Saturday, August 1, 2009

Tennis Psychology (Part 1)

By Gail Jones

Tennis psychology is the same as understanding the workings of your opponent's mind and gauging the effect of your own strategy on his/her head and also understanding the mental effects resulting from the different external causes on your own head.

However, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own psychology. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing occurring under different circumstances. This is because people react differently in different moods and under different circumstances.

You must realize the effect on your game of the resulting irritation, joy, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction is. Does it increase your efficiency? If so, strive for it, but never give it to your opponent. Does it deprive you of concentration? If so, either remove the reason, or if that is not possible, strive to ignore it.

After you have properly assessed your own reaction to circumstances, observe your opponents to determine their characters. Similar temperaments react in a like way, and you may judge people of your own sort by yourself. Different characters you have to seek to compare with those people, whose reactions you are already familiar with.

Someone who can control his/her own mental processes runs an excellent chance of reading those of someone else for the minds works along definite lines of thought and can be examined. One can only regulate one's own thought processes after examining them very carefully .

The steady, unemotional baseline player is seldom a quick thinker. If he were, he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is usually a pretty clear indication of his/her type of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who usually displays the baseline game, does so because he hates to stir up his/her slow mind to think out a safe strategy of reaching the net.

However, then there is the other kind of baseline player, who would prefer to remain on the rear of the court while supervising an attack intended to break up your game. He is a much more dangerous player and a deep, quick thinking antagonist. He obtains his/her results by changing his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variety of his/her game. This player is a very good psychologist.

The first sort of tennis player mentioned above just hits the ball without much thought about what he is actually doing, while the latter always has a definite strategy and sticks to it.

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