SLSF Articles

Tennis psychology is the same as understanding the workings of your opponent’s mind, and gauging the effect of your own game on his/her mental viewpoint and also understanding the mental effects resulting from the various external causes on your own mind.

Nevertheless, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own psychology. So, you have to study the effect on yourself of the same thing happening under different conditions. This is because people react differently in different moods and under different circumstances.

You have to understand the effect on your game of the resulting annoyance, joy, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction takes. Does it improve your prowess? If so, go for it, but never offer it to your opponent. Does it rob you of concentration? If so, either remove the cause, but if that isn’t possible, try to ignore it.

Once you have accurately measured your own reaction to conditions, study your opponents in order to determine their characters. Like characters react similarly, and you can judge men of your own type by yourself. Other temperaments you must seek to compare with people whose reactions you know.

A person who can control his/her own mental processes has an great chance of reading those of someone else for the mind works along definite lines of thought and can be examined. One can only control one’s own mental processes after carefully studying them.

A steady, phlegmatic baseline player is rarely a keen thinker. If he were he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is often a fairly clear indicator 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 slow mind to think out a safe strategy of reaching the net.

Then there is the other type of baseline player, who would rather remain on the back of the court while directing an attack intended to disrupt up your game. He is a very dangerous player, and a deep, keen thinking antagonist. He achieves his/her results by mixing up his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variance of his/her game. He is a good psychologist.

The first type of tennis player mentioned above merely strikes the ball without much idea of what he is really doing, while the latter always has a definite plan and sticks to it.