Is this the future of woman's tennis????

[hockeyscout]

I thought whoever won the Williams - Kvitova match would win the woman's side today, and it appears I was right.

I think we just saw the new for woman's tennis today, what do the rest of you think?

I think if you add in a top end slice backhand like Grigor's, serve - volley game and stepping into the ball off the front foot, court speed, well, I think you might have a player who could say, go back 20 - 30 years and win against Martina and Steffie. And, no, I am not being a smart ass. I am serious.

If you think about it, the William's sisters arrived at just the perfect time didn't they (?) and now they are exiting at an even better time (they still might get a few more titles). We call it a dead era in hockey, not sure what you call it in tennis.

Anyways, my eight year old daughter insisted the quality was better in 2014 than 2013 when she said, "Papa this years Wimbledon was much better than last year. No one cried."

[klacr]

Strawberries and Cream and Bagels

Kvitova played some spectacular tennis. Reminds me of another Czech born female lefty I know who dominated the grass at AELTC. Kvitova beat Bouchard 6-3, 6-0 in 55 minutes. Ouch. Cream with that bagel?

This is Kvitova's 2nd title and unlike 2011, Kvitova is fit, motivated and understands the opportunity that lies ahead of her. Perhaps she can pass on her grand slam winning ways to a fellow Czech named Berdych. That would be great.

As for Bouchard, I kinda felt bad for her. She just happened to be the unlucky one that got in the way of the Kvitova Steamroller. Although, it would have been nice and probably very keen to have adjusted tactics a little bit. Yes, I get it Genie...hit hard from inside the baseline and never get pushed back and hold your ground and be ultra aggressive. But what happens when the player on the other side of the net is hitting the ball harder, cleaner, flatter and deeper than you? If you don't change tactics you are SOL. Unless of course you didn't have a plan B. Then you are just not prepared or not well trained. Bouchard is well trained, at least, well trained enough to make an impressive run to the finals, but Kvitova is ball striking machine. Bouchard did not play a terrible match...only 4 unforced errors from the Canadian. Not even a Genie in a bottle would not have helped Bouchard.

Great players have both full offensive and defensive capabilities on their shots. Bouchard needed to step back, give herself time, let herself breathe, give Kvitova a different look. Or, she could have just kept with the same routine and hoped that Kvitova would somehow snap out of her "zone". But for Kvitova, she wasn't in a zone, she just played tactically smart, technically fundamental tennis. Wow, those skills get you a Wimbledon title nowadays? They do if you can execute it in big moments like Kvitova.

I'll always root for the Czechs. Had them as my teammates in college and yeah, they were solid. Not just as players, but as people. Clean ball striking, flat hitting, technically sound strokes. Some would say that is boring, I say it's a great learning experience and admirable in their discipline.

Here's to Petra Kvitova. 2014 Wimbledon Ladies Champion.

Kyle LaCroix USPTA
Boca Raton

[stroke]

Copy everything you said Kyle. Petra played the best match I think I ever seen a woman play on grass.

[hockeyscout]

Question

I am the biggest Petra fan of everyone as she is my favorite player. However, do you think it was Petra who was great or Eugenie who was just bad, or somewhere in between.

Anyways, what we saw today was kind of what we believe woman's tennis should be (of course with more backhand one handed slice and serve and volley), go all out and hit the winner deep, deep and deeper.

As Geoff says, body-shots.

Guess you'd better be able to consistently hit a winner all the time if you want to compete as a woman from now on.

And by the way Petra is what you want your kid to be! Nice kid.

[stroke]

I was really impressed with the way Eugenie conducted herself in the post match interviews that I saw. She was very pleasant and handled what was a huge disappointment with a lot of class.

[tennis_chiro]

...However, do you think it was Petra who was great or Eugenie who was just bad, or somewhere in between.

Anyways, what we saw today was kind of what we believe woman's tennis should be (of course with more backhand one handed slice and serve and volley), go all out and hit the winner deep, deep and deeper.
...

And by the way Petra is what you want your kid to be! Nice kid.

Well, I for one am really glad to see someone win who thinks it's a good thing to have friends in the locker room. It's nice to hear further affirmation that she is the nice person we have been lead to believe by the media coverage.

