Your Strokes:
Katrina Allick Volleys
Analyzed by John Yandell
The volleys are the most compact stroke motions in tennis, but they are also, in my view, the hardest to understand technically, and for many players, the hardest to master. When I visit tennis clubs I almost never see players with good technical volley patterns, even those who play doubles every day.
I think there are at least two reasons for this. First the motions happen so quickly, with the players about half as far apart compared to baseline exchanges. Second, the core elements are difficult to separate from the advanced elements.
Most players see that pro players hit radically downward to create underspin on both sides, and attempt to copy this aspect of the pro volley motions from the outset. Trying to do this, they tend to take the racket hand too far back, and then swing radically downward. The result is usually the loss of the hitting arm shape, poor contact position, and a tendency for the ball to float.
These more basic elements are the positioning and shape of the hitting arms, and the movement of the hitting arm forward to the contact from the shoulders. The movement of the shoulders is widely misunderstood on the volley, but this is the critical factor in mastering the forward swing.
The shape of the hitting arm and forward movement from the shoulder are also fundamental to pro volleys, as we have seen in our previous articles (Click Here for Forehand Volley. Click Here for Backhand Volley.) But it is very difficult to see them, not only because the volleys happen even more quickly in the pro game, and because the basic elements are combined with the more advanced components in the same motions.
Again, as we have seen, these advanced components are the backward rotation of the hitting arm structure to open the face and the downward angle of the swing. (Click Here.)
Pro players need significant underspin to deal with oncoming 90mph passing shots. But that isn't the reality in club or junior tennis.
In my view, the vast majority of players need to learn to hit flatter volleys first if they want to develop solid fundamentals. Underspin can then be added or increased after that.
For any player to really develop solid contact I believe it's necessary to isolate these more basic elements. We can see this by looking this month at the volleys of Katrina Allick, a star singles player on my high school team at University High School in San Francisco.
Katrina had an 14-2 record in singles, helping lead our team to a third consecutive conference championship, and then all the way to the sectional finals. (Hey, if you haven't seen the team video from this incredible championship season, you need to. Click Here.) As the number two player on our team, Katrina also won the league individual tournament, a major achievement, especially as a junior.
Katrina's success came in part because of her natural, all court game. She has great hands, and is also one of those rare kids who loves hitting all the shots. She's natural at the net, and can hit underspin and drop shots off both sides.
I watched her win a lot of points over the course of the season coming to net. But in general her net points tended to go on too long. It would take her two or three or more volleys to win points that could have been finished in one or two. Because of this difficulty, she also lost quite a few points she was in position to win, and this in turn made some of her matches more difficult than they really needed to be.
Katrina's problems at the net were directly related to the technical issues discussed above. She tended to make late contact and to float her volleys. So even when she hit the ball into the open court, players were getting additional chances to hit another pass or a lob.
It's likely Katrina will play number one next year on her team, and she is also starting to play more USTA tournaments. So this winter she and I decided to work on her technical volley motions. The goal was to develop more stick and the ability to finish points at the net more quickly and decisively.
All the footage in this article came from a single one hour session. The changes Katrina made, as you'll see were significant, and demonstrate the power of combining stroke modeling with immediate video feedback.
When you look at the animation at the top of this article, you can see that Katrina is natural at the net and that her volleys don't seem to have major technical problems - at least when we look at them in real time. But again the brief, compact motions make this virtually impossible to really see with the naked eye.
When we videoed her and slowed the motions down we could see what was really happening. Katrina's swing patterns move sharply downward. Watch also how her wrist flexes and the racket head drops on both sides.
On the forehand her arm straightens out completely on what should be a routine volley and the contact is therefore too far to the side and too far away from her body. On the backhand, the contact is pushed back too far in close to or even behind the edge of the body.
Neither side makes the right use of either the hitting arm or the shoulders. This is causing her to lose leverage and racket head speed on both the forehand and backhand volleys, and why they both tend to float and lack pace.
The solution was for Katrina to develop more precise hitting arm positions, and then, once these were set, to coordinate the hitting arms with the use of the shoulders in the forward swing.
We've described the volley hitting arm position as the "Open U" shape. (Click Here.) Basically the forearm forms the base of the U, while the upper arm and the racket form the U's legs, open at about 30 degrees.
The hitting position is set up at the completion of the turn. Once the "U" shape is in place, the forward swing is generated from the shoulders.
Let's look at the forward swing on the forehand first. On the forehand, the rear right shoulder drives the hitting arm forward to the contact. It's a rotational movement - like a tiny segment out of the forehand groundstroke.
On the backhand side, unlike the forehand, the shoulders don't rotate as much, if at all. Instead the torso stays basically sideways. Instead of rotating the rear shoulder, the player uses the front, right deltoid muscles to pull the hitting arm structure forward to the contact and through the shot.
So in both cases, the hitting arm structure is moving forward as a unit. The shoulder is powering the volley, as opposed to any internal motions in the hitting arms themselves.
This is what creates a naturally powerful contact slightly in front of the body, with the hitting arm in the correct technical position.
It's not enough to use vague phrases like "hit the ball in front" in teaching or learning the volley. My experience is that players need to have specific models of how to structure the position of the hitting arms. They also need to understand and to feel the actual physical motion to move the racket forward to the contact.
If the player can't model the hitting arm position and the forward motion without the ball, there is virtually no chance he or she will be able to replicate the technical motion in practice, much less actual match play.
So with Katrina, we worked on setting up the physical hitting arm positions with great precision. Then I had her model the movement forward to the contact on both sides. We looked at her original volleys on video, as well as video of her modeling the motions.
I made her consciously visualize the positions and motions by swinging with her eyes closed, and asked her to create a mental image of how the motion looked inside her mind's eye and how it felt. (For more on the use of visualization see Jim Loehr's seminal article "In Your Mind's Eye." Click Here.
So after just one hour, what were Katrina's results? First look at the animation of her revised volley motions in real time. Compare the feel you get to the initial animations at the top of the story. You can tell that it feels more solid, but why?
That becomes clear when we look at the key positions. On her forehand, watch that as she comes forward she does a much better job of holding the hitting arm in the open U position.
Her back shoulder is driving the hitting arm forward and around to the contact. And this is moving the contact further forward, and causing the volley to stick.
It's the same on the backhand side. Because she has the feeling for the Open U position, Katrina is in position to use that front shoulder to move the whole hitting arm structure forward to the contact.
The shape of the swing on both sides is much more directly forward, rather than angling so sharply down. Because the shoulders are now driving the motion, the hitting arm positions are much more solid and contact at the correct distance from the body is created automatically.
As Katrina gets more comfortable with these structural fundamentals, she will probably add more underspin naturally. But the plane of the swings will hopefully still be predominantly forward and the contact in front.
In the meantime, I plan to have to drill regularly on the ball machine and in live feed, working through the more basic positions and motions. Depending on what happens we may actually work on the more advanced movements, or it may just happen naturally.
It's a great start, and I have a feeling it's going to be bad news for some of her opponents in the long run. Katrina is one of those rare junior players with a natural all court game and it's going to be even more effective when she finishes more points at the net with crisp, accurate volley winners.
