The General Psychology of Tennis (Part 1)
Posted on July 9, 2009
Filed Under Tennis
Tennis psychology is only understanding the workings of your opponent’s mind and assessing the effect of your own game on his/her mental viewpoint and also understanding the psychological effects resulting from the different external causes on your own mind.
However, it is true that you cannot be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding your own mental processes. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing happening under different circumstances. This is because you react differently in different moods and under different conditions.
You have to understand the effect on your game of the ensuing annoyance, joy, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction is. Does it improve your prowess? If so, go for it, but never give it to your opponent. Does it rob you of concentration? If so, either remove the cause, but if that isn’t possible, try to ignore it.
After you have properly assessed your own reaction to conditions, study your opponents to decide their temperaments. Like temperaments react in a like manner, and you can judge people of your own sort by yourself. Other temperaments you must try to compare with those people, whose reactions you are already familiar with.
A person who can control his/her own mental processes stands an excellent chance of reading those of someone else for the mind works along definite lines of thought and can be studied. One can only control one’s own mental processes after carefully studying them.
A steady, phlegmatic baseline player is seldom a keen thinker. If he were he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is usually a fairly clear indication of his/her sort of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who usually advocates the baseline game, does so because he hates to stir up his/her slow mind to think out a safe method of getting to the net.
Then there is the other kind of baseline player, who would rather remain on the back of the court while directing an attack intended to break up your game. He is a very dangerous player, and a deep, keen thinking antagonist. He achieves his/her results by mixing up his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variety of his/her game. He is a good psychologist.
The first type of player mentioned above merely hits the ball with little idea of what he is actually doing, while the latter always has a definite strategy and sticks to it.
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