How to Poach: Common Mistakes, Timing, Positioning, & Drills

Link to the Instagram Post

Possibly the most important skill to have in doubles, aside from the serve and return, is poaching. In this episode, I break down the poaching mistakes I see over and over again from doubles players at all levels.

We'll discuss timing, direction, and simple positioning that can flip returns into easy finishes. Members get the full five-mistake breakdown plus drills. The free preview covers the two biggest errors and how to fix them fast.

• Exactly when to move on your poach, and the biggest mistake club players make when poaching
• How skill level, pace, and opponent depth change your poach timing
• A common movement mistake that could be causing you to miss volleys
• Where to start and where you should NOT start in the service box and the “window” concept
• Using a quiet racket face for clean finishes
• Members only: How close you should be at the net
• Members only: How to finish your volleys and stop hitting it back to the baseline player
• Members only: When it's OK to cover the alley and not poach
• Members only:  Drills to help your poaching skills

To get the rest of the episode, sign up for a membership here: https://thetennistribe.com/memberships/

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Transcript

Member Preview And Course News

Mistake One: Moving Too Late

Reading Pace And Position

Mistake Two: Moving Sideways

Forward Momentum And Positioning

Finishing Volleys With Simplicity

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Today, we're talking about one of the most important topics in doubles, and in my mind, one of the most poorly executed, and that is poaching. I'm going to go over five poaching mistakes that I posted on Instagram recently. That post has 112,000 views. And outside of the serve and return, I think poaching might be the most important skill you can have on the doubles court. And honestly, I think it's more simple to learn this skill than it is to learn or improve, I should say, your serve and return. So if you're going to improve your serve, you're going to have to spend a lot of time practicing your serve. And that's not to say you don't have to spend time practicing poaching, but I think it's a little bit simpler than the serve or the return. If you're not a good returner, it's going to take you a while to practice that and become a good returner. So this is a really popular topic. It's a very misunderstood topic, and it's also a poorly executed topic in my mind, really at every level of the game. I was just at a Division I uh tournament this weekend, and the a lot of the players there did not know how to poach properly. In fact, the majority of them didn't, and they are high-level D1 players. So I'm going to go through the five poaching mistakes from that Instagram post, which I'll link to below for those of you who want to see it. We're going to talk about timing the poach properly. We're going to talk about the movement. I'm also going to talk about how to position yourself properly on the poach, where you should be making contact in both the deuce and the ad court, how to work on finishing your volleys when you do poach, and then how often you should be poaching, including when you should not be poaching, and you actually should be covering the alley a bit more at times. And then at the very end, I'll cover a couple of drills as well. This is a member podcast. So those of you who are listening to the free podcast, you're going to get a preview of this. It's going to be a pretty significant amount of this episode, but you will not get the entire episode to do that. You have to sign up for a membership, which again, I'll link to that in the show notes as well. Members, if you are listening to this on the free feed, be sure to log into your membership and get the member feed downloaded. A couple of other quick announcements before I dive into mistake number one. I am working on a Serve Strategy course. It's going to be coming in November. It's going to be available for club level members. And then it'll also be available for purchase. If you do not want to sign up for the membership and don't want a monthly or annual fee, but you do want access to the Serve Strategy course, you can just buy that for a one-time fee as well. That's going to be coming in November. I'm going to focus primarily on regular formation in that course. I've started outlining it and kind of putting it together. It's going to be very, very in-depth and targeted, mostly at the club level, but honestly, anybody at any level is going to get a lot out of it because I'm going to be using video from professional points as well. So let's dive into mistake number one. And you can see all these on Instagram. So even though I'm only going through the first two for the free uh podcast feed, you can see mistakes three, four, and five, although I'm going to dive into them much deeper here. Mistake number one is moving too late. I talked about a couple episodes ago a drill I did in New York, and the poacher was constantly moving too late. I recently did a couple of clinics with some 3-0 and 3-5 players. Again, the most common mistake I saw was they move too late on their poach. I was at a Division I tournament this weekend, like I said earlier, and I still see players moving too late. You know they're moving too late because either the ball gets by them or they're off balance on their volley. They're stretching for the volley. They don't hit a clean volley. You've got to get there early to hit the ball clean. So how do we time our poach? It really depends on a couple of factors. Number one is pace. So if you are playing on the ATP or WTA tour, you've got to move before they even get into their backswing because the ball is moving so fast. So you've got to go really, really early. If you're playing at 3-0 or 3-5 level in your USTA league, you can move a little bit later. And this is going to depend on your quickness and also your reach as well. If you have a big wingspan, then you don't have to go as far. So you can move a little bit later as well. But if you're a little bit shorter and you don't have a big wingspan, you might have to move a bit earlier. But if they're hitting the ball slower and you are a pretty quick person, you can move a little bit later. The other thing that matters is the depth of the opponent. So where is the opponent hitting from? If they're hitting from five feet behind the baseline, you can hold your ground a little bit and then move because that ball has further to travel. If they're hitting from the baseline or inside the baseline, which is a much more difficult poach, then you're going to have to move earlier. And in that scenario, you might not even be looking for a volley. You might be looking to make them redirect down the line and try to force an error. So the timing depends on all of these factors, but generally your eyes at the net as the net player should be on the opponent. So if your partner's serving, your eyes are on the returner. And you want to time your movement with the backswing of the opponent. You do not want to wait until they make contact. If they're making contact and then you move, you are going to be late. This is a very common misconception. A lot of players think I need to wait for the right ball to poach on, but that's incorrect. Your eyes should be on the opponent, reading their body language, their position, and based on that, you have to move before they make contact. So if I see them backing up behind the baseline and they turn to their backhand side, which may be a weakness, or maybe they can't make it