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It appears we've destroyed our ball machine. May she rest in peace. I like the unit you have, it looks like two machines, synched up? Can you tell us what that gear you have is please as it looks interesting. Time for us to get something new and improved I guess, and I liked the two units idea, as it will deliver balls with the type of quickness we like (I hope).
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Take a look here:Originally posted by hockeyscout View Post
I think Renzo shut down the Institute, but he is still there and he has some machines in storage. Very different from any other machine. Fires a pattern of up to 9 balls from the machine you call it from. Send the program to the machines by Bluetooth from a Palm. You can store various patterns on chips. There are 4 motor controls in each machines, basically 4 computers in each machine and they are hooked up. You digitally set the speed of the top and bottom wheels as well as the placement of the balls height and direction. I can feed 4 year-olds inside the service line with the machines firing from just across the net or I can fire Nadal-like topspin from the baseline bouncing above the shoulders. Motors are stronger than anything you will find on any other machine. Doesn't work as an automatic machine; you must press a button to fire a ball. Realistic rhythm and geometry. I've been using my set for 12 years. Everyone else sent them back (they were only leased; I was the only one that bought them). It takes some forthought to figure out what you are trying to do. Original lease was $900/mo but came down to $600/mo. Mine cost me almost $40,000 and probably more, but that's because I paid for a prototype third machine to serve that never got completed.
At one point, Renzo had a few sets of the machines being used in Europe, but all I can see is the pros were too lazy to figure out how to use them. They are just a tool, but they are a great tool.
don -
The grand V elite is remote controlled, with 60mph nadal like spin, and many patterns, or you can program your own pattern. $2,500Comment
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HS,Originally posted by hockeyscout
I had prototypes when Renzo was developing the machines. I've known him for over 40 years. Worked for him in Augsburg, West Germany in 1973-4. He patterned his schools along the lines of the school I started in Grand Central Station. I got one of the first sets. When I committed to lease them at $900/mo initially I had a really good job running Huggy Bears and I was just trying to add additional income in my spare time. I figured I would make enough money selling leases that I would get the machines for free. But no one wanted to spend the money. Six months in I convinced him to sell me my set for a total of $26,000. Later I gave him another $10,000 for first dibs on the serve prototype, but it didn't happen. He needed some extra money to pay for the special wheels he needed for the high speeds he wanted to run the server at. Then over the years, I spend quite a bit more upgrading to the newer motor controls (almost computers that control the speed of each individual motor with digital commands), so I spent quite a bit more than $40,000. But it's a lot less than if I had been paying the lease all these years, even at the $600/mo he later reduced the lease to.
There are certainly some little idiosyncrasies to the machine you need to learn. Balls get jammed, etc. I had one situation where I couldn't get the remotes to work because there was a cell tower at the corner of the court about 150 ft from the machines. I had to go down 4 courts away to get away from the signals from the cell tower. But the electronics was improved and upgraded the first few years I had the machines and is not much of a problem now.
Financially, I would probably have been a lot better off with one of the high end Playmate machines from Metaltek. The guy who did the electronics for the machine was Freddy Yarur who is now running his dad's company, Metaltek. Freddy was a teen electronics nerd and Metaltek wasn't paying him much so he took off for Florida and worked on his own. Metaltek turned Renzo down when he asked them to build the machines for him so he did it himself and he found Freddy to do the electronics design.
Some of the more generally available machines are probably more stable and less prone to "problems", but for working with high end players, I can do things with my "Twins" that you just can't do with anything else. Unfortunately, Renzo didn't want to let the machines be regular machines so you can't use them on automatic with the carousel just going around. The feeding mechanism spring-loads the balls and you have to press a button to fire each ball. Renzo was teaching in Florida with "hitters" and he got frustrated with their inability to do exactly what he wanted so he built the machines. When he realized the geometry was inadequate with just one machine, he made them a pair and hooked them up. The firing signal for both machines goes to the ad court machine and is relayed to the deuce machine if that is the one that is firing. In addition, the machines both move along in the ball sequence when either machine fires (up to 9 shots and they can all be different although you really need two balls to go from full topspin to full slice and high speed to drop shot - just throw in an intermediate ball if I am trying to do that... then the wheels have a chance to slow down or speed up...otherwise you could burn out the motors).
I could manage most of the time with just one machine, but I couldn't manage without the ability to fire the balls according to the speed of the players shot. The idea is to create a realistic rhythm so I try to make the machine fire just as the ball goes by the machine. It's helpful to stand in between the machines and give a visual signal to the player as you fire the machine, but I prefer to stand close to them where I don't have to yell to communicate. In the videos Renzo has put up, you will always see the teacher standing on the opposite side swinging his arm in a signal to give the player a timing cue for his split step.
I also do a lot of work where I want to make the player move faster and make their stroke more efficient. So sometimes I am firing the next ball even before they have hit the last one. In some of the videos, you can see the next ball coming out even before the current one has been hit.
As for speed and spin, the balls go fast enough that I can't get them in the court if I turn both wheels up to full speed. Top speed is probably somewhere around 80 mph, but I rarely go for that. However, I do use a speed that imitates a legitimate fast rally ball with a lot of topspin. And if the player is stronger, then I am giving them a ball that has bite and kicks a little bit.
You have to use consistent balls to expect any consistency from a machine. So I can set the machines where the ball moves and yet it lands time and again a few inches from the line, if that is what I want. More important to do something like have a ball go just left of center in a medium drive, then right of center in a faster ball, then deep left corner with topspin, then back again to the forehand and then short and out wide to the backhand... you get the idea.
If you get to Florida for the Key Biscayne tournament, you should try to go see Renzo and see how it works. But I gather you are not getting much travel out of Ukraine these days.
I'd suggest you take a good look at the higher end Metaltek Playmates. There is another machine out of Northern California that JY likes very much, the Ace Attack. It works as a great serving machine delivering a variety of spins as well as firing over 100MPH. There are higher end models, but those machines start to get pretty good around $6-8,000. I question how well some of the $2000 and under models are going to hold up to the use and abuse you might subject them to in your program.
You really should take a good look at his website or a related youtube video for TennisTeachingInstitute. Check out the "Wall". You should have one of those. It's as different from normal walls as the machines are. But he doesn't really market them. You can find a simpler version of the same thing at tennisbackboard.com. They even have an instructional manual you can use to make your own...probably what you need.
Good luck.
don
PS would like to see video of your daughter actually playing pointsComment
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I would say the unconventional thing to do would be to always keep it at the center of the base line, never change the speed and never move it around.Comment
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Just move it around and mix it up.Comment
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