Friday, July 10, 2009

Tennis Psychology (Part 1)

By Gail Jones

Tennis psychology is nothing more than understanding the workings of your opponent's mind and gauging the effect of your own game on his/her head and also understanding the psychological effects resulting from the different external causes on your own head.

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 you react differently in different moods and under different conditions.

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

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

A person who can regulate his/her own psychology has an excellent chance of reading those of another for the minds works along certain lines of thought and can be studied. One may only control one's own mental processes after studying them meticulously.

The regular, unemotional baseline player is rarely a keen thinker. If he were, he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is usually a fairly clear indicator of his/her type of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who usually displays the baseline strategy, does so because he hates to activate up his/her torpid mind to work out a safe strategy of getting to the net.

Then there is the other type of baseline player, who would rather stay at the back of the court while directing an attack intending to disrupt up your game. He is a much more dangerous player and a deep, keen thinking opponent. He achieves his/her results by changing his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variance of his/her game. This player is a good psychologist.

The first type of player mentioned above just strikes the ball with little thought about what he is actually doing, while the latter always has a definite plan and sticks to it.

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