Excuses! Why Don't Club Players Use More I-Formation?

I recently posted an Instagram video asking why club doubles players don't use I-Formation. It now has over 210,000 views and 100 comments, many of which are excuses.

In this episode, I break down the five most common excuses and share my rebuttal. I hope that this will convince some of you to start using serve formations more often to help you win matches.

Here are the excuses...

1. "Our serves aren't good enough."
2. "I'll get hit in the back of the head by my partner's serve."
3. "Club players are too slow."
4. "The net player would be too scared." OR "the net position isn't fun."
5. "The returner will rip down the line."
6. At the end, I share the only valid reason to never use I-Formation.

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Transcript

The Mission: Busting Club-Level Excuses

Excuse #1: Serves Aren’t Good Enough

It’s All Relative: Pros vs Clubs

Running It Right Beats Running It Fast

Excuse #2: Headshots and Safety

Serve Height, Depth, and Control

SPEAKER_00 1:15

For a long time, I just used tennis as my form of exercise. I knew the importance of going to the gym. I knew the importance of cardio and fitness and strength and mobility. And I tried yoga a few times. I went to the gym and lifted weights every now and then, but I was never very consistent with anything. And then eventually I started listening to this podcast that convinced me the importance of exercise. And since then, I've been able to fairly consistently go to the gym for the last three or four years and lift weights and work on mobility, and it's helped my tennis game. Now, I'm not here to convince you to do that, although you probably should, and it probably will help your tennis game if you're not doing it already. But I think this is going to be a podcast episode similar to how that episode helped me go to the gym more regularly. This episode, I'm hoping, is going to convince some of you to start using serve formations more regularly. It's something that a lot of you probably know you maybe should do, and it might help you win more matches, but you just continue to stick with your old habits and use regular formation every time when you're serving. So recently I posted on Instagram a video of a pro team using eye formation and forcing a return error. And I said the eye formation works at every single level of doubles. So why do 95% of club level doubles teams never use it? And at this point, it has over 180,000 views, uh, over 70 comments, and many of these comments were basically excuses for why club players can't use eye formation. So what I want to do today is go through the most common excuses and share with you why I think they are invalid. I'm going to basically share my rebuttal, and hopefully by the end of it, you'll understand the importance of using different serve formations regardless of your skill level. I'm going to try to, like I said last week, continue to do more strategy episodes like this. The Pro Tour is in Asia currently, so it's very difficult for me to do a lot of uh interviews with the pro players since I am here in Texas. So I use this time of the year to focus a bit more on uh the club level strategy and a little bit less on the uh pro tour. So let's start with excuse number one for why club players don't use iFormation. The most common excuse by far was our serves aren't good enough. So when I read an excuse like this, uh the first question I have is what do you mean by good enough? So I want to I want people to be very specific with their language. And I'll have a some future content I'm actually working on uh that is gonna talk about the importance of this because I've got some other Instagram posts where people are disagreeing with me, but they're not being specific with their language. So what do you mean by good enough? Do you mean they're not fast enough? They're not consistent enough, they're not uh placed well, the the location is not consistent enough. Do you mean they can't generate enough spin? Is it some combination of all this? I want to know what you mean by our serves aren't good enough. Generally, for club players, when I formation doesn't work, the thing that I notice is the serve lands really short in the service box. So serve depth is something really important to work on. I've talked about that a lot this year. I've even done some lessons with uh some premium lessons for my membership, uh specifically on serve depth. Second is it's all relative. So you think your serve isn't good enough. Well, guess what else is not as good as the pros? The return. The returner also has a much lower return skill level and the server has a lower serve skill level. So it's all relative. While the serves are slower, they're less accurate than the pros, the returns are also slower and less accurate than the pros. So if iFormation works at the pro level, it's going to work at the club level too, because relatively speaking, even though I'm only hitting a 50 mile an hour serve or a 60 or 70 mile an hour serve, depending on your skill level, the returner is going to be relatively the same. So you have to keep that in mind as well. Uh, third, a lot of this is a mindset thing. So most players at the club level, and this is something the pros understand, they really understand probabilities and percentages. Most players of the club level will try I formation and they'll get beat once or twice down the line. And they'll say, Well, look at that, it doesn't work. And this