10 Minutes of Tennis: Advice for the Compete Beginner

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Good morning. This is our 10 minutes of tennis at 10.04.

We call that close enough in our world. This is close enough.

I like the numbers full and I apologize to everybody for you pros at there.

Don't be late. Be on time. If anything,

the beginners be early. That's actually a good start.

I appreciate that. Justin Yeo, our Aussie tennis pro in Puerto Rico.

I am Shaun Boyce and this is 10 minutes of tennis.

Today we're going to talk to the complete beginner.

So that is a good starting point for the coach for the complete beginner.

Please set a good example and be on time.

Be early. Be there waiting. Be there ready.

In Atlanta, we got a lot of pros that weren't trained like I was

in the fancy country club setting where what was the phrase early is on time,

on time is late and late is unacceptable.

Yeah. Okay. Guys, you've got to be there waiting. These people are expecting you to be

professional and if you want them to treat you that way, first starting advice is

be on time to the coach. Now, Justin, for the beginner themselves, they show up.

What are they thinking? What are they looking at? What are they looking forward to?

They obviously like the sports somehow.

Oh, they're looking for the benefits of the sport.

We sort of have two beginners. One is that they just get thrilled

by watching it on the court and say they want to give it a go.

And then you got the other one obviously that really just wants to the health benefits

because as I've said, a thousand times over, you'll do more calories on a tennis court

than you'll do on a gym or anywhere else.

And I've proved it over and over again that you will put more calories on a tennis court than anything

else. So they're sort of the two beginners I see for my 36 years of coaching.

And I'm probably going to get a little harsh if this coach is out listening,

maybe block your ears or maybe get something out of this. But

beginners need to really get a decent coach. The coach that knows real fundamentals and

focuses on the fundamentals to start with because if they don't do it right, the person will drop out

of the sport because as they're dropping out of the sport, they're because they're not progressing.

They're not, when they go to play, there's so many fundamentals that are making them not

grow higher and higher and higher. And what I see a lot up in just a high level of high performance

coach is when I touch a beginner, I constantly are reversing the racket back, searing, theory.

If I hear that, I have any coach want to punch them in the head because it's not the game.

The game is turned. Rotate the shoulders, learn how to perceive the ball.

Early as possible. If not, they're always going to contact late, they're always going to hit from the

shoulder. They're never going to have the right fundamentals to progress the game. And then the other

side of it too is that they're watching them on court. So what's the first thing a player does on the

court? The shoulder is the same. The racket's not going back. So that's something if a coach is

teaching away now, I hope he's listening in switches, turn his turn of the shoulder. The other issue I

find is ready stance in all areas, adults and juniors. If the ready stance isn't done correctly,

right from day one, it sets the tone for every ball, for where you're going, to get to the ball,

to get back, it sets everything. If you don't get that ready stance, splits their company, develop

either. I call it the ready step or the spring step. I don't call it the split step because split

step commonly with junior development, they go down to their heels and they can't go forward.

So I tend to say spring step so you're ready to go in all directions. But fundamentals, as they

should spend three months, fundamentals, getting them right. Ready stance, how many times I see the

elbows in the rib cage? It's not going to work. You can focus on grip all day, but at the end of the

day, the government is going to pull in the court. So commonly, if you focus on the direction of the

racket face and thinking about what they're doing with their hands in the racket face, the grip will

tend to sort itself out. They will progress at being able to get the ball in court and then you can

turn the grip around a little more to get more spin if you want to show them something extra.

But at the end of the day, I see way to, and again, USPTA might be killing me right now saying,

"Oh, you're talking about the bad ball." No, you're talking about the bad ball all day,

and not seeing the ball and not putting it in the court. So I think that's where we've got to be

careful. I've been caught a few times. There's a mechanical-minded beginner, and there's a very

visual rhythm, smooth kind of player that works on function. And you've got to try to find which player

that is. So you work with him the correct way. I've been caught two many times today. They're like,

"China asked me about grip and about all these things." I'm like, "No, no, sit the ball here, right here."

And they're bringing time. They want to know these things to put that together. So

that was much since the coaches. For the players, fun to coach, that's going to teach you through

fun, and that coach, because the player comes out and finds the coach, there's a big difference between

what you see on TV and what you should be doing in your first few tennis lessons. And that's the thing

we struggle with the kids. We struggle with the kids' parents. They say, "Whoa, I'm supposed to

follow through and look what Roger does on his ball is." I'm like, "Whoa, your kids,

seven." Relax. He's not Roger yet. So being able to see the simple, the coach that can teach,

here's what you do now. We'll get out to that other point later.

It's important. And as a player, it's hard to know the difference of what I'm being coached. There's

a guy out there saying, "Well, nobaks doing this with his right hip." That's probably not day one.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to mean I have to look at videos. Jogged Vich had a racket. It was too big for it.

And he would just be cranking the ball. That forehand back when he was a kid is not the same boy

hand now. So it's pretty obvious. Commonly we hear that a lot actually in the high performance area.

My kid means that it's like, "No, your kid needs to get split step. He needs to learn how to get in

the proper ready stance. He needs to be able to read the ball before it's coming and be prepared

before the ball bounces." I mean, that many times I've seen kids not prepared before the ball bounces

because they said, "Fuck this on." What the swings look like. You know? Yeah. You're now figuring out

if their elbow is in the right place. And then come back to that engineering mind versus we see

a lot of that engineering mind versus the Seaball hit ball mind. And as a player, is that the advice?

If you're giving me the beginner player, the advice is, "No yourself a little bit." Give that a little

bit of a 10-metre nose chair and say, "No yourself and what you're looking for. Go find a coach

that can talk to you." Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you've got a kid or an adult who can see the chess game

all over court and will just play games with you all day long. It doesn't care about it. The swing.

It only pays best the outcome. Right? So build that game. Build that player. Don't be trying to, but

again, no matter which player it is, the fundamentals is everything. If they are not loaded,

if they're not ready, if they're not reading the racket up the other end, versus just reading the ball.

There's all these little fundamentals that if you can get them right, that player whichever one it is

can grow. And the more they grow, the more confident they get, the more long-term we have a player

at the sport, you keep them there versus the other way around. It says, "No, there's nothing to me."

And so if we were going to write this book and the advice to complete beginner and it had three things

at the end, we go through all this advice and all these things. And we had those main three things.

It said, "Okay, beginner player. We covered the coaches. They should know better." But in this case,

the player, if you're going to give them three things to say, "Hey, focus on these three things in your

first, what, 90 days? What do you set?" Ready, Stanks. Watch some whole rackets, a racket.

Learn to move. I didn't hear anything about grip. Nope. I didn't hear anything about elbow.

Nope. Because the key factor here is you'll start to learn to turn anyway when you want to hit the ball.

You won't just hit with your arm. You'll turn anyway. If you move, you have to turn it as well.

And this game, I've been in big conferences. This game is not gone. So don't let them stand still.

They have to learn to move as soon as possible. And the split step or the ready stance will help that

And he won't get out of the five other for the reason that he's up vertical the whole time.

And as soon as he gets down, he can do it for like 10%, 20%, and over side of these up again,

frame the ball in the net. And I'm like, yeah, because you didn't get the fundamentals right from the

start. He's back so he's too big because of it. It just comes down to fundamentals.

And now he's reprogrammed, which makes it even harder because he's trying to stop coming back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the beginning of their roar and get it right. Their progression.

All right, so those three things first 90 days, Justin, you know, thank you so much. See you next week.

Kiss my ad. Have fun guys.

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