How You Practice Matters

Not all practices are created the same.  Stepping on the court and just hitting the ball without having a sense of what it is you want to accomplish will leave you somewhere, but it most likely will not take you where you are trying to go. There are really two different types of practices that every player should participate in.  One is a competitive practice and the other is a cooperative practice.

In a competitive practice, each player is trying to figure out the puzzles of how to do better at a particular skill than the other person.  It’s also often a situation where you are trying to win and take the other person out of their comfort zone so they can’t be successful.  The other type of practice is the cooperative practice.  In cooperative practice, all the participants are trying to work together to accomplish a specific goal. One example of this would be trying to hit 20 balls in a row cross-court, past the service line.  In this situation, it’s imperative that one player deliver a ball which can be handled by the other player.  If that doesn’t happen, the goal will never be reached.  The opposite would be a competitive practice, with each player trying to play out a point cross-court in such a manner the balls are hit out of the other person’s strike zone in such a way their opponent can’t handle the ball.

So, how do you decide which one of these types of practices you are going to employ?  I believe it is important to work on skills in private lessons, which is a cooperative practice.  A coach is feeding you balls or hitting you balls so you can work on stroke development, footwork patterns, or things like that.  That’s largely cooperative in nature.

Hitting lessons can either be a cooperative or a competitive practice.  As a cooperative practice, the goal is to find either a highly- skilled player or a coach who is willing to deliver the ball just like you need it.  The sole function of this type of hitting lesson is to provide exactly what you need in order to be able to hone the things you’re working on.  The hitting partner will do things like run you around and then purposefully give you an opportunity ball where you can be aggressive, hit a drop shot, or do something you’re trying to improve.  Hitting lessons that are competitive in nature provide a player with a greater degree of challenge when playing matches against someone with a higher skill level who can handle the ball you are generating while providing the consistency needed.

There are group practices which can also be either cooperative or competitive.  I generally prefer to have group practices be about 30% cooperative and 70% competitive.  I use the beginning as a cooperative warm-up to make sure everyone is warming up at a level which allows success and then we go into the competitive mode for the majority of the group practice.  In the games-based approach to learning, we generally use competitive practices for figuring out the strategic parts of play; so we put players in various situations that require them to use specific skills to accomplish something, as well as wanting to and needing to win.

I think, even within a competitive practice, there is some degree of a cooperative nature.  A player shouldn’t go out on the court and be working on playing a game that is so big the person on the other side doesn’t get any kind of practice.  When that happens, there’s no value in it for that other person.  I believe every player has a responsibility to the person on the other side of the net to not work on things to the point that success can’t be achieved and therefore the other person doesn’t get any practice. I also don’t believe it’s a good use of time for a player, who’s trying to get better at the sport of tennis, to bring down their game to a level far below anything they would ever use in competition solely to allow the person on the other side of the court to have success.     

Then there are practice matches and tournaments at a lower level which are exclusively competitive and performance-oriented which means the player will be working on performance goals versus outcome goals.  In that case, a player may be more focused on achieving a high level of second serves close to the line versus wanting to win the tournament.  However, always keep in mind, why would you ever step on a competitive field and not try to win.  Winning should never become non-existent in that situation.

Private lessons, hitting lessons, group practice, and tournament play are the various competitive and cooperative practice situations every player should participate.  It’s important to remember that how you practice most often determines how you play in competition; if you don’t run after short balls in practice, you most likely won’t do it during tournaments.  When a player understands how to put out their best effort and how to get that right balance with those various types of practices at any given period of time, I believe, they will always be a much more successful player.