's forehand. For me, it's still the best forehand ever. Apart from hitting the ball in front, finishing the stroke, hitting from an open stance etc, the thing that always stood out for me about Agassi's forehand was his awesome turn at the start of the stroke.

On this video, look at his left arm at around the 12-19 second mark. It stays on the throat of the racket until the bounce allowing him to track the ball perfectly and then extends to the side of his body and holds there for a prolonged length of time. Andre is loading the gun big time. He's storing energy in his body like someone would store canned food in anticipation of a war breaking out.
And then boom!
I've always had a good forehand and I know that one of the reasons for this was watching Agassi for hours and hours when I was a kid and copying him as much as I could. Maybe I was lucky that I somehow noticed this great unit turn of his and decided I should probably do this too. Maybe I was lucky ... definitely lucky more like it.
Nobody told me about this, it was just something I discovered on my own. I guess what I'm saying is that you really need to work on developing a big shot like Andre's forehand and if this is something you are able to achieve in a natural way like I did, then that's just as good and in my opinion better, than developing it via formal coaching.
Watch the best and learn from the best.

Being a great competitor

If you want to be a great tennis player then you absolutely have to be a great competitor.
Lleyton Hewitt; Jimmy Connors; David Ferrer; Rafa Nadal ... all supreme competitors. With this in mind, here are my buddy Werner's 8 rules for being a great competitor:

1. Don't be perfect - winning or losing a point doesn't make you more or less.
2. Line-up - after mistakes you need to be ready for the next point. The two things you need to manage are your attitude and intentions.
3. Don't fix yourself, manage yourself.
4. No Bulls%$§ - nothing stops you from competing ... not even a bomb going off on the next court.
5. Stay external - keep the focus away from yourself and focus on how to make the opponent suffer ... tactics anyone?
6. Clarity - know what's happening tactically and why momentum is a certain way.
7. Controllable - focus only on what you can control ... attitude, intensity, effort level on each point.
8. Fight feelings - base what you do on tactics and targets and not feelings and emotions.

That's some pretty sound advice.

Keeping it simple

If it's good enough for Tipsarevic to keep it simple then it's good enough for everyone else. After all, the simple way is always the easy way and the right way.
When it comes to simplicity, I am always reminded by what Bruce Lee said:

" ... One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity."

http://blogs.tennis.com/tennisworld/2012/03/by-pete-bodo-miami-not-long-ago-i-came-across-a-video-in-which-janko-tisparevic-then-still-miles-from-his-current-top.html

Words or no words?

I am from New Zealand and am a native English speaker. Yet I live in Austria, speak passable but pretty poor German and have been more successful teaching tennis here than in all the English speaking countries I used to work in combined.
I will say that some of the talent I work with here is a little higher but it's not a tremendous difference. For me, the biggest difference is that my lack of verbal skills in my students language has improved my coaching. There isn't the chance for them to get confused by my words. And as we know, the body doesn't remember words or store words, what the body stores is feel.
And this is what I have focused on - feel.
I can tell you to have a more of a turn at the start of your forehand or a looser arm on your serve, but it is much more powerful for the student if you can experience this feeling through an exercise. You feel it, your body remembers it. Of course you still need a lot of repetition, but your body will remember it.
And when you are playing a match and it's 4-4 in the third, you definitely don't want to be operating by the way of, "do this and then that before I do ... what the heck was I supposed to do again". No, you want to be operating on an instinctive level.
I firmly believe in not trying to sound too clever as a coach and that just giving my students simple exercises to do that helps them feel various things they need to improve has helped their games tremendously.
How do I know this?
Well not once has a player come to me after a tournament match and said they were confused about this shot or that shot or thinking about this or that.
I'm hoping this is the start of getting them to play in the zone.

