Doubles Only Tennis Podcast
The only tennis podcast with a focus on doubles. We believe doubles should be more popular and get more coverage than it does, so we’re fixing that. Our goal is to help you become a better player with pro doubles tips and expert strategy. We interview ATP & WTA tour doubles players and top tennis coaches to help you improve your game.
Doubles Only Tennis Podcast
The Serve Toss, Pancake Serves, Overhead Tips, & Tennis Con 9 with Peter Freeman
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Peter Freeman is one of my favorite tennis coaches to speak with because he has so much experience coaching club doubles players. Like me, Peter creates a ton of online content, including one of the largest online tennis conferences, Tennis Con. I've presented at Tennis Con for the past 3 years and cannot recommend it enough for club players.
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I spoke with Peter to preview Tennis Con 9, which is a little different this year. We also discussed some takeaways from our doubles camp earlier this summer, including the two types of serves at the club level, building a chip return, and fixing your overhead.
- How TennisCon started and what’s new this year
- Challenges, Easter eggs, leaderboard, and prizes (including a free ball machine)
- The importance of learning from many coaches, not one
- Continental vs pancake serves
- How high should your ball toss actually be?
- Executing the chip return
- Overhead rules to help you not miss
- What tennis can learn from pickleball culture
You can watch TennisCon for free for 48 hours once it starts on the 27th. Upgrade to the Lifetime Pass to keep access and play the game.
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TennisCon 9 Announcement & Invite
SPEAKER_00TennisCon 9 starts on October 27th, and if you are a club level tennis player, singles or doubles, you have to sign up for TennisCon. I'm going to include a link for you to sign up. It's totally free. The link will be in the show notes of this podcast. And just like the last three years, I do have a presentation at Tennis Con. And just like the last three years, I am having Peter Freeman on the podcast. And that is what you're about to listen to. So in this episode, Peter and I talk about TennisCon. He talks about how it got started, his coaching experience. We also discussed what's different this year, and I really love the format this year. It's a little bit different. There's fewer coaches, there's shorter presentations, and it really encourages you to digest all the information in a new way. He previews three of his favorite lessons so far from TennisCon. And then we dive into some things that I learned from Peter earlier this year when we hosted our doubles camp together. A lot of this is going to be must-hear information if you've been struggling with your serve toss. If you can't decide if you should switch to a continental grip on your serve or stick with a frying pan grip. We talk about return tips. We talk about what to do with your overheads. And then at the end, we talk about pickleball and why pickleball has a lot of different things that we can learn from as tennis players and tennis coaches. So this is a really fun conversation. Again, if you're a club level player, you need to sign up for TennisCon so that you can learn from all of these awesome coaches. It's totally free. And then you also should listen to this uh podcast with Peter and digest a lot of the tips that he delivers on the serve, on the return, and on the overhead. So without further delay, enjoy my conversation with Peter Freeman. Hey everyone, welcome to the show. Today we have Peter Freeman on from TennisCon. Peter, welcome. Hey, I'm a pleasure to be here. Well, it's fun to have you back. I'm excited for uh TennisCon again this year. Um, for people who don't know what Tennis Con is and don't know who you are, uh tell us who you are and and how TennisCon got started and where it is today.
The Challenge Format & Prizes
SPEAKER_01Okay. Well, first me, I've been teaching pretty much since I've been a teenager, and now I'm over 50. So that's like too long. And I've been doing online now for well over a decade. And then um almost a decade ago, I came up with a concept to do because I know a lot of people in the online space. And so came up the idea for a tennis conference, uh, and it's called Tennis Con. And we bring the best instructors on the planet together to cover all the important aspects of making club players better at tennis. And this year, Tennis Con nine is actually because another thing I love to do online is challenges. I do a lot of different challenges. So I thought this year, let's make it a challenge. And because earlier this year I found a software that hooks into a membership that's really awesome. Uh I think people would agree that the information that people consume online is generally pretty good if you have coaches that you trust, but getting through it, sometimes people forget because they are so busy with their life. But so this software enables people to play a game while they're going through a course. So I will pop up, I call them Easter eggs. So let's say with your video, I might pop up around minute four and I'll say it's time to score your point. And then they click on inside the video, it takes them to a webpage, they score the point. There's a leaderboard, and then this year, the top three winners. Uh, you know how they say, uh, you're gonna really give away a fourth uh place uh medal, isn't that kind of like not good? Well, our first prize has eight winners, and that eight people are gonna get to train with me and Maribon here in Atlanta for free, who uh finish on top of the leaderboard. Uh, second place is a Pongbot ball machine, which I like to joke is really one of these new intelligent ball machines that's smarter than I am, and that's a$2,000 value. And then third prize is a fast track training aid, which recycles balls to you and you hit it into a net. So you can literally hit 1,200 balls in an hour. So really get all your strokes grooved and perfected, as well as we're gonna have daily prizes. So this is a really exciting tennis con. This is definitely the most exciting, I say it every year, but this is the most exciting tennis con this year because we just really threw a lot of new wrinkles into it.
