Donald Young's
Forehand

Jason Frausto

I remember hearing about Donald Young while watching the U.S. Open, when John McEnroe first mentioned hitting with a young kid with great hands, similar to his own.

So I started to follow Donald’s junior career, and saw he was beating much older players.  At the age of 13, he won a sectional title in the 18s, beating several players who would go on to play big time college tennis.

A whirlwind of hype would follow.  Donald signed deals with IMG and Nike, then won a junior title at the Australian Open at the age of 15.  Was he was destined to be the next great American tennis champion? 

Donald started receiving wildcards into ATP events, but his momentum quickly stalled.  He failed to win a set in any of those early matches.  His crafty and steady game had infuriated inconsistent juniors. But it didn’t have much impact on veterans on the tour.  He seemed to lack the firepower to succeed against grown men.  

This year his results have improved.  He has won matches in ATP events, done well in several challengers, and cracked the top 100 for the first time.  But how much of his ultimate success will be due to talent?  And how much will be due to technical proficiency—or it’s lack?

If you look at Donald’s forehand, in my opinion there are flaws that are holding back his success.  When a player is dominating his peers in the juniors, technical flaws are less apparent or can be overlooked.  But they can be painfully apparent at higher levels.

Young was never known for blowing players off the court.  His game plan was to be steady and outlast his opponents.  To get to the highest levels, however, you must have weapons to truly hurt your opponents.  That almost always includes a big forehand.

But when we look at Donald’s forehand, there are several elements that seem inferior to the best forehands on the tour.  Let’s start by looking at the size and shape of his backswing. 

His backswing is absolutely huge, as large or larger than any player on the tour. At the top of the backswing his hand is very high, far above his head.  Most top players on the tour have motions that are far more compact, for example, Roger Federer or even Rafael Nadal. 

In fact, there are only two players whose backswings reach a similar height to Donald’s,  Lleyton Hewitt, and Fernando Gonzalez. Hewitt is known for hitting with great consistency, accuracy, and depth.  Gonzales has one of the most powerful forehands on the tour.  But to this point, Donald’s forehand has not proven nearly as effective in either dimension. 

For Hewitt or Gonzo the backswing hasn’t proved a liability because they execute so well on the rest of the stroke.  Both hit through the ball beautifully with great extension.

But For Donald, the  forward swing is severely constricted.  Donald barely hits through the ball on most forehands and has less extension than virtually any other player in the Tennisplayer archives.  Sometimes on his followthrough his hand actually bangs into his torso.

But when we look at Donald we see something close to the opposite.  The fact is that Donald doesn’t hit through the ball as well as Hewitt or Gonzales or any top player.  Sometimes his contact is very late.

One thing I’ve noticed about Young is that he just isn’t capable at this point of pounding three or four big forehands in a row without missing, and this may explain why.

Donald has an extreme windshield wiper motion on almost every forehand. He tends to roll his hitting arm and racket over almost immediately after contact.  Instead of extending through the shot more he simply cuts off the swing.  It’s a matter of degree but you can see that over many balls he is consistently much more compressed.

Watching frame by frame, you see the tip of Young’s racket is much lower during the wiper than either Gonzalez or Hewitt.  The racket head barely continues along the line of the shot.  As the racket head comes across the body, there is very little spacing between his hand and racket and his torso.

Preparation

Why is he so different than other top players?  If we go back and look more closely at his preparation we can see another factor that is probably related to Donald’s lack of extension.  Let’s look at the position of his left arm, and the timing of how it moves. 

Donald starts the preparation with both hands on the racket, which is similar to all top players.  And Donald keeps his opposite arm on the racket until very late in the preparation—again not that unusual. 

But if we look at the timing of this movement, his hands appear to move back more slowly than most other top players.  On most balls, most top players reach a characteristic turn position at about the time bounces on the court.

This means the left arm is stretched fully across the body, usually parallel to the baseline and pointing directly at the sideline.  Donald rarely makes this position.

At the time the ball bounces, he hands tend to be still moving back.  As he stretches his opposite arm across his body, the ball is already coming up off the court, well after the bounce.

The result is that his left arm ends up positioned at a much higher angle compared to Gonzalez or any top player.  From this position, Donald probably needs those super fast hands just to get the racket to the contact point.  But in some examples you can see that his contact appears quite late.

The timing of his preparation in comparison to other players also explains his limited extension and why he would have to rely so much on the extreme wiper to get much energy into the ball.

As the game gets deeper and deeper and more players with nearly flawless technical games come along it will be harder for those with significant technical flaws to survive. 

Donald Young still has plenty of years of development ahead of him, but he needs to work on his forehand as well as his serve and other parts of his game to post better results at the main tour level.

While doing commentary at the U.S. Open this year, Andre Agassi stressed how critical technique really is in the results of players, and I believe him to be correct.  You want a stroke that can produce pace and won’t fail under pressure and at this point technically I don’t think Donald is there with his forehand. 

Hopefully his game evolves, because I’d love to be cheering on a new American champion, but the size of his backswing, the timing of his preparation, and his limited extension are things that Donald will have to overcome to make a big jump upward in the rankings.