Tennis Made Easy Essay (402 words)

When surfing the Internet, eventually winding up at tennis4you.com, I found something called the “Lesson Lounge” which has instructional articles on the game of tennis. My particular article discusses a very crucial part of the game, and also a difficult one, the first serve. The reason this drew my attention is because this is a major weakness in my already pathetic tennis repertoire. By reading the article, I hoped to find strategy to learn from, and eventually, with practice, to improve from. In the article, they explain how the first serve can become “someone’s biggest weapon making someone else’s worst nightmare!” That, not only can one use a power serve or a placement serve to attack their opponents, but that working out is not even necessary to do so. The tennis serve can have significantly more power by using “legs, shoulder rotation, and stomach muscles” during one’s motion. They stress that since you have two serves, it is crucial to take a chance and make sure your first serve is NOT “easily attackable”. From here, they lead into more complicated serving techniques that involve the type of hit- such as the flat, slice, kick, and topspin serves. Although I am not good enough to test them out, through time, they could certainly help someone with an interest in tennis who is willing to practice. After establishing the four types, the writer goes more in depth to differences between power and non-power serves. With power serves, they emphasize the importance of rhythm, significance of keeping your opponent guessing and lastly, the need to hit it in bounds. They continue to say that, obviously, no matter how hard your serve is, it is useless if it cannot land in bounds. As far as non-power serves, they speak of smaller players and how technique and mechanisms such as spin. Another main point here is that one must serve deep into the service box. From the article, I have been able to develop a much stronger sense of how to serve well. Additionally, although it cannot relate to this years experiences (since we’ve only had one day) it could help me judge, more specifically, how and where more knowledgeable tennis players may try to serve the ball. Essentially, it took a minimal and rather pathetic foundation of tennis wisdom and expanded it in a way that could elicit a future improvement on the court.