Exploiting Poor Footwork Of Your Opponent

I am an A Grade Junior player and I have some big matches coming up in the next couple of weeks, which I was hoping you might be able to help me with.

My game involves solid (not fast) first and second serves and a big forehand. My opponent’s weakness is that his footwork can sometimes be all over the place, and he does have a temper. What can I do to take advantage of his footwork?

About your opponent’s poor footwork - make him use it. ;)

Play short cross court shots, try to wrong foot him, play a short slice ball and deep top spin or / and drop shot and lob combinations.

Imagine that you would want to train someone with poor footwork and you would like to make it REALLY difficult for them.

So imagine your self as a coach : what kind of balls would you feed?

Got it? OK, now play like that. ;)

But ALWAYS make sure that you are actually capable of playing such tactics. Although the tactics may look good on paper, you may make too many mistakes trying to play something what you are not used to.

So decide what would be the best way to play him - in theory - and what are you actually going to play.




This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Tennis Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


2 Responses to “Exploiting Poor Footwork Of Your Opponent”

  1. Windyridge Says:
    October 13th, 2007 at 12:26 pm

    Too bad there weren’t any blogs when I was a tennis playing youth. I could have used this. I played a lot of competition tennis. No coach.

  2. Tomaz Says:
    October 13th, 2007 at 11:43 pm

    Yes, I agree. When I started playing tennis there wasn’t even internet in Slovenia. ;) The first good tennis site was tennisserver.com where I read a lot of material.

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