Basic Tennis Psychology (Part 1)
Tennis psychology is nothing more than understanding the workings of your opponent’s mind, and assessing the effect of your own game on his/her head and also understanding the psychological effects resulting from the various external causes on your own mind.
However, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own psychology. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing occurring under different circumstances. This is because you react differently in different moods and under different circumstances.
You must realize the effect on your game of the resulting irritation, pleasure, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction takes. Does it increase your efficiency? If so, try for it, but never offer it to your opponent. Does it rob you of concentration? If so, either remove the reason, or if that is not possible, strive to ignore it.
After you have properly measured your own reaction to circumstances, observe your opponents to determine their temperaments. Similar characters react in a like way, and you may judge people of your own kind by yourself. Opposite temperaments you must try to compare with those people, whose reactions you are already familiar with.
A person who can regulate his/her own mental processes runs an excellent chance of reading those of another for the mind works along certain lines of thought and can be studied. One can only control one’s own mental processes after carefully studying them.
The steady, unemotional baseline player is seldom a keen thinker. If he were, he would not adhere to the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is usually a pretty clear indication of his/her sort of mind. The impassive, easy-going player, who normally displays the baseline game, does it because he does not want to activate up his/her slow mind to think out a reliably safe method of reaching the net.
However, then there is the other sort of baseline player, who would rather stay on the rear of the court while supervising an attack intending to disrupt up your game. He is a very dangerous player and a deep, keen thinking opponent. He gets his/her results by changing his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variety of his/her game. This player is a very good psychologist.
The first type of player mentioned above merely strikes the ball with little thought about what he is actually doing, while the latter always has a definite strategy and adheres to it.
If you are a novice tennis player or are interested in the general psychology of tennis, just visit our site entitled Tennis Tips for Beginners This article, Basic Tennis Psychology (Part 1) is available for free reprint.
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