A New Teaching System: The Forehand Keying Process

[johnyandell]

Hockey Scout,

When you call respected coaches "nuts" and make comments such as:

"Its called a fast eye. Every good athlete and coach has it, 100 percent. Can't say I need slow motion. I see it. I know other coaches who have coached good athletes who read scenarios quickly. Its an ability - to you the game is fast, but, to those who have put in the work its painfully slow."

You are revealing more about yourself than you realize...

The human eye films 20 frames/sec. Ten times too slow to see the contact in tennis. As Stotty points out great players and great coaches in tennis figured things out. How many others didn't?

It's a contradiction to laud these researchers in other sports and then claim that the tools that the next generation is using are not necessary.

[johnyandell]

So we can agree to disagree. Time and time again I have sat with coaches who thought they saw things or didn't see things only to find that high speed video showed them a different version of reality. The contact point is just an example of the problem of human perception. You can't see the racket drop or the internal rotation on the serve or the wiper on the forehand--the list goes on for every stroke. But if you don't care about contact then you don't care about the one moment that matters most.
I will agree with you about sugar--although I don't recall who said what about that when-- it's poison! But the point about visual learning--undoubtedly how the great players learned in the past--there your fellow poster is on sound experiential and scientific ground. Your accountant story is irrelevant (and very long...) Here is one for you. When I learned to shoot a turn around jump shot I just watched Bob McAdoo.

[hockeyscout]

The racket drop, internal rotation on serve, wiper finish - those are just not important aspects to be me. The moment you value, is likely polar opposite to what I value. MY philosophy and theories on how a young player should hit a ball that fly in the face of convention. You guys will likely hate the way my kids play. But, it may be an advantage for them later if there style is anti-tennis, who knows.

[klacr]

So we can agree to disagree. Time and time again I have sat with coaches who thought they saw things or didn't see things only to find that high speed video showed them a different version of reality. The contact point is just an example of the problem of human perception. You can't see the racket drop or the internal rotation on the serve or the wiper on the forehand--the list goes on for every stroke. But if you don't care about contact then you don't care about the one moment that matters most.
I will agree with you about sugar--although I don't recall who said what about that when-- it's poison! But the point about visual learning--undoubtedly how the great players learned in the past--there your fellow poster is on sound experiential and scientific ground. Your accountant story is irrelevant (and very long...) Here is one for you. When I learned to shoot a turn around jump shot I just watched Bob McAdoo.

Bob McAdoo is a member of my club. Great guy. His daughter Rashida plays at tennis team at Georgia Tech. She's a big ball striker. Bob loves his tennis more than basketball, but struggles with the serve.

Kyle LaCroix USPTA
Boca Raton

[johnyandell]

Kyle, Ha! We have to film him when I am down next. Great jumper no matter what he thinks now...

[johnyandell]

HS,
I've been wrong before. But if you are right on those points you will have overthrown the biomechanics of how the body currently works. If you do I want to film that in high speed...

[Guest]

I agree with hockey scout on the concept of a "fast eye" that a coach develops. However, a coach is comparing what he sees with the template he chooses from the stored images in his brain's library. Sometimes the library of images are too narrow or at a too high level of performance to use as an effective template comparison. In these instances, high speed video would be especially useful.

[hockeyscout]

HS,
I've been wrong before. But if you are right on those points you will have overthrown the biomechanics of how the body currently works. If you do I want to film that in high speed...

Racket drop, internal rotation on serve, wiper finish are areas of value for you ... but, for me other aspects are of more importance.

[Guest]

Some persons are talented. Like Pancho Gonzales, Roger Federer. Ivanisevic when asked about his serve, just said "I toss the ball up and hit it". Some players have the tennis player DNA, others have to work very hard. We are all different, what works for one person may not work for someone else. Having said that, I believe John's visual tennis concept works very well for the majority.

In addition to visual tennis, the articles on biomechanics are very interesting to understand how the body functions when hitting a stroke. Reading them will help you understand and raise your awareness of the critical points to try and watch when, say, Federer plays.

For most of us, it is an endless quest and the journey to get there is intriguing.

Thank you John, for the best site on tennis on the internet.

[johnyandell]

Guest, You didn't login in but thanks!!

[gzhpcu]

John, it was me. Do not know why I showed up as guest!

