Strategy is simple! Ball Control is complex!
More often than not game situation, strategy, tactics, and ball manipulation (skill) are confused with each other. Here I'll try and clarify these ideas for the next time when you are on the court and need a game plan.
Game situation is self explanatory and essentially there are three:
● Serve and Returning
● Baseline Rally
● Net approaches and passes
In a given game situation, what strategy would a player employ? Oxford dictionary defines strategy as: A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim. For this discussion, we are assuming in all cases that both players are of equal skill.
Five basic strategies which can be used as stand alone and in combination thereof are:
1. Consistency
2. Moving the Opponent
3. Moving the Opponent
4. Using your strength
5. Exploiting your opponent’s weakness
Tactics - Executing a strategy through what process!
Tactics - Oxford dictionary defines tactics as: An action or strategy carefully planned to achieve a specific end. The tactic we employ to execute a strategy will determine our phase of play to either stay neutral, aggressive, or defensive.
Let's start from the most basics to the most difficult.
1. Baseline to baseline - stay alive in the point. Very simply, keep the ball in play and wait for the other player to miss. You would be surprised how effective this is even at the highest level. At the recreational level this by far the most used strategy. A player who becomes impatient and starts taking extra risk will accrue more losses than wins. Hence, give yourself a true chance to stay alive long enough in a point to win.
2. Bring your opponent in - now that you have successfully ascertained that your opponent is steady from the baseline, it's time to check their skills at the net. How vulnerable or skilled they are at the short game, slices, volleys, and overheads.
3. Bring yourself in - if the opponent is still going strong, now it's your turn to take a trip to the net and apply some pressure and see how comfortable they are when pressed to hit a passing shot and a lob.
4. Thus far if all is even keel, then bring your opponent in and you also go in. This tactic is quite aggressive but then again you have exhausted the previous possibilities. Recall that the sport is about controlling attrition no matter what level you are playing. By both going in at the net the points start to shorten and errors rack up fast for either side.
5. Serve and Volley - here it is evident that the points are meant to be aggressively played resulting in either winning fast or losing fast. To do this well, requires the most amount of skill of all the previous strategies.
The graphic below gives an example of what strategy and tactic to apply for a particular game situation to try and gain a desired outcome.
