Not playing well - Part 2
My personal experience

It was the first day in spring that I played outside. I have been playing for 7 months indoors in a faster court with no wind. Actually I wasn’t playing; I was coaching most of the time. So my game was very rusty.

On the first day outdoors I played a match with one of my students. Here are the problems that I felt 5 minutes after we started hitting the ball:

• my timing was off since the courts were slower
• I broke a string in the first two minutes of the warm up and had to play with my old racquet which I haven't held in my hand for a couple of months
• it was windy and in combination with my off timing I kept hitting the ball with the frame
• I was late on returns since I haven't returned probably for a month
• my first 5 practice serves went 10 feet long. (I'm a 5.5 or 6.0 NTRP player so that's a huge miss for me)
• I was very late on my practice volley when we were warming up. I could only imagine what would happen if I came to the net and he would hit a hard shot at me

Now this looks like a perfect scenario for self destruction, bad mood and lots of negative feelings. But I felt a great challenge dealing with all that. How am I going to solve all these problems?

Well, how about one by one? I immediately started to look for solutions and here are my decisions before we started the first point:

• stay in point, run like mad, hit as many balls as you can
• don't try too much, aim 2 meters from every line
• focus on seeing the ball well
• serve with 75% all serves with top spin, when returning go further back to buy a tenth of second (or two)
• forget the score, don't play with your opponent, fix your tennis first
• when you come to the net you'll probably miss the first 2 or three volleys, don't panic, your brain will soon start adapting (I totally trust in my inner game)
• the one who gets more frustrated with the wind is the likely loser – and that's not going to be me.

I can't change the reality – the wind is blowing. Either I adapt to the conditions or I live in the dream world - how nice it would be without the wind.

Now this seems a lot of thinking and it takes you half a minute to read all that. But thinking goes much faster and when you start playing it's not in your consciousness anymore.

It's stored somewhere deeper although I am aware of my purpose. And decisions during play come up from that purpose.

Here's how the match went. It took me 3 games to improve my timing and my serve (I hit 3 double faults even though I served smart. The loss of feel and an old racquet took some time for my inner game system to adapt),

I didn't care about the wind, but my opponent was getting more and more frustrated with it. In those 3 games I was totally focused on solving all my tennis problems and finding a better form and feel. I was 0:3 down after ten minutes.

And then I started missing less, hitting some better shots and I was totally in the process of dealing with tennis difficulties.

My opponent, on the other hand, was getting a little worried about my level of play which he noticed was going up, he was also getting more frustrated with the wind and how it made him miss.

20 minutes later I was serving for the set and winning it 6:4.

I felt great – not because of beating my opponent but because I managed to overcome all those difficulties from the beginning of the match. The final result is only a consequence of your level of play, your attitude and your effort.

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