I wasn’t able to attend week 9 as my daughter was born the day before!
However thanks to some very supportive grandparents who gave me the evening off for tennis, I was excited to be back, even if I was running on only a few hours of sleep with my newborn.
This session mainly focused on generating as much topspin on our serves as possible. In true Andy fashion and with some outside the box thinking, he had us all serving while sitting on chairs. The idea was to strip everything back and focus purely on the arc and movement of our arms rather than footwork. Once we got the feel for it, we moved into practising while standing.
I won’t lie, I found it really tricky. Serving itself isn’t the easiest thing to master, but trying to get my head around striking the ball at an angle rather than straight through it to generate spin really challenged me. I think I managed it a few times (possibly by accident), but it’s definitely something I’ll need to keep practising until it starts to feel natural. I’m terrible for getting in my own head and overthinking instead of trusting the feeling.
We finished with a few games to put the serves into practice and play the points out properly. I always seem to play better when there’s a bit of competition involved.
Overall, it was a more technical lesson and challenging in a completely different way.