Tuesday, July 07, 2015

Just a series of stills of a serve in motion

The title says it all! We were at Wimbledon yesterday and I was standing by court 11 watching the mixed doubles when I took a quick burst of pictures on my phone of Robert Lindstedt serving.






It's really interesting, to someone who plays tennis like me, to see how the racket head drops and then snaps through the contact point out in front, and how his body weight is moving forward. Some people think the jump is intentional, but hopefully you can see from the pictures that he doesn't jump, it's his upward drive and the action of his racket arm that literally throws him into the air as he goes up and into the ball.

The other thing that was noticeable yesterday was that the players who didn't bend their knees on their ground strokes really do come unstuck on the grass. It was really obvious in the Kygrios/Gasquet match we watched. Kygrios missed a number of shots mainly because he tried to hit a low bouncing ball without bending his knees.

So, the tennis was great, the day was great and I had a great time watching and thinking. I also met up with Ali, a friend of mine with whom I did my coaching qualification. Very encouraging because he's done his level 2 and it didn't sound that hard!

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