Essential Tennis looks like THE guide to making necessary improvements

The top roadblocks keeping people from playing their best tennis are time, age, athletic ability, and money. (It can cost $50,000 annually to raise a top-level junior player!)

But the biggest obstacle of all - according to Ian Westerman, the author of 2022's Essential Tennis: Improve Faster, Play Smarter, and Win More Matches - is likely the ball! That’s because our obsession with focusing on hitting a good shot with the right arc and speed and to where we want can keep us from focusing on having good movement and swing techniques. Focusing on results and the ball also tightens us up. 

His coaching philosophy is that, “for every aspect of tennis, there is one element that’s more important than any other. If you can make even a tiny improvement in that element, you will become a better player much faster than if you focused on other things.” He notes, for example, that there are a dozen things to do to make your forehand better, but instead try to pick one element to focus on. For example, you can notice when your opponent is out of position and don’t change technique but rather hit the ball into the open court.

(Bonus advice to me from Coach Matt at College Park JTCC is to, on my second serve, swing faster and keep my head up to keep it popping. This has been working and my second serve looks better and more accurate than ever before. It's also helping my first serve, which I can now rely upon to be a true weapon and hit it harder and more accurately than ever, without tightening up worrying that I'll make double faults.)

Back to Westermann, he writes that self assessment is essential to any hopes of improving. To that end, setting up a camera while playing is really helpful to finding where improvement is needed, otherwise we’re just guessing. Along those lines, keep a journal while playing and jot down objective notes about what went well and what needs improving. Also take a few notes about your opponent, his strengths and weaknesses and how you would approach playing him the next time.

All of this advice comes from just the Introduction in the book. I can’t wait to keep reading it (and writing about it) because I’m already suspecting it’s the best tennis-instructional guide out there. In my past several matches, I’ve implemented the bit about focusing only on hitting the ball where my opponents aren’t and I’ve notice my serve getting better and my shots getting more powerful and successfully mixed. I haven’t lost. 

Tonight I’ll be playing "match play" in this league at the JTCC, on chalky clay courts, where we usually play about one set of doubles or singles before rotating to the next opponent. It’s a lot of fun, and I’ll add that I haven’t lost any singles matches since I started absorbing the advice of this book.