Why Shorter Lessons Increase Action
SPEAKER_00That's awesome. Well, you keep stepping it up, and uh, for people listening, I'm gonna link below in the show notes so y'all can sign up. So you might pause it now and just go sign up because without all of those prizes, I think it's one of the best values you can get as a club level player in tennis. Because ordinarily, and I've talked about this on my newsletter and and with people on the podcast in the past, ordinarily to get access to these coaches, you have to pay at least hundreds of dollars an hour. Sometimes it's a thousand dollars an hour for some of these coaches, and and you get access to them for free. Um, so each presentation you get for 48 hours, and then there's a way you can upgrade to um still for not a big price, it's like around a hundred bucks to upgrade for lifetime access to these.
SPEAKER_01Which is actually when you first get in, you can get it for sixty-seven dollars when you first get in.
Preview: Favorite Serve and Tactics Lessons
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. And I don't I don't want to sit here and like try to sell people the whole podcast, but I I wouldn't say it if I didn't believe it. Like it is so important for people to learn from different sources. And I encourage, I really want people who listen to my podcast as their main source of doubles knowledge to sign up for TennisCon and learn from other coaches and think challenge me if you hear something that's different than what I say, tell me. And I'm trying to learn too because I watch a lot of these presentations as well, because nobody has all the answers. So it's good to kind of pull sources, pull knowledge from different people and different coaches, and then kind of decide what works best for you. So I think it's it's so cool that uh you're able to do this, and it's it's fun to be a part of for me as well. And another thing I'll say is the challenges are so cool because that is the only way people can improve. Like you, if you don't challenge yourself, you're not going to get better on the tennis court because you have to be willing to be uncomfortable and you have to be willing to kind of push your limits to improve. And so many people are just afraid and stay in their comfort zone and they never get any better. So these challenges, I'm really excited to see what everybody has in store for these. Absolutely. So um I'm not sure how many presentations you've gotten so far. I know we've already recorded mine. Um, do you have three favorite challenges so far? And obviously, you don't have to give the details because people will see that in TennisCon. But do you have three favorites uh so far?
