Preview: 3.0-4.5 Doubles Lessons on Poaching, Down-The-Line Shots, Errors, Scouting, & More

I share seven strategy lessons gathered from recent experiences at the US Open, Davis Cup, and coaching club players heading to Nationals. These lessons are particularly helpful for the 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, and 4.5 level doubles players who tend to get some of these things wrong.

Note: Tennis Tribe Members get access to all seven lessons, while everyone can preview the first three.

• Focusing on what happens most - and why we get this wrong.
• How to think about getting to the net.
• Scouting what your opponents do and don't do, plus how to handle the lob.
• Members Only: Statistics on hitting down the line - this data will surprise you.
• Members Only: A lesson on poaching, including my new favorite drill.
• Members Only: One simple thing to focus on early in the point that will have a huge impact.
• Members Only: A counter-adjustment I noticed in the US Open final, leading to a Grand Slam Title.

To access all seven lessons, sign up for any membership level at https://thetennistribe.com/memberships/

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Transcript

Seven Strategy Lessons Introduction

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Hey everyone, welcome to the show. Today I'm going to share seven different strategy lessons with you. It's been a while since I've done a strategy episode. So I've been wanting to get this out there for a while, but I've been traveling a lot. I was in New York for the U.S. Open. I went to Delray Beach for Davis Cup. And then the past week I've been very busy with the member webinar. I also had a clinic recently with a 3-0 team that is headed to Nationals soon. And I've learned a lot of lessons from all of these experiences over the last few months. And I wanted to share some of the lessons that kind of stuck out to me with you here today. So we've got seven different lessons. We're going to talk about what to prioritize in your practices and in your matches. We're going to talk about getting to the net. I'm going to talk about scouting, a really good lesson on scouting opponents and how to make adjustments based on what they do and what they don't do. And then down the line shots, poaching, the importance of your first two shots and one thing that you can do to improve those first two shots. It's actually a very simple kind of takeaway from one of the clinics that we did recently. And then a lesson from the women's US Open Finals as well. This is a member episode. So of these seven lessons, the first three are going to be free for everyone. So if you're not a member, you're still going to get a lot out of this episode. If you want access to the last four lessons, you will need to become a member. So to do that, go to thetennistribe.com. You can click on membership in the main menu and sign up there. All member levels will get access to the premium podcast feed. So I'm going to start with these first three lessons. The first one is about worrying about what happens most. So a lot of us in tennis, in doubles, we focus on things that don't matter as much. And that gets in the way of winning. So I'm going to share a few examples here. In New York, uh I did a what we call it a called it a rally trip. It was basically an all-inclusive US Open trip that included uh hotel and tickets to the U.S. Open and then a couple of clinics. And one of those clinics was with Tony Huber, who is a former podcast guest. He coached five plus world number ones in doubles. Uh, and now he coaches club level players. And I love talking with coaches like Tony who have have experience coaching both the highest level players in the world and club level players because they always have kind of a unique take and a unique perspective and a really um fascinating way of delivering certain messages because they have so much experience. And Tony's no different. I'll link to the episode uh in the show notes from last year. It was one of the most popular uh podcast episodes I've ever done and certainly one of my favorites. Um so in this clinic with Tony, we we ran through a clinic. I'm gonna share a lot of lessons from that clinic here today. Uh, but at the end of the clinic, one player asked, What should I do if my partner poaches but doesn't finish the volley? And what I told them is I don't really worry about that too much because typically what's gonna happen when your partner poaches is you're never gonna get a chance to hit another ball. Um, the answer is move across and kind of closer to the middle. Uh, you might have to get over to cover the line, but honestly, we're not that worried about that because when your partner poaches, the most likely thing that's gonna happen is the opponent tries to go down the line and they miss. The next most likely thing that's gonna happen is they try to go sharper across court or hit it harder because they see them moving and they miss that. The next most likely thing that's gonna happen is your partner gets a volley and maybe they make the volley, maybe they miss the volley, but regardless, they fit the point is over. So the the odds of your partner poaching hitting the volley and the ball coming back is pretty low. And if your partner poaches and misses the volley altogether, you'll already be there across court to cover that ball. So I don't really worry too much about if your partner poaches but doesn't finish because it's such a rare scenario. There was another case recently where I was helping out with a pro-level team, and one of the coaches, who is a former top professional player who won multiple Grand Slam titles, asked me where this particular opponent likes to hit their forehand. And this opponent served and volleyed the majority of the time. And my answer to that was very similar to the answer I had in the previous question from the club level player. I don't really care where they like to hit their forehand because knowing that is not going to help us