This week's plan and welcome to March!

Hi everyone,

March is here and I'm sure a lot of players are going away for a short vacation. We will make sure all players work hard this week so they can use their March break to get a good rest.

This week our focus will be working on pattern training, specifically on starting the point and the 2nd shot after. We will be looking at starting the point (serve or return) towards opponent's backhand and what to do with the next shot coming back. There will be decision making component in this training in order to help players understand how to position themselves, whether they should/could continue to take control and play aggressively, or they need to take a neutral (perhaps defensive)position to keep the ball in play. This training will go well with the serve and return training we have been working on for last couple weeks. I think it will also help players in their matches.

We will continue to work on groundstroke skills as far as handling pace, have better timing and impact, create better rhythm during rally... etc. I think everyone has improved tremendously in these areas, but we need to maintain them and continue to get better at them.

Let's make this a great week! See you on court!

Peter Liu

This week's plan

Hi everyone,

It has been a great week of training. I felt all players were engaged and really put in efforts during practice. I also felt players taking more ownership in their tennis and was more focused on the things they wanted to improve, so great job to everyone.

This week we will continue to develop our serve and return game. For the most part everyone is doing better, but I would still encourage all players to get out there and practice serve as much as possible. Two main issues I saw were double faulting and not utilizing spin to help with 1st or 2nd serve, in some cases players are still "pushing" their 2nd serves in which really isn't going to make the serve better in the long run. These aspects of serve can only be improved by spending enough time practicing it and eventually gain confident and control.

On groundstrokes, we will be working on creating and handling pace from the baseline position. We want players to be able to create pace or an aggressive rally ball when the incoming ball is slower. And control or redirect if incoming ball is faster. This should overall help players develop better feel and understanding on how to control the ball based on what they're receiving.

Of course we will be working on volley skills and transition from groundstrokes to net play whenever we can. A lot of smashes will be hit in order to help develop overhead skills which is also important for serving.

Let's make this a great week! See you on court!

Peter Liu

This week's plan and tournament results!

Hi everyone,

I hope you all had a wonderful Family Day long weekend.

This week's plan is not too different from last week. We are in our pre-competition phase as we have few more players going to tournament this coming weekend, so the plan is to have players select few things they really want to work on and help them focus on improving those areas. We have been practicing with this approach since last week and I think everyone got to learn about taking more ownership during our training, so let's hope all players continue to push themselves and train effectively.

Playing lots of points is still our focus this week, but we will really explore the importance of starting the point both from serve and return perspective. Having a routine before the serve and be ready for the 2nd shot in order to take control of the point right away or neutralize our opponent if the server's serve isn't strong enough yet. We will also work on return of serve, not only we want to return with good consistency, we also want to put server on defense as soon as possible, especially on those weak 2nd serves.

Let's hope we can get players ready for the tournament this coming weekend!

See you on court!

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We also have some tournament results from this weekend's U10 Future Stars Championship at Aviva Centre! I'm so proud of our players and I'm sure it was a wonderful and everyone got to learn a lot from this experience.

Matthew Yang made it to main draw Flight A. In round of 16 Matthew was down 0-3 and 30-40 in 3rd set, he managed to save 3 match points and came back to win the match in tiebreaker 5:3. It must've been a amazing match to watch! Matthew lost in the quarter final stage, but has demonstrated great effort and maturity in his tennis!

Evan and Kristofer both went into Flight B and had really good results. Evan got to semi final stage and Kristofer got to the final. Congratulation to both of them on their effort!

Robert from our U10 program is the youngest player we have in this tournament. He got into Flight C and made it to semi final stage. Great job Robert!

On the girl side we have Bailey made it in to Flight B and fought her way to the finals. It was wonderful to see Bailey out there competing and I hope she will get out there more!

Ola and Claire are both in Flight C and had good results. Claire got to quarter finals and was the recipient of the sportsmanship award! Ola went on to the finals and won the Flight C draw. Great job and congratulation to them both!

Peter Liu

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

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

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