is a sample size of one. But that's actually supposed to happen when you run eye formation. What's also supposed to happen is a lot of more uh missed returns, more missed returns generally than regular formation, and more volleys for your partner at the net. So you have to weigh all of that against each other. Just because they hit a down-the-line return winner once doesn't mean you abandon the eye formation strategy. And I'll talk in a little bit about uh when it's maybe best to use eye formation. I don't want to dive too deep into that. I want to focus on these excuses. Uh, and then at the very end, I'm gonna share with you the one excuse that I will accept uh for not using eye formation. Um last I teach it to 3-0, 3-5, 4-0 players, and it does work, but you have to run it the right way. So a lot of players will tell me, this happened at a few camps I did this summer. Players will come up to me and say, Look, I've tried this eye formation thing in the past, and it just doesn't work for me. So is it okay if I stick with regular? And I'll challenge them a bit and ask them, so tell me about how you've run it in the past. And every single time I find some error in the way that they're running it. And that is the reason it's not working for them. Not because it doesn't work, but because they're not running it the right way. One player told me they weren't communicating with their partner before the point on which direction they're gonna move after the service hit. Another team, the net player was way too far back from the net. So then they ultimately missed a lot of their volleys. Um, there's all sorts of different issues you can have with it, but if you're running it the wrong way, it's not going to work very well. But if you run it the right way, it works at every single level of the game. So our serves aren't good enough, is not a good excuse for me. Uh, I think that's relative and focus on serve depth. Excuse number two was because you'll get hit in the back of the head with the serve. This is something that's going to happen. Um, the when you use eye formation, there's a line between the server and the returner, and the server's partner is directly in that path. So you are more in the way. Now you do do want to get kind of crouched down, you want to take a knee and stay low, uh, but you will get hit in the back of the head every now and again. One solution for this is to try Australian formation. I'm totally okay with Australian formation. I prefer I if you have the mobility to kind of get low into that crouched position, um, but Australian formation is okay, and that is a solution to not getting hit in the back of the head. But this happens at the pro level too, and it happens in regular formation. In regular formation, players get hit in the back of the head, and pros get hit in the back of the head with their partner serve on occasion. If you get low enough, it shouldn't happen too much. But I promise you, when the pros are getting hit in the back of the head, it hurts a lot worse than when your partner hits you in the back of the head. Um, keep your eyes forward. If you get hit in the back of the head with a 50 mile an hour serve, you're probably going to be okay. Um, so that's just part of the game. One other thing I noticed is of the six comments that talked about getting hit in the back of the head, five of them were from guys. And a lot of guys try to hit their first serve way too hard at the club level. And this would definitely result in some headshots. Um, in that case, the problem isn't eye formation, it's a low first serve percentage because they're trying to hit it too hard. So they probably make 40 or 50% of their first serves. They have very little control of their first serve, and they're gonna hit their partner in the back of the head. But even if they're playing regular formation, I want to fix that first serve percentage because they need more control. And if they get that control, they probably won't hit their partner in the back of the head. The last thing I'll mention on this is because your partner's at the net, they're low. I want you to focus as the server in eye formation on height and depth. Those are two of the most important aspects of good serves at the club level. Because, like I talked about earlier, the serves that get punished are the serves that land short in the service box. If you can get it higher over the net, it will land deeper in the service box. And you can focus on that, and you're not going to hit your partner in the back of the head. And again, you can try Australian formation if this is something uh that you are, you know, a little bit more afraid of, or maybe you have a bad knee and you can't get down low. But this is just not a very good excuse for me. Let's move on to excuse number three for not using eye formation in doubles. Uh, this was a relatively common one because club level players are too slow. Uh, I don't like this one either. Um, I don't like any of these actually, but uh, here's my rebuttal. It's true, the club level players are slower. So if I'm a club level player and I'm serving, and then I have to, let's say this is an ad court point, I'm running I formation, I'm having my net player go left, I have to go right to cover the down the line return. The club level player will get to say the singles line a lot slower than the pro player will. 100% true. But guess what's also going to take a lot longer to get back to that intersection of the singles line and the baseline? The