Sumner Chase:
Two-Handed Backhand

Analyzed by John Yandell

This month we take a look at the two-handed backhand of nationally rank senior player Sumner Chase. Sumner loves clay courts. In fact he loves them so much he only plays clay court tournaments. To practice, he built a clay court at his house in Dallas.

That may sound extreme but his thinking is that in the senior divisions, injury problems can put you out of action for a period of months or even years. Playing on har tru, or green clay, is much, much easier on your body. It also forces you to have a more complete and versatile game because you can't just hit a serve and a forehand and expect to win points against a good player.

Sumner came to San Francisco to work on his whole game, but I thought his two-hander was especially interesting. For a male player playing in the 50 and over division a two-hander is pretty unusual. Watching the ball he produced I have to say that he hit it quite effectively. That effectiveness was a little surprising though when we stopped to take a look at the stroke on video and analyze the technical elements.

The late contact and compressed finish are interrelated.

What did the video show? Let's put it this way, I've seen a lot of players who had better technical structure who didn't produce nearly as effective a ball. It goes to show that technique alone isn't what makes better players.

But the positive thing for Sumner was that he had a lot of room to make technical improvement, which could only make the shot itself more powerful and effective. He was also interested in improving his backhand return--and our analysis of the two-handed groundstroke also provided the key for achieving that goal.

When I first looked at Sumner's backhand there was one characteristic that stood out. The entire forward swing looked compressed for want of a better word--like it had been squeezed together from both ends.

Some of the technical elements were ok or at least not radically off. The motion started with a unit turn. He also established a very solid hitting arm structure, what we've identified as the "bent/bent" variation in our technical analysis of this shot. (Click Here.)

Despite these positive elements, the contact was slightly behind the front edge of his body and the extension on his followthrough was quite restricted. He also had what I refer to as a "mechanical" wrap. This is the tendency to manually bring the arms and racket up and over the shoulder so that the butt of the racket points at the opponent.

This part of the stroke is basically the deceleration phase, used to slow the racket down. In my view, the wrap happens automatically when the swing is fast enough and the player is sufficiently relaxed. It definitely shouldn't be taught as a component of the forward swing. My suspicion was that this artificial motion could have led to the compression of the stroke in the first place.

So it looked like what Sumner needed to do was to relax, move the contact forward, extend the forward swing, focus on a finish point further out from his body, and forget about taking the wrap over the shoulder. And all that was true, as we'll see.

But the interesting thing when we looked frame by frame was that there was a further underlying element to address first. I said the motion started with a good unit turn. True. But one of the things I always do is look at the timing of the preparation in relation to the advance of the oncoming ball. Not just the position, in other words, but when the player achieves it.

The key is to complete the full turn by the time the ball bounces on the court--at the absolute latest. When we do the basic analysis we work off medium pace balls coming directly to the player. In these circumstances, the player should be able to complete the turn even sooner. But that wasn't the case with Sumner's backhand.

Look at the position of his turn relative to the oncoming ball. You can see that with the ball already approaching off the bounce, he is still shy of the full turn position--on average something like 2/10s of a second too late. This may not seem like much but in a fast exchange it can be up to 20 percent of the total time the player has to make contact with the ball. You can also see how this would be an even more important factor on the return of serve where the time interval is shortened substantially.

This delay in the turn was related to another tendency Sumner had, which was "chase the ball" with the front foot. Rather than turning the torso and loading the outside foot first, he started the cross step to the ball before the turn motion was complete.

All this compounded his timing problem. Although you see pro two-handed players hit with closed stances, (Click Here) they all make the cross step in time to get the foot down and fully load the shoulders at the time of the ball bounce.

Sumner wasn't getting there. Although his position at the completion of the turn was pretty good, the fact that he reached it after the bounce of the ball--even on easy medium paced shots--was contributing to the late contact and the compressed swing.

The best way to address timing problems in the preparation is to work on hitting open stance. It's true on the two-hander, and on the one-handed backhand as well for that matter.

It's not that you necessarily want to hit a lot of balls open stance on your backhand. But in order to hit successfully with an open stance you need full preparation with the shoulders completely turned and the weight loaded on the outside foot. So working this way helps players feel the timing of the turn.

Developing open stance forces you to turn earlier and puts you in a much stronger position to either step in or step across and get there on time. Note in the animation that his shoulders are fully turned at the completion of the set up on the outside leg. Developing a complete turn in the proper sequence was the critical first step, and also laid the foundation for improving the return.

Now what about the problem with the late contact? With Sumner I felt that the contact might improve naturally if we addressed the finish position on the forward swing next. The concept is simple. If the stroke starts correctly with a good turn, and finishes correctly with full extension, then there is a good chance everything in between will also be correct, including the critical moment of the contact.

That's pretty much what happened. We looked at Sumner side by side with some great two-handers using the same "bent/bent" hitting arm structure, players including Nikolay Davydenko and Mario Ancic. Once again our Stroke Archive on Tennisplayer came through with the clips we needed. From there we started to construct our models and visual images.

As I've written in multiple articles before, the key to the forward swing is what I call the extension point. This is the last point in the forward swing in which the racket is moving outward and or upward toward the target. That's different from the wrap or deceleration phase, in which the racket starts to move backward and down.

So for Sumner, we defined the finish or extension position with some checkpoints. The wrists reach about eye level. The edge of the racket comes across the body to basically the right edge of the torso. The forearm is at about a 45 degree angle to the court, and the upper arm is parallel.

Of particular importance was the spacing between the hands and the torso. Note that this has probably at least doubled, increasing from a foot or less to two feet or more.

As I do in working with any key position, I had Sumner close his eyes and work on the swing pattern until he could find the extension point naturally. From there, I asked him to visualize the same image when we began actually hitting balls.

The finish extended and the contact moved forward.

Quite quickly the forward swing started to length out as he worked closer and closer to the model finish point we defined. We stopped from time to time and had him correct from wherever he actually finished to the model position.

You can see the difference this made in the contact point. The contact moved to the front edge of the body, roughly even with the edge of the front leg, a much stronger position than where he started.

It never hurts at this point to then look at the contact point more exactly and put that position and the checkpoints in the context of the overall swing. You can add this with the appropriate checkpoints, including the particular structure of the hitting arms.

Again you need to be able to work through the whole motion and get all the positions right with your eyes closed and in practice swings without the ball.

And how did this all this affect his return? Check it out. Watch how he is able to use the open stance--this is just happening faster than with his old, two part preparation. Watch how the contact and extension on the return are also solid. The positions are very similar to those of the groundstroke--as they should be. Now we'll wait and see what the report is when Sumner gets back into the swing of national competition.