Your Strokes: Shirish Forehand

An extreme grip, a pretty good turn and the wrong finish. Recently I had the pleasure of working with a new student on his forehand. Shirish is a long distant pilot for a major airline who has stop overs in San Francisco. He had read my book Visual Tennis (Click Here) and wanted to come work with me directly, and I said great. He wanted to work on his forehand and so we did. As I always do, I started out by filming him in super slow motion video, and also measuring the speed of his forehand with my pocket radar gun. Shirish isn’t tall. And the first thing I saw was his extreme western forehand grip. That made sense. Not necessarily what I would teach anyone from the beginning. But not something that I would change either. So we focused on his key positions that all good forehands share. I am with Brian Gordon that the outside Roger Federer style backswing with a relatively conservative grip is probably the ideal model. But there are many, many players at all levels who have great forehands with other grips and more involved backswings. What I wanted to see was where was...