win this match. We have to prioritize the things that happen most. And this player who serves in volleys and likes to get to the net probably hits five forehands in the entire match. They mostly are hitting volleys, serves, and returns. And when I'm talking about forehands, I'm not talking about forehand returns, by the way. So I don't really care that much about where they hit their forehand. If we're focused on that, we're gonna miss the bigger picture on where they tend to hit first serves or second serves in the deuce court, in the ad court, what they where they like to hit their returns against first and second serves. So those are the things I want to focus on and prioritize because they happen a lot more than forehand groundstrokes on the third or fourth or fifth shot of the rally. Yesterday I was helping with some training for a 3-0 nationals team. And I described it to them this way. At Nationals, if you're a USCA player or any sort of club player, if you're a member of a team, I'm sure you've been a part of a team where the last match is on, everybody's around the court watching, and there's this really long rally. And at the end of the rally, your team either wins the rally and everybody goes crazy, or y'all lose the rally, and the other team on the sidelines is going nuts. And I talked to them about that and said, That's great, it's a lot of fun. Those long rallies get the the louder cheers, they get the um on the pro tour, they get more of the highlight reels, all of that stuff. But they don't really matter in terms of who wins the match because they don't happen that much. So what does matter more is the point before where your team missed a return, and the point after where the other team missed an easy volley on the second shot after the serve, or two points later when they double faulted because it was a big pressure point. Those are the things that matter more because that's happening more often. Those longer rallies that are 10, 15, 20 balls, those don't happen that often, and they're gonna mostly be about 50-50. So let's prioritize the things that happen most. Now, in that clinic with Tony Huber on the rally trip in New York, one of the drills he did was he measured the rally length. So he started with all four players at the baseline. And the one player in the deuce court, one player in the ad court, on the baseline, on both sides, and he alternated feeding. So he fed to player A, player B, then player C, then player D, then back to A. They're all on the baseline. He feeds it in, they just play the point out. You can do whatever you want. You can come to the net, you can stay back, you can lob it, you can slice it, you can try to come to the net and hit a winner, whatever you want to do. He just feeds it in and you play. So this is without serves. So with serves, there's going to be a lot of missed returns, but this is an easy feed to the baseline. There's also no net player on the other side of the net. So if I'm the baseline player and Tony feeds to me and there's no net player, I don't really have a lot of pressure on this first ball. So the likelihood of me missing it is pretty low. And even in this scenario, the 0-4 rally length was 85%. So 85% of all of the points, and we did this for about 10, maybe 15 minutes. 85% of all the points ended in the first four shots. So no neither team had more than two shots. So that is crazy high, a crazy high percentage. Five to eight was about 12%, and then rallies of nine or longer. So this is the type of rally where everybody's kind of hanging on the edge of their seat during your sectionals or nationals match, and everybody goes nuts if your team wins or is so disappointed if your team loses it. It happened once in about 15 minutes. And again, this is without serves and returns. So these longer rallies just don't matter that much. We really want to focus and prioritize the serve, the return, and then the first shot after that. And one of the rules that Tony created to start the clinic is he said he wanted all of the players to hit 80% of their balls in the court. So he has this camera that he sets up at the net post and it measures all the balls that land in, that land out, and where they land out. So if it's wide, long, or in the net. And I'm going to get more to that a little bit later. But he wanted 80% in because 80% means you're making four and you're missing one. You're making four and you're missing one. So that means we're not missing in those first four shots. We're prioritizing that 85%. So that was a really good lesson from Tony. And again, to summarize this one, let's worry about what happens most. I'm not that concerned about these 10, 15, 20 shot rallies. Um, if you've heard me talk about uh Craig O'Shaughnessy in the past, he kind of was the um on the forefront of some of this data um on rally length uh and shares a lot of this information all the time. And it's had a big influence on me and my game and the way I practice and the way I teach people. And this was just kind of a reminder of that uh from a slightly different angle. So let's go to lesson number two. Uh, this is also from the clinic with Tony. Uh, he measured the make percentage again. So we wanted 80% of the balls in the court. And we started out the clinic by simply feeding to the baseline players. So all of the players were on one side, Tony was on the other. He just fed a forehand, fed a backhand, and then you rotated to the back of the line. So from the baseline, the players made 74% of their shots in the court. And then after that, we did that about 10 minutes. After that, they came to the net. At the net, they got a couple of uh volleys, a forehand volley, a backhand volley, and then I think in the last three or three to five minutes we did an overhead as well. At the net, they made 81% of the balls in the court. Now, this doesn't seem like a lot. It's a 7% difference. 