So I was late from work to coaching my temp yesterday. When I got there, he was playing a friend of mine who I play with every once in a while who I would estimate at 1700 or so. My temp, to my surprise, beat him. While preparing to coach, my friend said that the biggest change in my temp's play since I started coaching him is that he is more consistent and able to play more than one shot. Since that was what I have been working on in his game, it was good to hear this from someone who plays him. It might mostly be playing against my rally ball quality that is helping him as opposed to any specific instruction, but I think that now that he can bring the ball back in the rallies at least once on defense (since we have worked extensively on blocking),he isn't as reluctant to rally as he used to be.
We worked on trying to incorporate more pieces into his loops, especially a relaxed wrist. The thing is that the more pieces there are to your loop, the easier it is to transfer power to racket flexibly with the wrist/elbow snap as the final piece. This is important because sometimes, you may not be able to predict well in advance where the ball will be consistently so you will need to hold back until you are fairly sure of where the ball will be and hit it then. Swinging at close to full power successfully is impossible if you don't always make good predictions about the spin, speed and position of the ball. While you get a less powerful stroke than going all out, you remain more consistent and can get a good spinny ball whose placement or movement might trouble your opponent.
After that, we worked on serving. I keep trying to get him to put max whip on his backspin serve. It's a process but I keep have to go back to square one - not sure why, other than that he doesn't see the value in practicing yet.
Then we worked on his looping the backspin ball with a relatively small stroke while waiting to attack the ball hard on the next shot. Sometimes, I would extend the rally beyond the next shot to make him play more shots. IT was funny sometimes when he would make an extremely spinny shot and think my block was going long and it would dip and land on the table. It was like a warning to him to stop premature celebration.
Then I fed him powerloop multiball so he could work on his blocking aggression and placement. We closed off with me serving and looping backspin to him so he could block or counter on the 4th ball.
While I was coaching, another individual approached me and asked for a lesson. I find how students respond to coaches and go about working with them interesting, probably because I worked mostly with the coach who had the best results in improving adult students in my club. While I can understand the demands for patience, I definitely would not spend forever working with a coach if I didn't see tangible improvements in my game that where taking it in the direction I desired. But I can also understand and see why many learners cannot see this.
The individual told me that he was working with another coach in the club. The first thing I explained to him was that I have a different approach to coaching vs. the coach he was used to, and that other coaches do have their subtleties. Minor differences in thought can become major when dealing with new players so I recommend that he work with the one coach who best suited his philosophy and temperament until he was good enough to seek coaching from multiple sources while selecting what he needed.
So the main thing he wanted me to show him was how to block topspin. Since this is a topic that I have taught a few times before, ever since it was taught to me remotely by Brett, I had an idea what the problem was and it fit the usual diagnosis - a person used to making lifting hits with open paddle angles struggling to block topspin when he hits up into the ball. I spent an hour trying to convince him that the lifting swings were unnecessary, trying to fix his counterhits and show him how it translated into a block. Only so much you can do in an hour but I did the best I could.
My knees have been bothering the heck out of me so I only played 4 games (not matches) and won them all a bit too easily against a friend/practice partner. I figured out a couple of tricks to make my sidespin serves bend even more (the main benefit of the practice that did not really help my elbow position) and for the U2000 crowd, it drives them nuts. The O2200 loopers tend to pivot and loop the ball inside out with consistency that makes my jaw drop. It gives me a small insight into what Brett means when he says that world class players pretty much restrict you mostly to serving shot unless you are willing to repeatedly play defense against the first topspin.
Will try to rest a bit but I may have to go in and coach on Saturday (watch the lower rated sections of the club tournament and see if any of my students are playing).
