Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and maybe getting started with your Christmas shopping!
For close to two weeks we had been focusing on competing, which was done in some type of situation points play or match play. Over all, I would say players did a good job, but I would still like to share some of my thoughts.
I thought some players competed really well, even though they know this is just training matches, they still took it seriously and played with good intensity and focus. They understand how to perform under pressure or under the restrictions I had given them. They managed mistakes well and most importantly, they were also able to play while maintaining the skills we worked on for the last 10 weeks.
I felt the biggest difference between players that did well and some that needed improvement really came down to the lack of match play, tournament experience, and mostly that "fire", "intensity", "edge", or that strong "competitive mindset". Of course there are other factors too such as over all consistency, technical skills, physical abilities, etc... but even some players had all those skills, it was still very clear to see who had been out there playing and was the "Veteran"... tougher, resilient, knows how to manage mistakes, and strong determination. Or who were the "greenhorn"... inconsistency, breaks easily, gave up a bit too quickly, poor body language after mistakes (sometime just after ONE mistake!) and suffer performance drop quickly due to nervousness which were not able to bounce back...
Now I am not suggesting that we should push players into competition right away and start to toughen them up, after all this path does take time to build... but I do think that some healthy amount of tournament play and match experience needs to happen sooner than later for some players. They need to see what's out there in order to be inspired to get better, they need to go through some tough situations in order to be resilient and build stronger characters. It's not going to be easy and there will be tears, but so is LIFE!... Just remember this. Tennis is a game, and game is meant to be played. So I encourage everyone to get out there and play tennis!
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Back to our plan. This week we will be working on generating topspin as well as finding ways to create more racquet head acceleration. We will explore the techniques in order to make this work and use it to open up the court with sharp angle cross court forehand or backhand. It is a important shot in tennis and I believe it will also help some players loosing up their wrist and arm during their swing.
That's see how it goes. I'll keep you posted!
Peter Liu
hi
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