But if I told you a first time player in a Wimbledon final was going to make over 61% of her first serves, only 2 df's and have twice as many winners as ufe's (8/4), much less just 4 unforced errors

(I have to diverge here: an unbelieveable stat - Vinci and Erani had 0 unforced errors in their doubles final. ZERO!!!)

and she was going to convert 100% of her break points, don't you think you would think that player, especially if she was as agressive a player as Bouchard, would at least be very close to winning that match.

No, this was not about Eugenie. Mary Joe Fernandez or Pam Shriver said she thought it was the best display of offensive tennis she had ever seen, including from Navratilova, Graf, Seles and Williams. Kvitova made three times the number of ufe's that Bouchard made, but she made more than three times the number of winners (28/12).

And, for heaven's sake, will someone please talk to Chris Evert!
"Bouchard needs to see the serve earlier." Poor Genie was shellshocked. But she still only made 4 ufe's. That's because Petra was putting the ball about 6 inches from the baseline a good portion of the time. Those balls would have been tough the first day of play, but now that area of the court doesn't even have a true bounce. That's where a lot of the forced errors came from.

Consider this: Petra won 61 points: 28 winners (only 4 aces) and since Bouchard had only 4 ufe's, that means Genie made 29 forced errors. 57 of 61 points that Petra won came from offensive play. That's ridiculous. 12 ufe's vs 57 winners and forced errors for your opponent is just absolutely amazing. Someone should check out some other blowouts to see how that compares (Connors over Rosewall '74?).

I gave Petra my "kiss of death" 2 1/2 years ago in an article in 10sBalls.com previewing the 2012 Australian Open:

"Kvitova increased her confidence last week winning all her matches and the diamond tennis ball trophy in the Hopman Cup, including getting another win over #1 Caroline Wozniacki. The one match to watch will be if these two meet in the finals. It would be for the number one ranking in the world. You can argue about whether Wozniacki really deserves that spot with her shortcomings in the Majors, but rest assured, she does not want to give that perch up! They will both have some dangerous and very eager opponents in the quarters and semis (and full commitment the week before a major championship is always questionable), but if Caroline and Petra meet in that final it could set the tone for the entire year. If Caroline can hold off Petra here and retain that #1 ranking, that little bit of confidence could take her through to her first major in two more weeks.

On the other hand, if, as I expect she will, Petra continues her winning ways (she would be on at least a 20-match win streak since the second week of October if she reaches the final) and executes another victory over Wozniacki, I think she will be ready to put up an even better year than Djokovic did last year. And I think her domination of the women's game could easily go on for a couple of years, at least. At Wimbledon and Istanbul, she showed me she has more game than anyone else in women's tennis today. The question is whether, at just 21 years old, she has the maturity and focus to maintain that kind of domination over a long period of time; she definitely has the physical tools (albeit she appears to have room to improve her fitness, speed and agility on the court). If she could carve herself into the kind of hardbody of preparedness Dementieva brought to the court, I think she would dominate the game for the next 5 years, and probably even more. But that's just me looking for someone to be the best they could possibly be. Petra appears to be just a little "too nice" to be that mean to either herself (training, dieting) or her opponents.
Petra may not go on such a "Novak-like" tear; nevertheless, barring injury, I would expect her to take possession of the number one ranking over the next few weeks and not relinquish it for the forseeable future. As for the Australian Open, the women only play 2 out of 3 sets and upsets happen, especially in the heat. But Maria, Serena and Kim are all battling injuries to get back into the thick of it and they are highly unlikely to upset the applecart this time around The other major champions of last year, Li Na and Sam Stosur, seem to be battling mental demons of their own making."

Boy was I wrong!.... or was I? I said last week in this forum that I didn't think anyone left in the draw could beat Petra, ... except Petra. She showed tremendous focus and maturity this week.

But HockeyScout is right. If Navratilova could get a little bit of her coach's ear and give her a hint of how to follow that serve up with just an occasional backhand volley into the open court, at least on the ad side, ... OMG!

The encouraging thing is she said afterwards that she still had a lot of work to do to get better. I hope she means it. If I was her coach, I would be trying to get her together with the kind of people HockeyScout seems to be locked into to improve her mobility, flexibility, strength and yes speed. Awesome core strength (which shows a little in the lack of any flab around the middle usually) can make you quicker. Petra is a big girl; she is not going to be quick like Halep, but she can be better and more stable, ... and the reward for doing it would be dominating women's tennis for 5 years.