ball. Because the serve is going to take longer to get to the returner, and the return is going to take longer to get back down the line to the baseline. So again, this is a relativity thing. It's all relative. Yes, you're slower getting over there, but the ball is going to be slower to get there too. So you don't have to be that quick. One thing you can do to kind of counter this is hit more if you have the skill level, hit more spin serves and hit a bit slower serves to give yourself more time to get over there. If this you, as the server, are covering the down the line shot. You'll know you'll see a lot of pro players hit more spin serves on first serves to keep that first serve percentage high. So that can potentially help you uh get over there a little bit quicker and slow the ball down and give yourself a bit more time. Um, excuse number four for not using eye formation in doubles. The net player would be too scared. Or I saw one that said the net position isn't fun. So if you're just too scared at the net, then you're allowing fear to dictate how you play tennis, and you're not gonna get any better. And if you want to do that, then that's okay. You probably don't listen to this podcast if that's you. Uh, but if you allow fear to take over at the net, you're you're just not gonna be that great of a net player. You actually have to have the opposite of fear, which is courage, to be a very good net player. So you do not want to be afraid of putting your head out there, getting your racket in front of you, and allowing the opponent to uh hit at you in the middle of the court. What's gonna happen is they're gonna miss a lot more by going bigger. You are gonna get hit some potentially. You'll miss some volleys, but you'll also be more effective at the net, put some volleys away, force a lot more errors, all of those positive things about being more courageous and being more kind of towards the middle at the net. Um, you have to be okay with that. And the last thing I would say about this one is it's actually more fun to play in the middle of the court at the net because you're more involved. So uh somebody said the net position isn't fun. I don't know exactly what they meant by that, but for me, it's more fun. And for the players I teach, um, I've got tons of testimonials on this when people listen to the podcast or um watch one of the membership webinars or read the net play guide, and they'll say they're having the most fun they've ever had at the net because they're more involved and they're starting to see the patterns and know when to move to the middle. So it's actually more fun to play in the middle of the court at the net, again, because you're more involved. And then the last excuse, uh, this is probably my least favorite of the five, is the returner will rip down the line. Um, it's not really an excuse because it's actually what we want the returner to do. Uh, we want them to go down the line, we want them to hit a winner or two per set, uh, because again, they're going to make about 30% of those shots. Um, while those 30% hurt because it's a down-the-line winner, the opponent's going to give a big come on and fist bump and high five their partner, and it'll feel like more than one point. It's only one point. And they're going to make three out of ten of those, which means you win seven out of ten of those points. So you have to live with that and recognize it's only one point. I'd rather have fewer errors in the match than the most winners. So we're not that worried about winners in this scenario. Um, we want them going for that down-the-line shot. Now, you do have to keep kind of a mental tally in your head for each time they go down the line, how many times are they making it? So if they are for whatever reason a good down-the-line returner and they make six or seven out of ten uh against your serve, then iFormation might not be best. I do a lot of strategy reports and scouting at the pro level, and every player is different. IFormation is not the best strategy against every single team or every single returner, but you will certainly at the club level and at the pro level face teams and returners, uh, specific players who struggle much more against eye formation. And if you don't ever use it, you're probably going to struggle to beat those teams. You're missing out on an opportunity. I'm going to end with this. The only excuse that I will accept for not using eye formation is I'm afraid to look weird. A lot of people just don't want to look weird on the tennis court. They have an ego thing going on. They do not uh want to ask their partner because they feel like it'll sound strange or they feel like they'll look like a nerd or something like that. If that's more important to you than winning tennis matches, then I can't help you. I think that uh in that scenario, you're going to need to just do the best you can in regular formation and know that you're probably losing some matches that you could win if you started to use I or Australian formation. So we'll end it there. Uh if you'll have any questions on this, you can always reach out to me, will at the tennistribe.com. I'll have more again strategy episodes coming soon. I've also got TennisCon 9, which I'm presenting at uh coming soon. So you'll see that in the newsletter. Um, be sure to sign up there at thetennistribe.com uh to check out my strategy presentation with uh Peter Freeman and all the other great coaches. And that is it for today. So I will talk to you all next week.