Andrea Koop used to be in the top five or so of the women's game. I haven't seen much of her lately. She is a lawyer and maybe has a full life outside of whacking plastic.
When I watched her, she played a very classical game. Her serves were very soft for a pro game. I only saw her miss a serve once. I was a bit stunned at that. She hit the ball to the middle of the service court always. Nothing fancy, just a way to start the rally.
But there is also something that she does that is worthy of our attention. She is probably no different than any other good player, but she is very obvious about it. And the thing I'm talking about is that she tenses up every time her opponent is going to hit the ball. She is expecting that the ball is coming to her. If the ball goes to her partner, she dramatically relaxes. This goes on for the entire point. Tense, relax, shift maybe, tense, hit, move, tense, relax...
The power in this is that you are never surprised that the ball came your way. Always assume the next shot is yours.
I was at the Harvest Tournament today. I'll create a post on some of the interesting things I noticed, but let me tease with this. The men's doubles was, with rare exception, all about hitting the ball really, really hard. And probably 30% or so were going out. Getting back to Andrea's methods, suppose you were expecting all the balls hit at you to be going out, would you be more inclined to duck?
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