Start Date, Leaderboard, Early Access
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, first of all, we're getting we're we have more than over half done, and they're almost all edited. And we're uh for people who have already signed up for the Lifetime Pass, I'm dropping it in uh kind of gradually so people can really consume it. That's the whole idea this year is less instructors, the videos aren't as long, so people can really get through the material. Now, as far as the thing that I love about TennisCon, is every year it recharges my coaching batteries as well. And that's what I really like about it is that I've always I'm always hearing different things that I'm like, oh, I wish I would have said it that way, or now I'm gonna start saying it that way. Yeah. So uh a couple of my favorite videos so far is um one of the longer videos is with Brady Height. He made a really thorough serve video this year, and he walks you through on if you're making a mistake, these are the reasons why you're making the mistake. So he basically points out all the mistakes you can make, you know, long and in the net and wide. And he he has his buddy Mark there with him walking through that. But probably my favorite thing was because when you see Brady, he's a massive guy, and his serve is flawless. And he talked about how when he was a kid that there was one drill he did to that easily added 15 to 20 miles an hour to his serve. And so my ears perked up. I'm like, well, you got an awesome serve, and this is what you're saying. You know, so he did a drill where he basically was um, and you have to do your full motion, you can't cheat with like a short toss. So you have to, and the goal is you're serving at the baseline, and you're trying to uh see how close you can get the ball to bounce near you and spike it basically. The closer the better. And he said in the beginning when he was trying it, because he was, you know, we always look at the finished product, we think we were always like that, right? But no, he said in the beginning when he was a kid for weeks he couldn't get it where it would not hit the net. And then he's like, then I got to go inside the box, and then in the demo, he's pretty much bouncing it like right in front of a no man's land. And so that was one of my favorite ones. Um then also Greg Lasore with uh OTI. Uh I think my favorite thing about it is this visually, it's so good where he's talking about the zones of the court, and he's talking about specifically the attack ball, right? So it's just before it's like here, you definitely have your like your approach shot. I know a lot of people are listening to this, but basically in that no man's land area, when you can step in there, that's a ball you can attack, not necessarily run through and go to the net. And so so he was talking about how to really identify that. And he was talking about the height of the ball. And what was really cool is as it was coming over the net, he had this green dot on it. So the ball is tracked by a green dot. So you can really see it going lower, and you can see Greg really reacting to it and already moving in and recognizing that. And it just was a kind of a good visual, like, oh, that's how quick an advanced player reacts to that and does something about it versus you know, a club player who might not realize that's happening. And so I really, really enjoyed that as well. Um, but you know, there's just so many, so many good videos this year. Marissa Johnson, I really love the way she did a really good on court workout, and I love the way that she does her workouts too. I think she does them maybe better than anybody because she does it very much like a fitness channel to where they've got the the cool music and then the timer timing. So it really is something you can do with her, where lots of the videos that you watch, you're like, okay, that's a tip. That's a great tip, that's a great drill. I'm watching it now, I'll go out on the court and do it. Uh so there's a little disconnect, if you will, on that. But Marissa's uh workout videos are great because you can literally do them with her. So I thought her video was really awesome as well.
SPEAKER_00That's really cool. Okay, so I'm gonna check out all of those. I mean, you've got so there's nine days, and what day does TennisCon start?
SPEAKER_01It's gonna start October 27th, is when I'm gonna go, okay, this is day one, day two. But people who uh do sign up now can get a head start. Uh on the leaderboard right now, we have that's what I love about this, is there's so many people tied for first place, which means they're watching every single video and they are getting every single point. So like Brady's was the first, that's one of the longest ones. His was 32 minutes. That's that's a long, long video at TennisCon this year. But yet, still almost everybody's watched that video and gotten their four points from that. My video has three points. Like so many people right now are on top of the leaderboard with max points. So um I'm I'm dripping them in there right now. In fact, tomorrow, the next day, I'll be releasing uh Ryan Reedy from Two Minute Tennis. He's got a second serve uh Kickserve video.
Value of Learning From Many Coaches
SPEAKER_00Okay, that's awesome. Yeah, I love that concept because I I remember I went to this uh online marketing conference a long time ago, and somebody said like 97% of people who sign up for an online course like don't get halfway through. Yeah, it's like something something insane like that. So it's like, okay, how can we change that? Because we're not here to just sell courses, we're here to actually make people better at tennis, right? And um, this is a great concept to be able to do that. So there's nine days. I was scrolling through the um sign up page earlier. And I mean, you've got the forehand, the backhand, the forehand volley, the backhand volley, the approach shot, uh, the doubles tactics and strategy, which is um the day I'll be presenting, uh, or people can watch my presentation, which was only 12 or 13 minutes, I think, by the way. Um singles IQ Pro Training Secrets. So a bunch of content there um that people are gonna be able to check out. So again, I'll link to that in the show notes. I want to move on to a couple other things, Peter, that we talked about in Atlanta earlier this summer uh when we did a doubles camp together. And this is something I've been wanting to chat with you on the podcast for a while about. I've mentioned it briefly uh because I had so many good takeaways from that time in Atlanta. Oh, good. But I wanted to start with the continental grip on the serve. Do you need a continental grip on your serve? It all depends what you want.
