The Path of Learning

Tennis is a sport that is not like the team sports most people play. Some people can go out and perform baseball, football, or basketball without any instruction. This may not mean they do not need to learn advanced tactics, but they have something in them where they can perform the basic skills without any teaching. Tennis is not like that. In fact, if you try and do what comes natural to you, you probably will not be very successful. Tennis is not like baseball where you hit a ball. You have to change your thinking and muscle memory to learn how to stroke a ball. Our goal is to be able to take the old information each student has about how to play tennis and train their muscle memory so that it is instinct.

The first phase our students will always go through is not knowing what they did wrong or how to correct it. When our students start with us they are aware that they need to get the ball over the net. When we teach them the forehand, for example, they now know what to do but when mistakes occur they may not know why the mistake happened and how to fix it. We use modeling followed by timely and specific feedback to help the student understand what they should be doing.  

The next phase the student will be able to start recognizing what they did wrong and ways to correct their mistake.  The student is now able to recognize on their own their errors and how to fix them. This can be mundane for students at a young age unless you know how to one, make sure they have success, two, add constant challenges, and three make sure they know that winning in tennis is hitting the same old boring stroke. What we have found out is that after a few lessons, we are able to use a feedback in the form of a question. The student may have used their forehand and the ball went off to the side. I may ask,"Why did the ball go off to the side?" The student will reply," I was too close to the ball."  

The third phase the student will be able to train their muscles to comply with what they are learning. Again, in this phase the student is going to be using a lot of repetition to develop the correct feel of their strokes. The student will be working on the correct technique consciously.

Which leads to our ultimate goal, the student will be able to have tennis strokes based off of instinct. The student will no longer have to think about how to stroke the ball. They have put in the 10,000 hours for mastery and have completely retrained their original process.