Teaching Kids Perfect Tennis Technique to Develop Essential Skills

And if his technique was any more advanced, if it looked any more like Djokovic's technique, it would be worse. It would hinder his ability to rally and hurt his overall development. Alright guys, thanks for clicking on the video. Today I'm going to share with you some of the coaching methods that I use for developing young tennis players. Now if you're a parent, I think you're going to find this really useful. That's whether you work with your player full time, maybe you want to do some stuff in between coaching sessions, or maybe you're just looking for the knowledge to understand how your player can develop the skills to play great tennis. And with that knowledge, it's going to help you to find a coach that really fits your needs. If you are a coach, hopefully you're using these methods, and if you're not, hopefully we can discuss them in more detail either in the comments section below or via my website at tpatennis.com. So the first thing to understand is that a beginner is going to struggle with their anticipation, their receiving skills as we call it. They're not going to know how that ball is going to bounce, where it's going to bounce, the speed, the spin, the height. They're going to struggle with this. This is why they're a beginner. We also have technique, which is sending skills, their ability to hit the ball back effectively and use the appropriate technique to do so. Now these two skills should be developed together and in harmony so that one helps the other. If you teach technique that is appropriate for the player's level and allows them to rally and that ball gets hit back and forth, they get to develop receiving skills. When receiving skills get developed, the player has a better understanding of where that ball is. You can develop more advanced sending skills because the player has the ability to time their swing and connect correctly with the ball. So quite simply within an open situation such as a rally or point play, your technique and ability to hit the ball can't be any better than your ability to track the ball. That would be like saying I've been working on my catching technique, my form is brilliant but I can't track the ball into my hand and I'm going to work on that at a later date. It's like no, these two things have to go together or you're not very good at catching and you're not very good at tennis if you can't marry the skill of receiving and sending skills. So I think the error that coaches and parents make is that when the player is struggling to hit that ball back and forth, they remove receiving skills to make it easier for the player. The coach then drops the ball in front of them and they work on technique which tends to get more elaborate because you've removed the need for the player to develop receiving skills or execute receiving skills. So you've removed the most important part of the game or at least half of it and you're just dropping the ball which doesn't develop the receiving skills. Then on top of that you develop more advanced sending skills that don't work within a rally that don't then develop receiving skills. Make sense? So I just want to make it clear that I'm always trying to develop a player's technique. The thing is technique is not the goal, it allows players to achieve the goal. So what you've got to do is create a situation whether that's a rally, moving the ball around, trying to win a point, trying to deal with a shot such as a fastball or a high ball, whatever it is and you try and help the player to develop their technique, improve their technique to better deal with that situation. All right let's take a look at some on-court video footage of me working with two six-year-olds Kyle and Faith and I'm just trying to have them control the ball back to me. Now obviously their technique is going to be really simple, just rack it right behind the ball and basically nudge it back to me. But if we can get a rally they see that cause and effect, sending and receiving skills and they start to develop the So even at this stage of their development I'm encouraging them to hit the ball back and forth to each other and if I'm working with more than one player at a time whether that's a semi-private or a group session I'm always having players hit the ball to each other as opposed to having them all on the same side of the net because in this scenario here I'm working on one player sending skills encouraging them to hit the ball to the other player and the other player gets to work on their receiving skills of running around trying to track the ball and trying to send it back. So I might not be able to work on the player receiving that much but they're developing far more skills than if I had them on the same side of the net and as I'm working with one the other player's not really engaged. So in this next exercise I've made it a little bit more competitive not keeping score but I am feeding the ball to whoever wins the previous point and I'm helping the hitter to be able to control their body the racket and their contact point to be able to get the ball to go up the line or cross court this is really useful to understand these things to develop these skills of how to manipulate the tennis ball. The receiver now has to run around a lot more control their body and again anticipate how that ball is going to bounce and attempt to send it back. A little too much mustard though okay catch the racket in your over your shoulder in your right hand you ready beautiful here we go keep two hands on the backhand beautiful made him run good effort make him run the other side oh got him make him run the other side where you at guy oh you're not got that here we go all right your turn yes get back get back over your shoulder beautiful now it's important to understand that it's the player's skill level and the situation that will dictate what technique to teach so in this situation he's got a little bit better his receiving skills have improved he's back on the service line so we got a bigger swing over the shoulder to control that ball over a further distance however still simple with the take back right behind the ball so that he can time that shot if I put it up here now we're doing a stop sign with the with the racket or high five or surfing or anything goofy like that it's not going to help him to control the tennis ball this technique here is perfect for his stage of development if it looks any more advanced if it looks any more like Djokovic's forehand or backhand it would actually hinder rather than help his overall development now I think it's really important that the kids can feed the first ball in because I want them to be able to rally on so you can see here that the alternating feeds now because there's two of them it runs quite smooth but in other situations where it may slow things down there's lots of ways that you can sort of speed things up by having the kids feed some balls and you having a bunch of balls that you can feed when the rally breaks down so in this exercise here you can see one of them's feeding when that rally breaks down they run and grab a ball from the basket and while that's happening I'm feeding the player a forehand or a backhand focusing on technique trying to have them control the ball back to me and by the time they've done that the other player's got a ball out the basket and they're ready to feed again so I'm always trying to come up with exercises like this that get them to feed but don't slow the tempo of the session down so same game here just starting off with a serve and again this technique is perfect throwing the ball up giving it a high putting it in the box getting the point started if I was to get them to do a throwing motion or to stretch higher or god forbid giving them a continental grip it's just going to hurt their ability to control the tennis ball and we're not really going to go anywhere and this is how bad habits are developed when you put something like a continental grip into the hands of someone who's not at that skill level they start doing funky things to be able to control the ball and get it in play because they don't fully understand the movements so go step by step and just evolve them through the process as quickly as possible all right guys I hope you found that helpful please leave me a comment give me a like all that good stuff also if you go to tpatennis.com I've got a free pdf download it's a coaching guide it's called the essential skills coaching methodology I've condensed all my coaching methods into nine pages easy to read easy to implement if you read that you will become an awesome tennis coach even if you've never coached before go check it out download it it's free come back and leave me a comment and I'll talk to you soon