74% from the baseline, 81% at the net. But with the margins in tennis being so small, 7% is actually a huge difference. Typically in a match, I know this because I study the data on uh ATP and WTA matches all the time. I've even done this for club level players. Typically in a match that you win, you're almost never going to win more than 60% of the points. So if you win 60% and the opponent wins 40% of the points, that means you've probably dominated that match. Most of the time, if you have a match that's you win 7-5-6-3, something like that, you're gonna win about 55% of those points. So that's only a 10% difference. And this baseline and net difference is seven percent. So this is a huge gap. Now what we also measured was winners and errors. So the rally length game that I just talked about, we had all four players at the baseline. So deuce, add, deuce, add, everybody's at the baseline, nobody's at the net, Tony's feeding, alternating between all four players. We went out and did that after he measured the rally length, and he measured winners and errors. He counted 10 total winners in about 15 minutes of play, and only two of those were from the baseline, and both of those baseline winners were through the middle of the court. They were basically a communication error on one of the team's parts. And these are players who don't play together a lot, so that probably wouldn't have happened if it was a team that plays together a lot and you know gels a little bit more and has that team chemistry. So two baseline winners both through the middle of the court, the other eight winners were all from the net. So what does this tell us? This tells us that when we get to the net, our errors go down and our winners go up. So getting to the net is this is just more evidence. It's a good strategy in doubles. Now, you do have to be careful in some of these scenarios. So yesterday, when I was with the uh 3-0 ladies, a lot of them like to hit their approach shot and get to the net. It's something a ton of coaches teach you. I'm sure you've been in clinics where uh the coach will tell you, you know, if the ball lands in the service box, you have to approach and come forward. I don't like to teach that because it's not always the best tactic. Some of the time yesterday I saw some of these 3-0 ladies doing this, they would hit their approach shot, come to the net, and the very next shot is a lob, and it puts them in a very difficult position. So you have to notice how often and how good the opponents are at lobbing, and sometimes you might have to hit that approach shot and back up. But one of the other takeaways from these statistics, this data, is from the baseline, we don't want to be going for winners. We only had two winners in this game from the baseline, both through the middle of the court. So every time somebody attempted a baseline winner down the line or cross court to the outside, basically, they missed the shot because it didn't happen in this 15 minutes. So we want to not miss, prioritize reducing our errors from the baseline, and then also getting to the net is really important. On those approaches, if you are going to follow it into the net, again, just be sure to kind of know the opponent and um study them throughout the match to see how good they are at lobbing. But if you're going to approach, approach deep through the middle of the court, and that's gonna take away their ability to lob. So it's a really important aspect of a good approach shot. And then of course communicate with your partner on who's gonna cover that lob. But the takeaway here is getting to the net is a good tactic in doubles. Lesson number three. This was from Davis Cup. So I was chatting with David McPherson, who was the longtime coach of the Bryan brothers. I was telling him a little bit about Tennis Tribe and what I do and um how I work with a lot of club level players, and um, we were chatting about club level strategy and the lob specifically, and something he said stuck with me. He said some teams can only lob and some teams can never lob. And I loved this phrase because I'd never really thought about it this way, but I wanted to share this with you all because it's such an important thing to notice on the court. If you go play a match and the team is straight up lobbers, you have to have a tactic, a strategy to combat that. And I've talked about that a lot over the years. I've got tons of content and lessons on how to beat teams that lob, how to beat pushers and so on. But what I mentioned recently in the newsletter, based on um David's quote here, and I'm gonna share with you now, is a lot of teams don't lob at all, or at least a lot of players. So if you can notice this during the match, they haven't lobbed us once. You can play much closer to the net and much closer to the middle of the court, knowing that they're not going to lob. And it's gonna make it a lot easier for you to beat those types of players. Again, from closer to the net, your errors are gonna go down and your winners are gonna go up. And if they don't lob, then you don't have to worry about the lob. So play as tight as you can. Studying the opponents and stop covering things that aren't happening is a huge aspect of scouting your opponents in doubles. So you want to notice the things that they don't do. And again, a lot of doubles teams, doubles players never lob. So if you can pick up on that, you can make that adjustment. There's other things that players may not do, like they may never serve down the T on their first serve, or they may never serve out wide on their second serve, whatever it is. If you can pick these things up, then you don't have to worry about covering it. You can adjust your position accordingly. So next I'm gonna get into the member content for this episode. Um, again, if you want access to that, go to thetennistribe.com, click on membership in the main menu, and sign up for any level of membership. And then you can get access to the next four lessons, which are going to be on down the line shots, uh, poaching, including my new favorite drill, uh the first two shots, and then a lesson from the US Open.