Last night I uploaded a video called “Tennis Training with a Pro”. I was fortunate to join tennis player Karl Adrian Ringdal and his coach Luis Perez for a couple of training sessions and we did some drills that I thought could be interesting to share. It also highlights how hard you have to work to become a pro player. Karl Adrian Ringdal is a 21-year-old tennis player from Marbella, Spain who was a promising junior but took a break from tennis for a little while (doing mainly coaching) and now wants to get back into the game and aim …
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So here is something new! We introduce Tennisnerd Academy, a feature I will do together with tennis coaches and brothers Nik and Vijay Siwach who used to run their own academy in Germany and are now based in Malta. What tennis stroke or situation do you struggle with? Please comment and let us know! The idea behind Tennisnerd academy is to give multiple solutions to common tennis problems. But we will also allow ourselves to stray a bit and do trick shots, get in-depth and discuss pro player techniques. This is, after all, for you (and us!) tennis nerds. Tennisnerd …
Clay courts are a bit of a divider in the tennis world. We all know what Rafael Nadal thinks, but guys like Nick Kyrgios repeatedly bash the surface. If we look at it with it from the UK’s standpoint, Clay Court Services’ Peter Sutton explains how clay courts can help British tennis. It is obvious if you look at the world rankings that clay courts play a role in producing world-class tennis players. Eighteen of the top 200 are Italian, 14 are French, 14 are Spanish and 10 are from Argentina, all countries where natural clay is the most played-on …
The playing careers for tennis players are often short, with the average age of retirement around 27 years old. On top of that, average earnings are not as high as you would expect, reportedly around $300,000 career prize earnings, with many players earning less. What does life look like after retirement? Andy Murray Unlikely To Experience Financial Issues It is the news of Andy Murray’s retirement that got me thinking about this. Murray will maybe end his legendary career at Wimbledon in 2019, due to an ongoing hip injury. Though I’m sure Murray will miss tennis immensely, financial speaking …
I am happy to publish a guest post from Cyrus Sethna and Nihal Daswani who were participants at the Australian Open “AO to AI Hackathon”. It deals with how data affects and can affect tennis in the future. The 80’s saw arguably some of the best years of tennis on record. Be it the epic Borg-McEnroe final at Wimbledon, the Edberg-Becker rivalry, the countless battles between Navratilova & Evert, or a new era of hard work & regimental tennis brought about by Lendl. On the other side of the net, the same decade saw the advent of the VCR, the …
The forehand is usually our most reliable wing and where we finish most of our points. This is not always the case of course, but a general rule. For many players the backhand is a huge weakness, how can we overcome this? Well, the obvious solution is to keep working on the backhand and that’s the strategy I’m trying to work on personally. Since my backhand has always been fairly weak and my forehand my main weapon, I’ve resorted to slicing most backhands in competitive matches. This has always felt a bit like a concession and something that would never …
I think it always make sense to work on your technique, but sometimes there are such big issues in your game that you need to change an entire stroke. Federer has not been in need of any dramatic changes, but constantly makes small tweaks to his game and has emerged in 2017 with a one-handed backhand that someone defeats belief. Just evidence what can happen if you’re focused on becoming a better player. We all want to become better players, no matter what level we’re on. That is the beauty of sport and life – our constant search for improvement. But sometimes …
For a while it seemed on the verge of extinction. The game was moving towards faster and faster baseline rallies and the two-hander is an easier shot to take on the rise. Then Federer came, dominated and now we are in a situation where the one-handed backhanded seems to be thriving. Just looking at this year’s Indian Wells with Stan the Man Wawrinka beating Dominic Thiem, Pablo Cuevas and his classic game reaching the quarter-finals, Federer finding a new way to beat Nadal. Then we also have Dimitrov who is playing better than ever and next generation guy Denis Shapalov who hits …
The Aussie younglings have kicked up a lot of fuzz in recent years. Kokkinakis has been the least prone to end up in the media, but Kyrgios helped him during his own match against Wawrinka last year when he announced to the microphones around the court that his friend, Kokkinakis, had been banging Wawrinka’s current girlfriend. Kyrgios comment was an illustration of how “hot” is head gets at times. Sometimes the umpire finds himself in the crossfire, other times it’s the opponent or, apparently, his friends. He seems to have found a better way to channel his energy through his …
I just had to start writing about this, but I might not finish it tonight and with this post. It’s simply a topic at the heart of our game. What’s in the head of a tennis player? We all know that the deciding factor in most tennis matches is the mental ability. Confidence. How you deal with setbacks. How much you want it. How nervous you are. How you handle pressure. This is all part of the head of a tennis player. Physical ability and technique are of course very important, but when you’re in that final set tie-break, you …