down the line, as soon as I see them turn to that backhand side, when they're in their backswing, I'm going to start moving. Okay. You also want to vary your movement a bit. So I mentioned a second ago, sometimes you might poach to force them down the line to try to just draw an error. Sometimes you might poach late because you want the volley. You can also vary your movement in terms of faking. I'm not going to get into that a ton here, but that's another good option to fake the poach. So you can vary the timing of your movement based on all of these different factors, and that's going to create stress for the opponent as well. So generally, though, if you're unsure, move earlier than you think, because the tendency for you, like most people, is probably to move too late. So that is mistake number one. That is how to time your poach. When they get into their backswing, that's when you need to be moving. Mistake number two is moving sideways. Again, I see this one at every single level. I even see this on the pro level as well on the ATP and WTA tour, especially. When your partner's first serve lands in, I want you to ask yourself this question: where do you move? So think about that. You're standing in the service box, your partner's serving, let's say this is a deuce court point. They make a first serve. What do your feet do? Where is your movement? At the Division I tournament this weekend, I was watching the server's partner on a lot of first serve points to try to figure this out, figure out, you know, are they doing the right things? And well over half of them, probably 80%, were moving either sideways or backwards when their partner made a first serve. This is not the direction you want to be moving when your partner makes a first serve. If you're moving sideways, so let's stick with the Deuce coordinate uh example. If my partner lands a first serve and I'm moving to my right, and I'm only moving sideways, and that ball is coming towards me to poach, I'm moving to my right and I want to hit it forward. That's gonna make it very difficult. I'm gonna be having to volley that ball with my arm. I'm not gonna have any forward momentum with my body. It's gonna make for a very difficult volley, and you'll probably either miss it or hit a weak volley, and the opponents will stay on the point, or you'll give them an easy short ball. So you can't be moving sideways, and you definitely don't want to be moving backwards on your poach. So think about that next time you're out there, when your partner lands their first serve, where are you moving? You should be moving forward and towards the middle net strap, regardless of deuce or ad side. Forward and towards the middle when your partner lands a first serve. So to do this, you can start in the middle of the service box. So that means you look to your left in the deuce court, you see the singles line. You look to your right, you see the center service line. Those should be equidistant from you. If anything, you might move closer to the middle, to the center service line, especially if your partner has a very strong first serve. If you do that, you need to crouch a little bit so you don't get hit in the head. When you start in the middle of the service box, uh left and right, and then you want to check behind you, check the service line, and then check the net. You want to be equidistant from those two or closer to the net. So that's your positioning. And then you're gonna start moving forward as the serve crosses the net. Your eyes are on the returner, you're reading their body language, you're reading their movement. And as you move forward, they get into their backswing, and when they have the racket all the way back, you start to move across. So you've been moving forward as they start to get in position, they go to their backswing, the racket's back, then you move across. So while your momentum's forward, you start moving across. So you're moving diagonally towards that center nut strap and you're gonna get there early. Remember, we have to get there early. We have to be balanced. And then you're just covering a window over the net. If the ball goes through that window, then it is yours. If it is not through that window, then you leave it for your partner. And that means you're gonna get beat down the line some. It means you might miss a few volleys, but if you cover that window, they're going to try to avoid you and you're gonna force a ton of return errors, and you're gonna get plenty of volleys that you'll be able to finish off. And I'll talk about uh mistake number four here in a second. Um, if you're somebody who does poach a lot, but you're not able to finish your volleys, uh, I have some tips on that here in a minute as well. But that's how I think about the movement for the poach when your partner is serving. It's the same in a rally. You want to be uh somewhere around the middle of the box, moving forward as that ball is crossing the net, and then you're moving across. Some players, especially at the ATP level on the men's side, start much closer to the net and they move sideways first and slightly forward. That's okay too. Just make sure you have some forward momentum when you're making contact with the ball. Because, like I said, if you're only moving sideways or moving backwards and trying to hit the ball forward and angle the ball off, it's gonna be really, really difficult. You're gonna hit a lot of bad volleys. So it's gonna make it much easier if you have a little bit of forward momentum because then you just have to lift your hands up and put the racket on the ball. I had uh Rajiv Ram on, um, who's won uh several US Open titles, a number of majors uh recently, and he talked about how he likes to think of his racket as a two by four when he's the server's partner. So if you have that forward momentum, you don't need to take a swing. You just have your racket out in front, you raise it to where the ball is gonna be, and then you just deflect it to the left or to the right. So it's very, very simple if you get this movement right. If you're moving sideways, you're gonna have to swing a little bit and you're going to increase your margin of error on that volley. So those are the two biggest mistakes I see. The next three, we're gonna talk about uh being too far back from the net. We're gonna talk about not finishing your volleys or volleying back to the baseline player, uh, not poaching enough when it's okay to cover the alley and not poach, and then also several different different drills uh that will help you with your poaching to develop more confidence at the net. So now we're gonna move into the member only section. Again, if you are not a member and want to sign up, check out the show notes and sign up for any level of membership, and you'll be able to get access to the rest of this podcast. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Doubles Only Tennis Podcast. If you're interested in diving deeper into the world of Double Strategy, I've created Tennis Tribe memberships that allow me to bring you more podcast episodes, video lessons, webinars, and other doubles content on a weekly basis without relying on paid ads. The lessons inside the membership will help you better game plan with your partner, optimize your practices, and become the smartest player on the court. Go to theTennistribe.com/slash memberships to learn more and sign up. You can also join my free newsletter on our homepage where I share a new doubles lesson every week. If you want to connect, you can find me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook or contact me through our website. Thanks again for listening.