Gonzo memories

Former Australian Open finalist Fernando Gonzalez retired this week. I could run through some of Gonzo's stats but I'm more a memories kinda guy so I'm sorry to disappoint any trainspotters out there.
As a junior, I played a lot of competitive tennis in Gonzo's backyard of South America. The first year I was in South America was 1994 and a few months after this I was competing in Europe. Whilst in South America I became good friends with a lot of the South America kids which included guys like former top 50 player Luis Horna. All the kids played the first tournament of the European circuit in Holland at a tournament called the Windmill Cup (a week before the tournament, a disgruntled local burnt down the windmill outside the club. I swear, I'm not making this up).
Now during my first trip to South America, Gonzo wasn't there but during that week in Holland, the legend of Gonzo was beginning to grow. The South Americans talked about him like they were talking about Keyser Soze on 'The Usual Suspects'.
"This one time, I saw him do this and this and that. I think I did, no?"
All I heard from these knuckleheads was, wait until you see Fernando play. Wait until you see him hit a forehand. The man was already a legend and he was all of 14-years-old.
The next week we played at a club in Belgium that was called 'The Happy Club'. (First the Windmill Cup with a burnt down Windmill and then the Happy Club. This wasn't even the end of it. The last tournament was played in Brühl in Germany and we all stayed in an Army Barracks that was manned by psychotic looking German Army dudes walking around with bowie knifes, machine guns and german shepherds that I think they used to underfeed on purpose to make them look even nastier than they even were. Before the trip I had also just learnt about the years of 'Nazi Germany'. Safe to say, my Nazi wisecracks were on hold for that week.)
Gonzo arrives at the club for his first match from god knows where. He's there for like 20 minutes before he's about to play. He plays some poor bastard on one of the main courts which has this huge balcony overlooking it and people couldn't have been more fascinated if Sampras and Agassi had shown up to play mixed doubles against Madonna and a Persian Tiger.
Gonzo put on a show and made me think for the first time that there were people who were good tennis players with talent - me - and there were also those people who were just 6789 levels better. He was the first guy who made me literally think, "oh my god, that is what I'm gonna be up against".
You would think Gonzo would have strolled through the tournament but he ended up playing an awesomely casual South American style match in the semi's and lost to some kid from France who another young freak, Xavier Malisse (he was even more impressive than Gonzo) beat in the final.
Gonzo was a cool dude as a junior as he obviously knew he had this extraordinary gift but as we say in New Zealand, he was never a dickhead about it.
And that's why I always cheered for him as a pro.

Reward Effort

Last weekend, a 12-year-old boy I coach lost a heartbreaking match in the final of a big junior tournament. Leading by a set and 5-4, he had three match points. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to take his chances and eventually lost the set in a tie-break.
Now, if you've been around junior tennis or tennis for as long as I have, invariably, after something like this happens the script usually goes as follows:
Player X who blew their chance generally goes beserk; occasionally breaks a racket; starts crying and completely tanks the third. Heah, their kids and they're just learning. This stuff happens.
What is rare, is to see a junior player lose a set in this manner, forget about it and start competing their tail off on the first point of the third set. But this is exactly what this boy did. He didn't win the match, but he didn't lose the third set 0-6 in a screaming fit of rage either. He held his own and played gritty tennis until 3-3 but ran out of gas at the end losing 3-6.
The most positive thing to come out of this match was the maturity of his attitude in the third set. In tennis you have to have a short memory and also fight, claw and scratch for every point. It's tough to train this attitude but one way to try and ingrain it is to always focus on effort during practice sessions. We miss shots all the time and we can't control the fact our opponent might hit a blazing forehand winner on the dead run.
But what we can control is the effort we give on each point. So, run for every ball and fight for every point and good things will happen. And if you're ever in doubt, just think WWDFD?
What would David Ferrer do?

Putting it on the line

As a coach, there is no greater feeling than watching one of your players compete.
I don't just mean go out there and play a match in a tournament, I mean really compete. Last Sunday, a young girl who I have been coaching since 2010 competed her butt off. To me, tennis is boxing with rackets. The opponent is trying to knock you on your back and you have to stand up to them, go toe to toe and not back down. Playing a girl she had lost badly to a few weeks before, my girl played a great first set and a half before getting the wobbles. The last half of the second set wasn't pretty but this is when she showed everyone watching what a competitor she is. It's easy to play when you're out there walking on water. At 4-4, 5-5 and 6-6, she was as far away from walking on water as possible. She was going on guts and determination.
She played a great tie-break and at the end of it she was the Tirolian Masters champion for her age-group.
Tennis is a great measure of one's character. She was out for 6 months at the end of 2011 with shoulder and ankle injuries. She has worked her tail off and has now gotten some reward for it.
For me, seeing her go out there in a pressure situation, stay composed and not back down ... well, it was one of my proudest moments as a coach.
Congrats Andrea O on a truly gutsy performance.
Time for your Petko dance!!!