[stotty]

I agree with hockey scout on the concept of a "fast eye" that a coach develops. However, a coach is comparing what he sees with the template he chooses from the stored images in his brain's library. Sometimes the library of images are too narrow or at a too high level of performance to use as an effective template comparison. In these instances, high speed video would be especially useful.

This so-called fast eye concept probably doesn't exist. Fixing commons flaws and recognising them immediately, however, does exist. But this is more a product of 'past experience' than a so-called 'fast eye'.

Some things, such as hand, racket, arm rotation, cannot be seen with the naked eye. Coaches cannot diagnose and fix the unseeable, and in this scenario, the fast eye concept is completely ridiculous.

Some things are diagnosable with the naked eye, some things are better diagnosed with the benefit of high speed video.

As coaches, often we can see there is a problem with a stroke but cannot quite put our finger on what it is. This is often because the series of events is happening too quickly to see. Also, a lot of things that happen in a stroke are interrelated and it's impossible to look in two places at once. High speed video resolves this issue.

Without high speed video, in some cases, a coach may suspect a stroke is faulty but cannot pinpoint exactly where the fault lies, so ends up using guesswork, often treating symptoms rather than causes. This is very common.

Stotty

[johnyandell]

HS, Like I said the water ball looks cool. Sounds like a lot of exercises drawing on other sports could be of real benefit in developing athleticism.

[johnyandell]

Phil,
Ha! I knew it was someone of intelligence and knowledge.

[don_budge]

The Teaching Paradigm...the development and education of a tennis player (creating a tennis player from scratch)

The development and education of a tennis player. You know the paradigm. The book is William Tilden. Richard Gonzalez is the model with the Don Budge backhand. Harry Hopman is the coach. Roger Federer is the Living Proof.

Reading through the posts from licensedcoach (Stotty), John Yandell and hockeyscout I become more and more content and satisfied with my teaching paradigm. John is a derivative of Tilden in that his analysis has only verified the teachings of Tilden. Everything that I have ever read by John Yandell or watched on his video analysis only confirms that fundamentals are fundamentals. Whether they are viewed at high speed definition or with the naked eye. Stotty brings many, many years of watching the greatest tennis tournament in the world up close at Wimbledon and he has seen all of the great ones come and go. Watching a tennis player live in competition is one of the best ways to learn and appreciate what it takes to hit a tennis ball and what is more how to play the game. hockeyscout now brings in an element of my paradigm that falls under the "Harry Hopman is the coach" heading. Hopman worked his players hard to insure that physical conditioning was not going to be a factor that they were going to buckle under.

What is more...hockeyscout brings up the subject about what comes first. The horse or the cart. Laying down the athletic foundation of a tennis player is going to pay huge dividends down the road. The current rage is to take mere infants from the cradle and try to get them to look like professional tennis players. I have yet to see one of these "wonderkins" make the big time. It takes one year to learn how to play the game of tennis, five years to be a tennis player and ten years to be a champion. These numbers haven't changed since they were written in the 1920's. The smartest thing a tennis coach could ever do with an eight year old is to get them to participate in as many sports as they can for three or four years along with some fundamental tennis training. Just rudimentary. Let the magic of a diverse athletic education take shape in the young one and then when their minds are ready for the game of tennis around 12 years old begin to get serious...if the student chooses to. Remember the ten years to be a champion. If the student has the proper foundation such as the one that hockeyscout advocates this number is reduce to eight. Eight years. When the 12 year old becomes 20 years old with the proper foundation and the wise tutelage of a Hopmanesque tennis mind this is the ticket.

All of these posters have some valuable intrinsic contributions. But in the end...I realize from my own background that it is the foundation that enables the game to come to you. I played several game pretty seriously before I ever touched a tennis racquet at 14 years old and very quickly I was playing with the 16 and under competition. Playing with mind you...not necessarily winning. But in the 18's there was some light at the end of the tunnel and it wasn't until I was in my 20's that I began to realize my potential. This was with sporadic training and without being religious about the sport spiritually. This happened later on in life.

This is an interesting thread at face value but I believe that there is much beneath the surface that is yet to mined. But in the beginning...this business of "playing around" in the inside of a ball in a pool is the stuff that children can sink their teeth into and therefore it will only pay dividends in the future when it comes to the education of the tennis player. Call in Hopman...or don_budge at this point. Engineer, sculptor...philosopher. It's a science. It's an art. In the end it is a philosophy. Most of all...it is only a game. A wonderful game however. God's gift to mankind in terms of recreation. Along with golf.