July 7, 2009

The General Psychology of Tennis (Part 1)


By Gail Jones

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

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 happening under different circumstances. This is because you react differently in different moods and under different conditions.

You have to understand the effect on your game of the resulting annoyance, joy, bewilderment, 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, but if that isn't possible, try to ignore it.

Once you have correctly assessed your own reaction to conditions, study your opponents in order to determine their temperaments. Like characters react similarly, and you can judge men of your own type by yourself. Other temperaments you have to seek to compare with people whose reactions you already know.

Someone who can control his/her own mental processes stands an excellent chance of reading those of another for the minds works along definite 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 seldom a keen thinker. If he was, he would not adhere to the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is often a fairly clear indicator of his/her sort of mind. The stolid, 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 reaching the net.

Then there is the other type of baseline player, who would prefer to remain on the back of the court while directing an attack intended to disrupt up your game. He is a very dangerous player, and a deep, keen thinking antagonist. He achieves his/her results by mixing up his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variety of his/her game. He is a good psychologist.

The first type of tennis player mentioned above merely hits the ball without much thought about what he is really up to, while the latter always has a definite strategy and sticks to it.

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