SPEAKER_01And so the big thing is if you are somebody playing 3-0 and 3-5 tennis, let's say you're over 50, let's say you're 60 watching this, and you're like, I just taught a guy this past weekend and he says, I don't want to be a 4-0 player. I like playing 3-5 tennis. Um, I'm 67 years old, and I'm not looking to be a 4-0 player. I just want to be the best. He said, This is a great line. He's like, I want to be the best 3.5 player I can be. That's what I want. And he's loves his tennis and super dedicated. It's his number one passion, you know, probably outside of his family. So if you're somebody who's playing 3.5 or lower, I do not think you need a continental grip on your serve. You definitely need a continental grip once you get to the net. So it's not like, oh, I don't need to learn the continental grip and feel comfortable with it in my hand. You absolutely 100% need a continental grip when you start getting in mid-court approach shots and the what I call pole position at the net for your volleys. But when you are serving, if you have the frying pan grip that everybody makes fun of, and you just push the ball with your shoulder in play, and you can get it to be medium pace and have good placement and make a high percentage of first serves, there's very few players you're gonna play against that are going to make you eat your lunch consistently. You might every now and then get somebody to whack a shot by you or your partner and you feel like, oh, my serve's so vulnerable. But in general, I think people overreact to that. It's not happening as often as you think. And even when you get a continental grip and a spin serve, guess what? Every now and then, just like a pitcher throws up a home run, you're gonna it's gonna happen no matter how good your serve is. Now, when you sit, when you're especially, I would say for male players, you're like, no, I'm trying to be like a high 4-0, and I even feel like I can get to a 4-5. Well, now you have to accept the responsibility of probably learning how to get that continental grip so that you can then have good spin serves and up the pace a little bit and especially improve your second serve quite a lot when you get comfortable with a continental grip.
SPEAKER_00How long would it take? Let's say you take a 3-5 player and he maybe he started two tennis a few years ago, or maybe he played in high school and is picking it back up, but he doesn't have a continental grip. How much time in terms of like a weekly basis? And then also how long will it take for this 3-5 player to develop that continental grip and get a let's call it a 4-5 serve?
Continental vs Pancake Serve: Who Needs What
SPEAKER_01That's a great question. Well, my answer to that though is there are some people like, look, I I'll I'll I'll die trying, right? Like if they're that hungry, I'm a big believer in Rick Macy's line, which is persistence is undefeated, you know, and and and you don't, I think that's one of the things that is the biggest killer. It's like, well, how long is this going to take me? And so they put the stopwatch on right away, and they're like, oh no, I'm this isn't happening. So it's it's a process that you want to enjoy and not rush. And just know that you're building a very valuable product behind the scenes, it's not ready to bring out to market yet. I love the way Jorge Kapasayan talks about what in your game is ready to deploy, and don't freak out about it. You still have your other serve that you can use in match play. You're building something amazing behind the scenes. And if you're talking about just getting a continental grip, just getting spin, you can start to do that within the first week, maybe within the first lesson, maybe right after watching my um sliceer video, which I give people a no-fail slice serve drill, which I put the tennis ball uh in the racket, but it really gives you a great racket drop. And if you follow that step by step, you're probably going to notice that, oh, I have spin and I'm holding the continental grip. The problem with that though is the illusion that now you've got it, because especially a coach will get excited because you're like, Yes, you're doing something you've never done before. So they'll say things like, That's it, you've got it. There's a difference though between that and you have it, right? So I like this one saying that somebody actually sent me lately, which is don't do it till you get it right, do it till you can't get it wrong. And that's what it takes like to kind of be like a four-five serve, is people are playing four or five tennis on their second serve. If they're a solid four or five tennis player, they are swinging pretty much at max rackethead speed for their second serve. The ball is just going slower and higher over the net and has more spin because of the way they're impacting the ball, the amount of spin that they're putting on the ball. But they're swinging just as fast. That takes a long time to develop. That could take one to three years, realistically.
