The Smartest Junior Tennis Match I Ever Saw

I've watched a lot of junior tennis matches over the years, enough that most of them eventually blur together. The score disappears. The opponent disappears. Sometimes even the tournament disappears. One match from more than twenty years ago never did.

It was sometime in the early 2000s at the Girls 14s Southern Closed in Macon, Georgia. I was coaching Teresa Wang. She was playing Mallory Burdett, who was younger and playing up in the division. Mallory was coached by Jerry Baskin, an exceptional coach. Teresa and Mallory split the first two sets in a close, hard-hitting match. This was still when splitting sets in junior tennis meant playing a full third, and the players were allowed a ten-minute coaching break before going back out.

I have no idea what Jerry told Mallory during those ten minutes. I don't want to pretend I do. What I know is what happened next.

On the first point of the third set, Mallory threw up a moonball. Teresa backed up and played it. On the second point, Mallory threw up another one. This time Teresa stepped forward and tried to take the ball out of the air with what I called a power volley, often called a swing volley. She missed. Third point, another moonball. Teresa stepped into the midcourt again, took it out of the air and hit the power volley for a winner. All three points happened inside the first game of the third set. Mallory never hit another moonball for the rest of the match. She won the third set 7-5.

I still think it may have been the smartest junior tennis match I ever watched. Not because Mallory learned that Teresa couldn't handle a moonball. Teresa eventually showed that she could. The intelligence was in what both players did with the information they were getting back.

Teresa was doing the same thing from her side of the net. She backed up on the first moonball, the answer most players are taught to give. On the second one, she didn't back up again. She came forward and tried to take it out of the air. She missed, but she didn't go back to backing up. On the third moonball, she came forward again and made the power volley work. She'd already decided the first answer wasn't good enough before she knew whether the second one was.

Mallory asked the question. Teresa answered it. Mallory asked again. Teresa gave her a different answer. Mallory asked a third time, got the answer she needed, and moved on.

That sequence has stayed with me because junior players are often taught to think about strategy as finding what works and then doing more of it. There's nothing wrong with that. If something is working and the opponent has no answer, there usually isn't much reason to volunteer a different problem.

But that wasn't what made this match memorable. The moonball worked until it didn't. The first one gave Mallory information. The second gave her more. By the third, Teresa had shown that she was willing and able to step forward, take the ball out of the air and make the tactic much more dangerous to keep using. The answer had changed. Mallory noticed.

That sounds obvious when I write it twenty-some years later. It isn't always obvious when you're fourteen years old, the match is close, the third set has just started and you're trying to solve a problem while also managing your own game.

Players can become attached to an answer because it worked once. Coaches can too. We find something useful and start treating it as truth rather than information.

The opponent doesn't like high balls. The opponent can't pass. The opponent struggles with pace. The opponent always serves wide on a big point.

Maybe. For now.

A match keeps moving. The person on the other side of the net is learning too. The weakness you exposed may still be there, but the player may find a way to protect it. The pattern that produced three errors may stop producing errors once the opponent recognizes what you're doing. The answer that worked in the first four games may be gone by the sixth.

That's part of what I've been thinking about in writing about the difference between seeing something and testing it. Testing isn't only about finding out whether an observation holds up. Sometimes it tells you when the answer has changed.

That may be what I loved most about those first three points of the third set. Mallory didn't need ten more moonballs to convince herself. She didn't keep returning to the same idea because it had worked earlier. She collected enough information and changed course.

I call this the smartest junior match I've ever seen because of how quickly both of them answered the question in front of them. By the end of that first game of the third set, something important had been asked and settled, and both players went right back to playing the way they had played the first two sets.

I don't know whether that was the plan Jerry sent her back onto the court with. Maybe it was. Maybe Mallory created it herself. Maybe the first moonball was intentional and the next two were simply good competitive instincts following the result. I don't know. And I don't need to.

What I saw was a young player treat a tennis match like a conversation. She posed something with the ball. Teresa responded. Mallory listened. Then she stopped asking a question Teresa had already answered.

There are plenty of ways to measure intelligence in tennis. Shot selection. Pattern recognition. Anticipation. Tactical discipline. The ability to absorb coaching and carry it onto the match court. I keep coming back to something simpler.

Can you recognize when the answer has changed?

Mallory asked the question three times. The third answer was enough. She never hit another moonball.

More than twenty years later, I still remember it.