Winning Pretty Part 2: Origins of Technique?

Bill Tilden published influential instructional books in the 1920s. Where does technique originate? There are no ideal “techniques” when a sport is created. How could there be? If no one is playing the sport there is no one to define what “technique” should be. It’s a blank slate. When athletes first started to play tennis and compete they had to rely on their own intuition, feelings, and results to guide them. Players also observed each other and intuitively developed skills to compete better. These skills–player developed and not coach driven–naturally formed the initial techniques of the “right” way to play tennis. Tennis, as first played on grass, was invented in the 1870s. The first Wimbledon championships were played in 1877. The first coaches in tennis were players themselves, analyzing what worked and forming a method of teaching those techniques to the next generations of players. According to one researcher the first tennis instructional book was published in 1914. Others quickly followed. In the 1920s Bill Tilden published several influential books. But from the start there was no consensus. Some teachers advocated semi-open stance, others neutral stance. Some favored continental grips, others semi-western and even western. The same researcher claims that…