But there I go again with the kiss of death. (Seems to have worked for Janowicz anyway!) And I will go out on a not at all narrow limb to say we are going to see a lot more of Bouchard. I know Kvitova is not even in the top three right now, but that has to be just a matter of time now. The women don't have a "top four", but she definitely belongs there and I think Bouchard and also Halep (who is firmly at 3 now) will soon be in the 3, 4, 5 discussion. Healthy, I still think Serena is still a favorite on hardcourts, but her hold on her perch seems suddenly a lot more tenuous. I think Petra can knock her off even if Serena is playing well, but she is the only one who can do that.

And will somebody please come out and say that Venus played a tremendous match to win 17 service games in a row before succumbing at 5-5 in the third. I've only seen a few points, but that must have been some match. To play that tough against Kvitova. That was the match that made Kvitova's Wimbledon as much as anything.

don

[klacr]

I am the biggest Petra fan of everyone as she is my favorite player. However, do you think it was Petra who was great or Eugenie who was just bad, or somewhere in between.

Bouchard had just 4 unforced errors the whole match. Don't think she played horrible. Just didn't change tactics one bit.

And Yes, I've been a Petra fan for a few years as well. Met her back in 2011 in Miami for the Sony event when I was doing work for ATP/WTA. She was very sweet, respectful, down to earth and you got the sense all the other players respected her.

It's nice to be important, it's more important to be nice. Fortunately being nice and having two Wimbledon titles makes you even more of a special person.

If a Czech named Berdych can't win me a grand slam, I'm sure glad a female Czech named Petra can.

Kyle LaCroix USPTA
Boca Raton

[hockeyscout]

I thought Venus Williams would take it this year, however, I did say whoever came out of that match would win.

By the way, I am not concerned with Petra's weight. This is pretty common with Czech athletes, they all carry around a bit of puppy fat, and if you try and take it off they'll get worse. It's just how they are born and it's tough to get down to 8 percent levels. Petra's probably stopped dieting, worrying about that puppy fat and she's eating a lot, more mature and accepting of her appearance and concerned more about how she feels and is performing as opposed to looking. Every woman athlete has to kind of come to terms with it, and it looks to be the case here.

I have had a day to really think this match over, and for us on this end Petra is doing what we want to do, however, I think our bigger focus is on what went wrong for Ms. Bouchard.

I think the issue may have been with Ms. Bouchard fundamentals - she got to every ball late, never stepped into balls and was pivoting way to much for my liking personally.

This is the problem I think when you do not practice that serve and volley night and day, you forget how to step into the ball like say Grigor Dimitriev is stepping into the ball. Say what you want about Grigor but it was easy to see he'd make it eventually because he has the fundamentals in place of moving to the ball likely because when he was young he was 100 percent focused on playing winning tennis, hitting the home-run, the unbelievable winner, getting to the right place at the right time to do it and not being "coached" to wait for the ball, and play "new" age closed stance baseline tennis. As Geoff Williams says, work on the "body shots."

I think Eugenie was coached in the traditional sense of consistency, and well, you guys were right, she made no errors, and was so consistent, but ... she's was very consistent at putting the ball on a tee for Petra the whole match!

Someone should chart errors a bit differently, and one of them should be giving the other player the ball. Man, whenever my young one does that I just tell the hitting partners to embarass her and hit the biggest winner of their lives and pretend they just won Wimbeldon! I always tell them to say "Thank you, thank you very much, when you hand me the ball I play tennis just like Roger Federer, and it feels great!" How could Petra not look like second coming of Martina when every ball is being handed to her?

Every time by the way Petra handed the ball to Eugenie, Eugenie looked fantastic, however, when she had to hit on the move, or run, she was basically handing the ball back to Ms. Kvitova who was being made to look like the second coming of Martina Navratolova, which we know for a fact she isn't their just yet!

What I say was a few things:

- Eugenie was pushing the ball

- Eugenie failing to get the ball deep

- Like christ, Petra in some cases was camped out a few feet in front of the baseline just hammering this short ball.

I think we may have seen a shift in woman's tennis with this match.
So many of these girls fail to get the ball deep consistently. In fact, the first one to get something hard and deep usually wins the point. All Petra did was get the ball deep, and step up like a man would on a short ball over and over again.

It would have been so interesting if she had a one hander, one handed slice and could get to the net, however, she didn't have to!

We kept remarking when we saw the match - Petra is playing like a man.

That's got to be the model for woman's tennis in the future, then man's technical game and size (Petra is tall girl, and she's WIDE).