SPEAKER_00Okay. And then what about if I'm a 3-5 or even 4-0 player? I've I've even seen um typically it'll be on the ladies' side, but I've even seen four or five players who who still use that kind of four-hand pancake grip on their serve, and and they can be pretty effective, um, especially when they can get it to stay low over the net and it has kind of that backspin and it skids through the service box. Um, I have trouble returning that personally. Um you're bringing back a bad flash flashback to me. Yeah, when somebody can hit that to my backhand return, I'm in trouble. I have to I have to lob it. I cannot hit out on that one. Um, what are some tips for that? If the person says, okay, I'm not interested in spending the time it takes to develop this continental grip. Maybe they're not. I remember in Atlanta we talked about being able to throw a tennis ball and that having to do with if you should move to a uh continental grip or not. But what are some tips for the to develop or to improve your kind of pancake serve?
Building a Real Second Serve Timeline
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that that's a great point, is uh what I said in Atlanta was there's two basic types of serves in club tennis, and that is a push serve where it's coming a lot from your shoulder and you're kind of pushing at the ball. Think about giving somebody a high five versus throwing a long bomb in football, okay, where now the shoulder's nice and loose and you're throwing it. And so uh if if people are more apt to having a pushing motion with the way they throw, then they probably and they're just way off on throwing, they should probably then think about sticking with that that grip where they're having to hammer it in there. And then the thing, the tips that are actually gonna kill you help you when you have a continental grip. You don't want to hit the ball way at the top. Because if you hit the ball way at the top, you're gonna have very little control over it. The ball is gonna fly out, it's gonna be hard to be consistent. So, what you're looking to do is get a medium pace to slightly faster. If you can master that, you're gonna be in good shape. And so, what you want to think about is actually lower tosses, lower contact points, and really getting the feeling of your hip and your shoulder and your hand connecting. Think about the last time you gave somebody a high five and they said, Whoa, like easy cowboy or cowgirl, then you've just hit a hard serve with that frying pan grip. And to to your, I share the same uh aggravation that you shared when I was playing league tennis. You know, again, when you played college tennis, junior tennis, men's league tennis, most second serves are coming with spin, and you get used to it sitting up and you can't wait for that. Then every now and then you'll play a mixed doubles match and you play somebody, a woman who like has just sick ground strokes, okay volleys, and then she's got like this little flat thing that she zings in that goes like two inches off the ground, and you can't do anything with it. And and you have to kind of put your ego aside and just like maybe chip it back or do whatever because you're thinking, well, this serve, it's not a real serve, but it's one of the hardest serves you're gonna return. So uh you can totally be very frustrating to your opponents when you're good at that.
SPEAKER_00So I want to highlight something you just said there because I guaranteed there's people listening to this who have that push serve, and then they have a coach who tells them, get your ball toss higher, get your ball toss higher. So you're saying the opposite. If you have your frying pan grip and your push serve, you do not want to make contact really high. You want it actually lower, maybe just above the height of your head, something like that.
Optimizing the Pancake Serve
SPEAKER_01Think about hammering a nail into a wall comfortably, right? So it's a little bit above your head, and you can go do that. And your elbow is actually still a little bent, right? When we're serving advanced, we don't want any elbow bent at contact. And I first saw this and was kind of like in a moment where I'm like, whoa, okay, uh, was this guy calls himself the tennis doctor? You can maybe find this video on YouTube still, and he worked at IMG Academies. And many of his videos were working with advanced players and teaching them how to hit kicks and slices and all that kind of good stuff. And then one time he was working with like a three, five lady, and and he's like, You see, you don't want to hit the ball at the top, you want to hit it here. And he was like whacking the fence, and he was, it was just like he was whacking a hammer and nail. It's like, here's where the power is for your technique. You don't want to hit it up here, you'll have no control, you know, it's not gonna go in that much. And when he said that, I was like, he's a hundred percent right. That makes total sense. We've all been teaching this wrong to this group of people for so long, and so ever since that video, I've been pointing that out to people because I know they're hearing all the other stuff.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I love that. I really love that. All right, so I want to move on to two more things that I learned from you in Atlanta. Uh, number one is the chip return. We spent a lot of time teaching the chip return, which is really effective in doubles. It's something that I use as a tactic myself. I tell people to use it. I've never really taught it because I don't teach a lot of technique, but that's something you're really good at and you had a really good progression for it. So, what are some tips to developing a good chip return? And maybe define it for what people uh or for people who may not know what we're talking about.
