ORC - U12 Performance

Thursday, February 11, 2016

This week's plan. And Happy Family Day, Valentine's Day

Hello everyone,

It was great to see all the hard work we put into rally consistency and quality coming together this week! I think all players are getting used to produce more consistent rally, hitting better shots and able to recognize opportunities in order to take advantages on opponents shorter, weaker, and less quality balls. I'm proud of everyone!

We also spend some time in each class on developing serve, specifically on adding spin (slice). The idea here is to help players developing more control on their serve and hopefully get them to a stage where they can decrease their chance of double faulting. I would suggest all players practicing serve away from academy hours and really spend some time with their private coach to further develop this skill.

For this week. Our first plan is to help players warm up with their own technical goals and focus on something each of them want or need to improve. The idea is to teach players on taking ownership and responsibility when they're on court training. Every ball and every strike counts, focusing on personal improvement rather than having coaches telling them what to do. This is a big learning for our young players, let's see how they handle this.

We also bring back some skill development combining slice and volley, just getting everyone to work on their racquet work and feel of the ball around the net. Of course there are lots of transition footwork to go with this as well.

Finally, we want players to play more points or matches this week as we have some tournaments coming up and quite a few players are getting ready for their competition this and next weekend. We will be looking for players to utilize the spin serve as much as possible, also encourage them to play aggressively when they find opportunities to do so. I think this is going to be a great week to watch everyone play.

Starting tomorrow is also the U10 OTA Champions Future Stars Series. This tournament will run four days and showing off our best U10 boy and girl players in the province. Go check out some junior tennis action at Aviva centre this weekend!

We have five of our own players in this tournament.

Matthew Yang

Even VanDerStarren

Kristofer Todorov

Bailey Muller

Claire Podolsky

Good luck and have fun everyone!

Peter Liu

Monday, February 1, 2016

Djokovic. The art of hitting deep

Hi everyone,

This article was shared to me by coach Andrea Rabzak (Thanks Andrea!). I think it is a very interesting read and goes really well with what we had been working on for the past couple of weeks. I hope you enjoy it!

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sweet-science-of-novak-djokovic-1454109939

Peter Liu

This week's plan. February already!?

Hi everyone,

Happy February! I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and was able to enjoy some Australian Open tennis action.

For the past couple of weeks we worked hard on rally consistency and also focused on the quality of player's rally. Keeping the balls in the court is one thing, but able to hit the ball with good tempo, good depth, and accuracy consistently is not an easy task. Everyone player should have idea what quality rally ball is by now and we will continue to remind players during their training.

With quality rally balls, we are forcing opponents to either make mistake out right or send a rally ball back to us that is weak or less quality. This is when good players take over control of the rally and continue to move or force opponent in order to create wining opportunities.

So our focus this week is exactly this. Take control of those mid court weak balls or anything that comes with less quality. We will train to develop a weapon, most likely their forehand, and help them with decision making in order to understand when, how, and where to use their strength. We will also work on transition to the net position as this is something players do often after an attacking or forcing shot. It is going to be a fun and exciting week!

See you soon!

Peter Liu

Monday, January 18, 2016

This week's plan

Hello everyone,

It is good to be back and I had a great time during last week's training, watching players begin this year with awesome intensity and focus. What a start!

During my absence in last couple of weeks. Coach Brad has been focusing on lots of fundamentals, volume, movement in order to get everyone back on track after the holidays. He also pushed the players to strike the balls cleanly with effortless strokes, and worked on serve/return with more emphasis on return positions. Great job coach Brad, Sam and Kyle! Thanks for your awesome work!

For this week, we will be focusing on hitting "quality" rally from the baseline in order to break down our opponents or forcing them to come up with weak shots or out right mistakes. We will help players recognize the effects of their good quality rally, so they can decide when to move closer inside the court and taking a stronger offensive position as well as looking to use their weapon to attack their opponent.

We will continue to develop serve and return game, making sure there are lots of volume and putting more focus on return of 2nd serve this week.

Let's have a great week. See you on court!

Peter Liu

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Happy holiday and things

Hello everyone!

We had a great wrap up this week before heading into Christmas and New Year. We focused on transition game this week, a lot of short balls were received inside the baseline and created movement towards net, players were pushed to take tons of volleys and smashes! Energy was high and it was great to see everyone having fun and be creative.

I want to take this time to thank and congratulate every single player for their hard work, effort and commitment during last 12 weeks of training. I think everyone did a great job and we have made lots of improvement in a very short period of time. I'm really excited to see what everyone will bring in the new year.

Holiday season is right around the corner, I hope everyone get to rest or take a vacation somewhere, spend time with family, friends and enjoy good food. Oh! Don't forget to go watch STAR WARS!! =)

I am sure some players are sticking around and would like to setup some private lessons. I would suggest contact Brad, Kyle or Rouba to see if one of them are available. Of course if you are already working with a coach and have setup some lessons for next couple of weeks. Great job to you!!

I would also encourage anyone who is not traveling away to think about playing a tournament. We have our own George Carter junior tournament at ORC in January and there will be tons of tournaments happening around the city in next few weeks. Have a look on the OTA website!

That would be all everyone! I want to wish everyone Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I will see you in January 2016!

Peter Liu

Sunday, December 6, 2015

Week 11

Hi everyone,

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

Upcoming tournaments

Hi everyone,

Just a quick update on some upcoming tournaments and players that are planning on entering (as far as I know of). It would be great if players from our U12 program can join up and attend some of these tournaments together!

I also know some of players have not been very active on playing tournaments for the last couple of months. I would recommend you to check out the rookie or transition tour tournaments below and see if you can make it.

Good luck and have fun to everyone that is out there competing! We are proud of you!

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ACE U12 Provincial Circuit *** (3 Stars)

December 11th-13th

ACE Burlington

OTA Entry Link

ACE U12 Rogers Rookie Tour December 13th

December 13th

ACE Burlington

OTA Entry link

ACE U12 Provincial Circuit *** (3 star)

December 18th-20th

ACE Burlington

OTA Entry Link

Blackmore U12, U16 Transition Tour **