Two Things That Seem to Work Well

This post is dedicated to John, who said today that the Jill Braverman tips below he figured out by himself after only three and a half years of play.  Well done, John, and let's look forward to the next three and a half years!

 

A couple of the recent posts have talked about Jill Braverman's style of playing.  I find these to be accurate and useful.  I've been trying a couple of the techniques that she advocates.

First one is to have broad stance at the kitchen line.  Feet wider than my shoulders.  This does the following:  My head is closer to the net top and it's easier to return shots that skim the net; while it didn't come up today, that wide stance is good if you want to duck a shot.

Secondly, the stance provides very good balance if I need to rotate my torso to one side.  The problem I imagined with this stance is that I would not be able to move sideways for a cross court dink.  But what it made me do is to shuffle my feet since it was impossible to cross them to move to the side.  I've been told this is a good thing.

The other habit that I'm trying to ingrain, and this was in the last post, is to run through the service return to get to the kitchen line.  While it might have caused me to hit a couple returns long, the advantage to be at the net and ready was a great tradeoff.  

So there are a couple of very simple techniques that anyone can adopt without any effort.