The Chip Return: Why and How
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, I think the first thing to get incentive to work on something is to really understand the benefit of it. You know, a chip return is basically another word for slice uh under spin. And why do you want to have it in doubles? Well, first of all, you're gonna get so many great looks at second serves. And being able to do this now, you can have the ball stay low. The Bryan brothers made a course with another person who's in TennisCon, Will Hamilton. And they basically said, look, the trick to doubles is you get them to hit up so you can hit down. And often the more people dive down the YouTube rabbit hole, they're they're getting obsessed with watching video after video of like Feder is forehand, Alcrez is forehand. They think, well, the right way to hit a forehand is you got to come over the ball. But you're not going to be able to overwhelm your opponent for two out of three sets with power approaching, and you're gonna make a lot of on forced errors. Then you're also gonna slow down and kind of choke some returns to where you're coming in, but you're really coming in behind a meatball because if you just hit a solid ball, it's the favorite shot that everybody loves to play against. It's going to bounce right into the opponent's strike zone right at their waist. And if you give them a little bit of pace to work with, now they're using the pace against you. To where if you can chip, you can literally have that thing like skid like it's on ice, and now they have to dip down and hit up. So now you're doing basically what the Brian brothers have taught you to do. You get to hit down why they have to hit up. So that's number one, that's why you want to learn a chip. Now, as far as to start learning the technique, again, remember how we said you don't need the continental grip on serving necessarily, but at the net, you absolutely need a continental grip. So the first thing you want to do is get comfortable with your continental grip. And then what you need to learn how to do is hit great volley technique, and then it's just a volley off the bounce. It is just a volley off the bounce. And then once you understand it's just a volley off the bounce, there's three types of volleys that do three different things to the ball. Number one is a winning the collision volley. So, what is that? That basically is when you have some off speed to work with, so you can add something to it. Lots of times, like your first volley that's floating in the midland, you can add power to that. So you want to win that collision and you want extension. You really want to push your racket through that ball so you can get it to go deep and force its way at it at your opponent, so they have to kind of like jump back to hit a passing shot. The second type of volley is a meet the collision volley. So this might be when you're facing somebody who has a very hard serve to return, and you're trying to hit like these normal four hands, and that racket at speed that is moving through the ball too fast, and you can't match it up with the ball. Well, you might just want to meet the collision and get your hand set and just bump the ball back. So you don't need to do much. The pace is coming at you is doing everything for you. And then the third type is lose the collision, where you kind of give way and the racket appears to almost go backwards after you hit it, and you can use this to intentionally hit short drop shot approach shots. Think Carlos Alcaraz, when he hits those beautiful drop shots, he's doing a lose the collision technique. So when you master those, you can absolutely dominate a double score.
SPEAKER_00I think if you were able to develop this against second serves, I think you could probably get to you could probably get to any level of doubles with this. I mean, Jamie Murray doesn't really have a topspin forehand. He basically just chips his forehand. Um you can certainly get to 5-0 with this against second serves if you develop a good kind of block chip return. Yeah. And the other thing you can do with that same grip is lob it, hit a lob return, which is absolutely a really effective return against second and especially first serves. Um so I love that. And then for one thing that came to mind with that short one, so this was the lose um lose the collision. So the serves coming and you're taking pace off of it and hitting it short. If the opponent has a weaker second serve, you can step up near the service line. Yeah. And then that drop shot doesn't have to be that good because the ball isn't traveling as far, and it's just gonna bounce somewhere in the service box, maybe, and that server is not gonna be able to get forward to that ball. I saw it several days, several times today, um, because I was doing a ladies 3-0 clinic, and those weak second serves, when the return actually lands short, sometimes it was more effective because the server didn't have time to get forward, and when they did, they were lifting it. They have to lift it they were talking about. So yeah, it's really, really effective. So, last one here uh overhead progression. You had a really good overhead progression. This is such an important shot because so many players lob in club level tennis, and I feel like our lobs are better than our overheads in general, uh, between the three five and four five level.
