Tuesday Tennis Tip: Smaggressive Aggression

As I was writing about the boy's basketball Sectional on Monday, I was reminded of my continuing belief that under pressure, teams that are aggressive are rewarded. It got me thinking, what are the ways to be aggressive in tennis, and where is the line of being too aggressive. Here's what I came up with.

There are three basic ways to be aggressive:
1. Placement
You place the balls in aggressive areas, such as deep into the corners, using angles, drop shots, moving your opponent around and controlling the point.
2. Pace
You hit the ball hard and force your opponent to adjust to the pace of your shots.
3. Coming to the Net
You get forward at every opportunity and force your opponent to have to come up with big shots to win the points from you.

With those three strategies in mind. I thought about this:

Playing One of the Strategies at a Time = Smaggressive
If you use just one of those strategies, you are being smaggressive. Only using one of them at a time is a fairly safe way to play, but it still puts your opponent under pressure. It is also very achievable at a high school level to use one of these aggressive moves at a time without making too many mistakes. So, typically in our matches we would want to play one of these strategies on every point.

You can see this in the way I coach. I typically instruct singles players to focus on placement of the ball, and doubles players to focus on attacking the net. These are the ONE strategies that I want players to use in those situations. There may be times for a singles player to attack the net, and there may be times for a doubles player to blast the ball. Yet, in general, I want them to stick with just one aggressive type play to put pressure on the opponent. Because

Playing Two of the Strategies at a Time = Risky
Think about it. If you play two of these strategies at the same point, you are going to make many more mistakes. Going for power and placement, you are going to miss more. Pounding the ball and coming to the net, it's difficult to get that balance, and you often get ahead of yourself. Same thing with coming to net and placing the ball. Usually the desire to get to the net causes the placement to lack a bit, and then makes it easier to get passed. The double-mindedness can get messy.

That doesn't mean you can't do it. Putting two of these together makes for a really aggressive play. That can throw your opponent off and help you win a point or two. But if you stay with the combination for too long, mistakes begin to pile up, and so does frustration.

Playing All Three at the Same Time = Chaos
If you try to hit for pace, placement and to get to the net; that is too much going on for the average player within the average point. I mean, honestly, that is where most mistakes come from. Players think, "Oh, there's a short ball. I going to blast that deep into the corner and then come to the net to pound down an overhead." Well, that's awesome when it happens, but usually there's so much going on in their mind that they send the approach shot long, or wide, or get to the net and don't get their racket prepared so they beef the overhead.

So, with that in mind, we want to use one of these aggressive strategies at a time. Over time, over practice, our normal shots will contain more pace. We will recognize proper times to come forward, and they will become more natural parts of our games. We just don't want to force it.