Tennis Psychology (Part 1)
Tennis psychology is nothing more than understanding the make-up of your opponent’s mind and assessing the effect of your own game on his/her mental viewpoint and also understanding the mental effects resulting from the different external causes on your own mind.
However, it is true that you cannot be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding your own mental processes. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing happening under different circumstances. This is because people react differently in different moods and under different conditions.
You must realize the effect on your game of the ensuing annoyance, joy, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction takes. Does it increase your prowess? If so, strive for it, but never offer it to your opponent. Does it rob you of concentration? If so, either remove the reason, or if that is not possible, strive to ignore it.
Once you have accurately judged your own reaction to conditions, observe your opponents in order to determine their temperaments. Similar characters react similarly, and you can judge men of your own sort by yourself. Different characters you must seek to compare with people whose reactions you know.
A person who can control his/her own psychology runs an great chance of determining those of someone else for the minds works along certain lines of thought and can be studied. One can only regulate one’s own thought processes after examining them very carefully .
The regular, unemotional baseline player is rarely a quick thinker. If he was, he would not adhere to the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is often a fairly clear indication of his/her kind of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who usually advocates the baseline game, does so because he hates to stir up his/her torpid mind to think out a safe method of getting to the net.
However, then there is the other type of baseline player, who would rather remain on the rear of the court while supervising an attack intending to break up your game. He is a much more dangerous player and a deep, keen thinking antagonist. He gets his/her results by changing his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variance of his/her game. This player is a very good psychologist.
The first type of player mentioned above just hits the ball with little thought about what he is actually doing, while the latter always has a definite strategy and adheres to it.
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