Something taught to every young student and athlete is that the skills and lessons learned on the court, field or track are things that can be carried into all walks of life and used long after someone hangs up their competitive athletic career. This is an accurate sentiment across all sports, but especially in tennis….
I help players become better losers. “But I don’t wanna lose!” I understand, but it is part of playing the game. If you dig a little deeper, you can see that you DO want there to be the possibility of losing, right? Can we agree on that? If there was no chance of losing the game…
Sound tennis strokes are produced by a balanced and synchronized combination of angular and linear forces because we strike a ball by moving in coordinated arcs that produce straight paths. The underlying physics are: Rotational inertia of the racket (moment of inertia ) leads to centrifugal force which then moves the racquet linearly at a tangent to this…
Each time you hit the ball in a tennis match, you should be hitting one of these three shots: starting shot, set up the point shot, or try to win the point shot. In the heat of a competitive tennis match, most players tend to either try to “get their shot in” or “go for…
Although it was over 30 years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the closest I have ever felt to being knocked out unconscious. Legendary Long Island coach Adrian Chirici and I received a doubles wildcard into the Hamlet Cup, an ATP Tour tournament that used to be held in Commack. Our…
If you or your kid’s forehand lacks power and spin, it’s not a mystery—it’s history. Professional tennis has fundamentally changed how the forehand is struck, yet many players are still using mechanics from a different era. The modern professional forehand did not appear overnight. Its roots trace back to early frontier players like Björn Borg,…
Our passion for introducing tennis to families at an early age and stage at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center requires a thoughtful, patient, and developmentally appropriate approach. At the age of 3, children are still developing coordination and receiving skills in gameplay. Instead of emphasizing structured gameplay, “Mommy & Me” tennis classes…
When he was eight-years-old, Aaron Rittberger’s first introduction to tennis came on the courts of Eastern Athletic Clubs in Dix Hills. He played many other sports at the time including baseball, basketball and soccer, but his parents wanted him to try a one-on-one sport to help build his self-confidence. “My older sister played tennis at…
In youth tennis, three roles shape every outcome: the player, the parent, and the coach. Each arrives with different expectations, different pressures, and different definitions of success. Yet beneath all of this, there is something they are all quietly working toward, something shared, but rarely named in real time. So what is the word that…
For many tennis players, this is the time of year to move from the climate controlled predictability of indoor tennis to the challenges and joys of playing the game outdoors. But how does one best prepare for this adjustment? Moving from indoor to outdoor tennis requires significant adjustment because outdoors you must contend with unpredictable…
