Coaching

Tennis is becoming an increasingly international sport every year. Though it is more readily available, there are still many noticeable differences in the background of the junior athletes being developed all over the globe. I took some time to interview three former top junior players from...Read more

Tell us about your tennis background. Skip Hartman: I started playing tennis at the age of eight at camp and then in the public parks in Manhattan, specifically, a park that no longer is there on 63rd Street and York Avenue that I could ride my bicycle to. I was a good junior player, having played...Read more

I’m asked many times how power is achieved in tennis shots. We see on TV many players on tour with amazing power. While of the world’s best players are bigger, faster and stronger than in years past, and technology has improved the racquets, the answer to generating power is still in the timing of...Read more

I was asked this past spring by the parents of some of my five-year-old students if I would consider starting a class for two-, three- and four-year-olds. The younger children had been coming to my club as tagalongs to their siblings’ lessons and were feeling left out. Secure in my belief that...Read more

"The highest reward for a person's work is not what they get for it, but what they become of it."—John Rushkin Did you ever watch a professional tennis match and wonder how the players make their extraordinary shots look so effortless? Perhaps you even thought it looks so easy that you should be...Read more

One of the first things we are told when we begin our journey in tennis is that the serve is the most important shot. Unfortunately, I ask many intermediate and advanced players about the simple biomechanics of the serve, and they become suddenly mute. We all understand that the toss is vital when...Read more

The tennis player is a person first and a performer second. This idea may seem obvious, since we are all born without a racket in our hands, and when we first walked onto the court to play, we didn’t miraculously change identities—we were the same person. Rafael Nadal, in his book Rafa, says, “...Read more

Walk around the grounds of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center during this year’s U.S. Open and you will see players from every part of the globe. Even multi-generations are represented in the junior and senior events. While the assortment of differing playing styles is vast, the...Read more

Winning Tennis Strokes is a short guidebook to tennis techniques and a splendid general introduction to tennis strokes. With this book, Bill Longua, a veteran tennis instructor and USPTA pro, has produced a concise guide to learning the fundamentals of the game. As Longua explains in his foreword,...Read more

It’s the best time of year … time for the 2012 U.S. Open. This is a time where you can personally appreciate the amazing talents you are witnessing on the courts, but more importantly, a great time to improve your own game by observing the players, not just watching them. When watching great...Read more