For me this match was telling because what I saw was extremely weak fundamentals in Bouchard's physical development. I can see she has done a lot of work on the strokes, and she is so pheonominal when the ball comes to her and she can get set, however, she broke down when she had to be REALLY NEEDED TO BE ATHLETIC, and get into proper positioning.

The Czech's, Swede's and Russian's, even in hockey are light years ahead of us Canadian's in physical athletic development. Light years. We're getting better, however, the issue we have as coaches sometimes is we believe hockey is a unique sport, and we do not have common sense to listen to the gymnastic, judo, NFL and other coaches who probably know better than us because they are not "Hockey Coaches."

This showed big time with Eugenie! Big time.

In hockey you can compete with the Russian's by doing this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRlnqthpTbM - see the 20 second part) and this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bHJj7avd4), win with grit, game sense, goaltending, team defense and it's a team 20 man game (our strengths), however, I really learned for the first time in tennis yesterday their is no where to hide when you're going against an well trained machine of a SFU former Solviet Union woman athletes who's been moulded with clay for 10,000 hours, and is now a magestic rock of an athlete.

Eugenie first off wasn't big enough or physical enough to compete with Petra.

However, time and time again her collarbone kept collapsing. This is all hip positioning (hips way to far back). Eugenie was muscling all day and just pounding into the court. Posture, Mid-Foot, Cadence and Lean! I saw so much overstriding today with Eugenie (by the way that I did not see with Petra who is seen as not being as good a runner as Eugenie by the way), reaching and landing in front of her torso, which of course effected her ability to put a good ball back in play, and at which time Petra would step in and look all world.

In the match Eugenie with her overbuild tennis shoes could not stride out AT ALL and get the legs behind her center of gravity! Petra's hip proprioception really showed here, and I can see she has a good team in place.
Pretend the pelvis is a bowl of cherries, you just picked it, and you want to take them home and give them to me to eat because I am such a helpful guy. The goal would be not to spill! Because I like cherries, and I would be an angry hockey if you did not give me cherries. So, in laymans terms Eugenie was spilling the cherries in the front (and as a result her collarbone and eyes dipped) and racket went absolutely chaotic (no more deep balls, predicatable shots which were easy to read and all the rest).

In other words Petra (despite her lack of natural speed) never spilled a cherry, and was connected to her power, didn't twist the hip forward and never lost any energy as she approached the ball. Great old school coaching!

The thing I like about Petra is she's not in a big rush, and she's a low key kind of gal. It looks like she's put in the slow work.

IMO, Eugenie will need to take a real break from hard training and work specifically on ingraining better form as well as fixing some environmental factors.

Now the million dollar question, is she willing to be patient, and learn stuff (running mechanics) that are over her head right now, and tough to come to an understanding on. Is the high priced tennis team around her she's had since 12 to authoritive based? Is her team telling her the ultimate ABC kiss of death "tennis is a unique sport" and not willing to expand horizons and bring in the mentorship help she needs now to help get her into proper positioning on the ball?

See that's all Petra did, get to the right positioning, and we can see the results.

I will tell you the major issue I have here with my training is hip mobility - flexibility, and the big one, getting the hips in the proper position. This match was such a reality lesson for us of what can happen to the best former Junior in the world, and a top end teenager (Bouchard just turned 20) when you get out on the court with a real pro like Petra who has put in their time, and understands certain athletic principals.

[hockeyscout]

Interesting note ...

By the way, when we watched this match the place we went to wasn't receptive to volume of a girls match. So, the volume was turned off and techno music was blasting!

Lucky break!

We liked Petra, however, what she was doing wasn't a surprise to us, it just looked to us how a match should be played. It was nothing out of the ordinary. What intrigued us the most was Bouchard, and how she could not keep up, and why, and not how great Petra looked for the most part.

Its amazing the internal dialogue a staff can have when no commentators are yapping, and I think we made some great progress in our program, as well as having some kick ass food!

I always preach, forget the noise!

When we watched again this morning on YouTube with volume we were kind of dumbfounded with the "noise." Greatest dominance ever, Navratilova comparisons, la la la, and all the rest.

It was like a WTF moment for us.

We never thought of it in the terms everyone described, and we actually did not think that match would have been good enough to beat a Graf or Navratilova due to it's lack of variety and change of pace. Maybe we are right, maybe we are wrong, who knows, but I thought you'd all be amused with this story!