Thursday

Tennis Psychology (Part 1)

By Gail Jones

Tennis psychology is the same as understanding the make-up of your opponent's mind and gauging the effect of your own game on his/her mental viewpoint and also understanding the psychological effects resulting from the different external causes on your own mind.

However, it is true that you cannot be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding your own mental processes. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing happening under different circumstances. This is because people react differently in different moods and under different conditions.

You must realize the effect on your game of the resulting annoyance, pleasure, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction takes. Does it increase your prowess? If so, try for it, but never offer 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 judged your own reaction to circumstances, study your opponents to decide their temperaments. Like temperaments react in a like manner, and you can judge people of your own sort by yourself. Other characters you must seek to compare with those people, whose reactions you are already familiar with.

A person who can regulate his/her own mental processes has an excellent chance of reading those of another for the mind works along definite lines of thought and can be studied. One can only control one's own mental processes after carefully examining them.

The regular, unemotional baseline player is seldom a quick thinker. If he was, he would not adhere to the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is often a pretty clear indicator of his/her sort of mind. The impassive, easy-going player, who usually advocates the baseline strategy, does so because he hates to stir up his/her torpid mind to work out a safe method of getting to the net.

However, then there is the other sort of baseline player, who would prefer to stay at the rear of the court while supervising an attack intending to break up your game. He is a much more dangerous player and a deep, keen thinking opponent. He gets 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 simply strikes the ball without much thought about what he is really doing, while the latter always has a solid, thought-out strategy and adheres to it. - 26706

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