Your Strokes: Eva So: Forehand

A triad of issues: backswing size, late contact, and compressed finish. Any working teaching pro knows that, when you look at the forehand of 3.0 to 3.5 players, it is very common to see a triad of related problems. These are a backswing that goes too far behind the body, a late contact point, and a compressed finish. And we can definitely see all three tendencies in the before forehand video of Eva So in this month’s Your Strokes. Eva is an avid club player, who just happens to be the wife of my genius chiropractor Dr. Ken So, and the mother of two daughters who were stars on my high school tennis team in San Francisco. But this was actually my first time working with Eva. So we started with filming her in high speed video. From that we could see all three problems. The first was that her arm and racket tip moved significantly behind her body (although there are definitely much worse examples at the club level!) We could also see that her contact appeared to be behind the edge of her front foot in her neutral stance. Her arm was extended too much to her side...