Three Collision Volleys Explained
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So So before we came on, I was saying let's talk about solid tips that are abused and misused. And this is one of them, right? I mean, we hear overhead. What do we think about when we think overhead? Put the ball away, overhead smash. So when club players are able to get themselves into it, doesn't have to be perfect, right? But whatever your version of the trophy pose is, you're thinking, all right, I'm going to try and smash this and put this away. Overhead equals end the point. And you got to be really careful about thinking about that. So besides technique, the first thing I teach people is, hey, if you have a lob that's going to land, um, for people who watch, I don't know how if you put this on YouTube or whatever too, but it's going to land service line and in, well, now we can start to work on our overhead. And so you basically want to make a very quick move, get your hand set. I like to call it the secret power source, and really use that offhand and get taller, not smaller. So many club players shrink as they hit the ball. You actually want to think of your sweet spot more towards the top of your string bed, not in the middle. Because usually what happens is it goes right down and right into the throw of the racket at club tennis. If you play club tennis, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So we got to get tar, not smaller, and you can hit those overheads. Now, once the ball leaves the box, I want you to start forgetting about the overhead. So clue number one, you should not hit the traditional overhead, is that you have to leave the box. Clue number two, absolutely do not hit an overhead. You have to lift one leg. If one leg comes off the ground, don't hit an overhead. I'm telling you through unlimited experience at this point, you are making this less than 50%. And this is a shot that you could still, I see you there, you can still make this shot 80 to 90, close to 100% some days. If you give up that idea and you do what I call is a waiter trade volley, right? We always hear about the waiter trade being negative, but it's actually perfect for this shot. You flip your hand back, you find where that ball is, and you basically push it to the safe part of the court. Traditionally in doubles, there's a lot of one up, one back. Find that person back and bump it back to them. If let's say you're on one leg as you're doing this, if you feel that one leg able to propel you back forward, you can reestablish net position. If you feel that you're kind of like stumbling off your one leg, your momentum's going back so much, you probably should just bump it and retreat back to the baseline. Now you've, even though you've just hit the overhead, it's turned from offense to defense. Now you're on defense. So get behind the line, get ready for them, maybe even to come to the net if you don't hit a great shot off that, and think now all of a sudden you're right back into hitting them a lot off of your uh overhead that you had previously.
SPEAKER_00So one of the things I love about these conversations is that we'll have this same idea and say it in two different ways. And I learn from the way you say it, and you learn from the way I say it, and we kind of continue to develop the best way to teach this to people. So one of the things I've always taught people with the overhead is if it is behind the service line, like you're talking about, what I tell them is hit just hit your serve. Hit your second serve and aim deep middle at the uh service mark on the baseline. Because instead of on your normal second serve, you have to land it in the service box. But on this particular case, you have the entire court to work with. So it's a going to be a very percentage high percentage second serve. So if you have that, if you don't have a continental grip on your serve and you have the the frying pan grip, you can just hit your normal serve and just aim longer. And it sounds like that's what you're saying. If you're behind the service line, just push it and aim aim deeper in the court and go. Yeah, 100%, 100%. So last question here for you. Uh, this is a pickleball question. We don't talk about this a lot uh on the podcast. Why does pickleball not have a technique problem and tennis does?
Overheads: Putaway Myths and Safer Choices
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this. I think that's where you so I I look, tennis is my baby, and I I don't think I could ever instruct pickleball for the reason that tennis is a is a hard sport. And with the strings on a tennis racket, it's it creates that where it's unforgiving. It's kind of like a golf club, right? I mean, if you swing hard at a golf club and you're off, you're way off. It's the same thing when you put strings in a racket, it's very temperamental. So that's why you can't swing on volleys. You know, that's that's why you got to know your racket at angles all the time, or else you're going to be punished in the worst way. And that's why tennis can be very frustrating. So the the creators of pickleball are genius because they basically made checkmate on tennis. They're like, okay, you know, they everybody swings at a volley. Don't worry about this. We're gonna deaden, we're gonna deaden the racket and the ball. So you can swing, the ball's still gonna go in. The serve is a nightmare. Don't worry about serving, you can just hit it underhand. Man, I'm getting older. This court's getting big. I don't know if I can cover this anymore. No problem. We got this court for you. It's super small. So you don't have to, you're not punished near as bad for unorthodox technique as you are on a pickleball court, as you are on a tennis court. So that's that's my kind of spiel on pickleball.
