The Importance of Tennis Skills When Learning How to Play Tennis

Improving tennis skills is equally if not even more important than improving your strokes.

So, you've decided to learn how to play tennis and you are one of the few beginners who understands that tennis requires more than learning proper tennis technique and footwork: it also requires certain skills.

Some of these skills you have already developed in other sports or activities. Some of these skills you will improve through playing tennis.

Here are the five most important skills needed for playing tennis:

1. Ball judgment
This is a fundamental sports and tennis skill. Without good ball judgment, learning and playing tennis is frustrating. With good ball judgment tennis is a cool new sports activity to enjoy with your friends and family.

Ball judgment is best developed in childhood before you turn 16 years old. From then on, this skill improves at a much slower rate.

Yet everyone learns to judge the ball's flight, so you needn't worry that you won't. Those who have played other sports requiring this skill - like volleyball, table tennis, soccer, basketball and similar sports - have a huge advantage over those involved in sports like swimming, running and biking.

2. Dynamic and static balance
We all have excellent balancing ability: just think about how often you have slipped or tripped but caught your balance.

Yet moving with speed, stopping, accelerating and changing direction in a sport like tennis is a different skill. Static balance is balance when not moving, and dynamic balance is moving in a balanced, controlled way.

Like all tennis skills, balance improves automatically when you play tennis. Of course, people with previous experience in similar activities have a head start, moving and balancing better to begin with.

3. Hand-to-eye coordination
While a tennis ball flies toward you, your eyes send snapshots of information about it to the brain, which calculates its distance, speed and many other variables. Then the brain sends command signals to the muscles in your arm, telling it where in time and space to move the racquet in order to meet the ball.

This process sounds complicated, and it is. Again, this tennis skill develops quickly in children and at a much slower rate in adults with no previous experience hitting or catching balls.

Some people are gifted in this area, and tennis coaches usually call them the "talented" players. But tennis talent could be more than just hand-to-eye coordination. Hand-to-eye coordination could be just the most obvious talent players may have; they may have other talents as well, which observers cannot see.

4. Footwork coordination
This skill is often neglected in teaching people how to play tennis.

Although there are common footwork patterns like that of the closed and open hitting stance, there are infinite possibilities in setting your feet for a tennis shot. Your feet can set be at various angles and various distances apart. Moreover, all your footwork must be done within the few seconds you have to strike the ball.

Footwork coordination is often best practiced with games that require many direction changes and quick foot movements, like soccer, basketball, table tennis or squash.

5. Concentration
This skill is the foundation of tennis. Concentration allows us to focus on relevant information, which is needed by the brain to judge the ball, balance the body, make decisions and many other tasks.

Poor concentration often causes errors in tennis. Coaches and players mistakenly see only the stroke as the cause of the mistake and keep correcting it, while the real cause is mistiming the stroke, which is caused by poor concentration.

These five tennis skills are just few of the many skills needed to master the game of tennis and play it effortlessly. They are also the keys to playing tennis for beginners and are much more important than perfect tennis technique.

That's why the best way to start learning how to play tennis is to work on both the tennis strokes and the key tennis skills. Through doing so you progress faster than you would through working on the strokes alone.

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