Bounce Hit

Roger Federer demonstrates the bounce hit. Jack Groppel, who at the time I spoke with him was the Chairman of the USTA Sports Science Committee, told me that Bounce-Hit, the ball tracking exercise from The Inner Game of Tennis, was the single greatest exercise ever created for tennis. He marveled, then, at how few tennis coaches and tennis players knew about it or, if they did, rarely used it. The same seems to be true 20 years later. In a recent Inner Game of Tennis workshop for 30 high school tennis coaches only 5 had heard of the book and none had heard of the exercise. In this article we are going to take a closer look at this classic exercise and help you put it into practice in the most effective way possible. We all know that tracking the ball is the most important skill needed to hit a consistent and accurate shot. But it is much harder than it looks. We can get faked out, because everyone can see the ball, but tracking it—i.e. where it is in space relative to your body and your racket—is a much more complex task. For example, Mehrdad Jazayeri, professor and member...