Basic Tennis Psychology (Part 1)

Tennis psychology is nothing more than understanding the make-up of your opponent’s mind and gauging the effect of your own strategy on his/her mental viewpoint and also understanding the psychological effects resulting from the different external causes on your own head.

However, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own mental processes. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing happening under various circumstances. This is because people react differently in different moods and under different circumstances.

You have to realize the effect on your game of the resulting annoyance, joy, bewilderment, or whatever other form your reaction takes. Does it improve your efficiency? If so, try for it, but never offer it to your opponent. Does it deprive you of concentration? If so, either remove the reason, but if that isn’t possible, try to ignore it.

Once you have correctly judged your own reaction to circumstances, study your opponents in order to decide their characters. Similar characters react similarly, and you can judge men of your own type by yourself. Opposite characters you have to seek to liken with those whose reactions you already know.

A person who can regulate his/her own mental processes has an great chance of reading those of another for the mind works along definite lines of thought and can be studied. One can only control one’s own mental processes after carefully examining them.

The regular, unemotional baseline player is seldom a quick thinker. If he was, he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is usually a pretty clear indication of his/her type of mind. The impassive, easy-going player, who usually displays the baseline strategy, does so because he hates to activate up his/her torpid mind to think out a safe strategy of getting to the net.

However, then there is the other sort of baseline player, who would prefer to remain on the rear of the court while supervising an attack intended to break up your game. He is a very dangerous player and a deep, keen thinking antagonist. He gets his/her results by mixing up his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variety of his/her game. This player is a very good psychologist.

The first type of player mentioned above simply hits the ball with little thought about what he is actually doing, while the latter always has a definite plan and sticks to it.