In the near future I intend to post about a few drills that I currently use or have used in the past to improve my own tennis, but before I do that I thought I should give you a quick background of my tennis.
Despite my dad being a tennis fanatic, he never encouraged or pushed me to play tennis - he left that to me. I used to play around with a plastic tennis racket and a sponge ball quite a lot when I was young but I got my first metal racket when I was six years old from him. I can remember hitting balls against a wall in my back garden having drawn a net onto the bricks with chalk, whilst admiring Lleyton Hewitt. This casual hitting continued for a couple of years and it never got more serious than that.
Once I turned eleven years old my dad signed me up to a tennis club where I used to hit with him. Eventually I got assigned to one of the club's weekly tennis groups where I had a bit of coaching, but more importantly I was hitting balls on a regular basis. It was then, when I realised I loved tennis and so I started watching professional tennis with my dad (2006 - right in the middle of Federer's reign).
As time went by I became more enthusiastic and eager to play tennis and I worked my way up the club's graded coaching groups. When I was fifteen years old I started having one-to-one lessons - it was these that improved my tennis massively. There really is no substitute to being taught by an experienced coach how to practise an art that he/she is a master of. It is the drills that I have learnt from them that I intend to share with you.
I'm now seventeen years old and play at county level (based in the UK) and I try to compete in a rated tournament once a month, whilst studying at school to get into university this October. I hope to compete in university level tennis and I intend to start taking coaching courses this summer so that I can be what they call a 'Level 2' coach by the end of next year which would enable me to coach adults in our brilliant sport.
