Your Strokes: Bob Farese: Forehand Volley

It doesn’t look that bad, but what ideas are at work?

So far in Your Strokes over the first year and a half of Tennisplayer, we’ve looked exclusively at forehands, backhands, and serves. Those are the strokes that our subscribers seem the most interested in, and that’s the video they’ve submitted. So it’s kind of exciting to shift gears this month and take a look at Bob Farese’s forehand volley. I had a chance to work with Bob recently and he was able to make some significant technical improvement that we’ll share with you here.

I still have some interesting comments and more analysis on our subscriber John Daly’s serve, but I’ll add that next month

To be honest, the volleys are a challenge to teach using our video analysis and pro modeling approach. This is because they are far and away the most elusive motions to understand when it comes to picking out the key elements from pro examples.

There are two reasons for this. First, obviously, the motions happen very fast, much faster than the serves or the groundstrokes. Second, there is a huge reaction or adjustment component to almost every volley. The contact point varies tremendously upward…