SPEAKER_00So one of the other things we talked about, and correct me if I'm like wrong on this, um, in terms of like what you had told me, but one of the other things we had talked about as well is a lot of pickleball doesn't have a technique problem as well, because they're it's such a new sport, it's such a young sport. You don't have all these coaches telling you you have to have a continental grip on your server, you have to get your ball talls higher. Where and they're just out there playing and just having fun and figuring it out. And tennis has, I guess, lost a little bit of that, maybe because we're so technically focused. And if somebody does want to just stay 3-0 or stay 3-5 and just have fun, there's nothing wrong with that if they want to continue to use the frying pan grip on their serve.
SPEAKER_01That's 100% right, too. I mean, tennis over the years, because it's been so uh commercialized, you have clubs and academies and clinics, and and uh instructors will often use things like that's the wrong grip, that's the wrong this, that's not even that's not a forehand, you know. Like, so then it really can shatter someone's ego and confidence on what they already kind of might do well, because there's some like just local legends who have the weirdest stuff that works so well. There's a lady uh at my place playing double A to where she literally holds her servant everything by the throat of the racket and serves and and and and but she's a genius at chipping and she always wins like one and one. And and you wouldn't teach anything she does, but she's mastered it. So with tennis coaching and players, they're they're definitely put into that stigma of, oh, I'm doing it the wrong way. And then oh, I won, but I don't even I don't even have strokes, where pickleball is not facing that yet. Now, I did also say, I think in our conversation, that's all gonna change because the more pickleball gets popular, first of all, you're noticing that it's just not gonna be enough to have fun anymore as time goes on. And if you look at the best players, you can see that they clearly have really nice tennis strokes, a lot of them. They have, especially on like ground strokes and then swinging volleys. They're basically using like beautiful tennis techniques. So the technique is advancing and the sport is starting to become monetized a lot to where now there are coaches. There's there's people charging over$100 an hour to take a pickleball lesson. And you might laugh at that, but hey, if you want to be the best pickleball player at your club, it is gonna require you to all of a sudden get some advanced techniques. So just like everything, it's gonna evolve and it's gonna get more and more serious. And when you join a pickleball club in the future, it's not gonna be just as simple as like, oh, I just want to join and have fun. All of a sudden you're gonna see like all these titans, you know, on the pickleball courts, and you're like, I want to play with them, and you're gonna feel bad if you can't get on that court. So uh that will be changing too.
SPEAKER_00That's funny. Yeah, I love the local legend analogy. I we had a guy who I used to play league with who actually was a 5-0, and he only hit lobs, like he could not hit out on the ball. And he had a hundred and I think he had the big Bubba, uh like a hundred and twenty-seven square inch racket, and he was a five-o men's player, but his lobs were impeccable. And he would he would get to the net and just dink the ball over, and like you he just never ever missed, and you're hitting overheads from the baseline the entire time. And if you watched him, you would think, like, this guy's not any good at tennis, his strokes are bad, but yeah, he he got to 5-0 men's USTA league. So it's uh yeah, that's a really, really good analogy. Um, Pete, any final requests or last comments before we hop off here?
Serve-Style Overheads From Deep
SPEAKER_01No, I just I had a great time uh with you at the camp. Uh hopefully we're gonna make that an annual event because it was really fun. I think we had a good uh chemistry back and forth. I know people really loved it, and uh I'm grateful that you're part of TennisCon 9 again this year. So it's it's nice to have you back, starting to become a little tradition as well. And yeah, I just encourage everybody that if you don't have your free ticket yet, at least try it out. You can watch TennisCon for free. You have free 48-hour access to the event once it starts on the 27th. Uh, but those days do expire. But if you do get a lifetime pass, then you can play the game. I cannot play the game with people on a free pass because it's a membership software. It hooks up to a membership, and then that can communicate with the video and the pages to get the points and create the leaderboard. So um, yeah, if you want to play the game, I think you're gonna have the most fun you've ever had with an online course.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Well, I'm excited to uh see how it goes, and I'll continue to encourage people to sign up because, like I said at the beginning, this is such a great opportunity to learn and improve your tennis game. So thanks again, uh Peter, for coming on, and I will talk to you soon. Take care.