How to teach your kid to take the ball on the rise

Tue, May 21, 2013

Posted by Albert Teo - Certified Tennis Coach Singapore in Tennis on 05 December 2011

Dear Parent

In today's modern tennis game, approach to teaching of tennis has changed tremendously. If we do not keep up with the modern game, we would invariably start our kids on the wrong basics.

Traditionally, kids initiation to tennis could include some ball catching exercises with a cone e.g

While this is good to develop ball sense, it sets the kids early on in his tennis learning to take every ball on the dip.

As a modern day coach, I approach all my young students to take the ball on the rise from day 1.

I would modify the ball catching with cone to a ball catching with a modified butterfly net (perahps a old racket fitted with a basketball net) . The emphasis is to bring the tennis net up and catch the ball across with a vertically set racket face as the ball is RISING. This exercise will instill ball sense and hand eye coordination while emphasizing catching the ball as it is coming UP, not going DOWN.

If such equipment is not available, we could modify the ball catching exercise with our hands up instead of our hands down. Again this reemphasises the need to read the ball trajectory b4 it bounces up.

Hope this helps.

Rgds
Albert
SSC / STA Certified Tennis Coach (Singapore)
HP : 8 one 8 one 7 one one 2
Email: albert_teo AT email DOT com

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