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Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Tennis Psychology (Part 1)

By Gail Jones

Tennis psychology is the same as understanding the workings of your opponent's mind and assessing the effect of your own game on his/her head and also understanding the mental effects resulting from the different external causes on your own mind.

However, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own psychology. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing occurring under various circumstances. This is because you react differently in different moods and under different conditions.

You must understand the effect on your game of the resulting annoyance, joy, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction is. Does it increase your prowess? If so, go for it, but never offer it to your opponent. Does it rob you of concentration? If so, either remove the cause, or if that is not possible, strive to ignore it.

Once you have correctly measured your own reaction to circumstances, study your opponents in order to determine their characters. Like characters react similarly, and you may judge men of your own type by yourself. Other temperaments you must seek to compare with people whose reactions you already know.

A person who can regulate his/her own mental processes has an excellent chance of determining those of another for the minds works along definite lines of thought and can be studied. One may only control one's own thought processes after studying them meticulously.

A steady, phlegmatic baseline player is seldom a quick thinker. If he was he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is usually a pretty clear indication of his/her sort of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who usually advocates the baseline game, does so because he hates to stir up his/her torpid mind to think out a safe strategy of reaching the net.

Then there is the other kind of baseline player, who would rather stay at the back of the court while directing an attack intending to disrupt up your game. He is a much more dangerous player and a deep, keen thinking antagonist. He gets his/her results by mixing up his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variance of his/her game. This player is a good psychologist.

The first kind of tennis player mentioned above merely strikes the ball without much idea of what he is really doing, while the latter always has a definite plan and sticks to it.

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