Basic Tennis Psychology (Part 1)

Tennis psychology is the same as understanding the make-up of your opponent’s mind and assessing the effect of your own strategy on his/her head and also understanding the psychological effects resulting from the various external causes on your own mind.

However, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own mental processes. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing occurring under various circumstances. This is because you react differently in different moods and under different circumstances.

You must realize the effect on your game of the resulting irritation, joy, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction is. 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 cause, or if that is not possible, strive to ignore it.

After you have properly judged your own reaction to conditions, study your opponents to decide their characters. Similar characters react in a like manner, and you may judge people of your own sort by yourself. Opposite characters you must try to liken with those people, whose reactions you are already familiar with.

Someone who can control his/her own mental processes has an excellent chance of reading those of someone else for the minds works along certain lines of thought and can be studied. One can only control one’s own mental processes after studying them very carefully .

The steady, unemotional baseline player is seldom a quick thinker. If he was, he would not adhere to the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is often a fairly clear indicator of his/her sort of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who normally displays the baseline strategy, does it because he does not want to stir up his/her torpid mind to work out a reliably safe strategy of getting to the net.

However, then there is the other type of baseline player, who would prefer to stay on the rear of the court while supervising an attack intended to break up your game. He is a much more dangerous player and a deep, keen thinking antagonist. He obtains his/her results by mixing up his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variety of his/her game. This player is a very good psychologist.

The first kind of tennis player mentioned above just strikes the ball without much idea of what he is really doing, while the latter always has a solid, thought-out plan and sticks to it.

If you are a novice tennis player or are interested in the general psychology of tennis, please go to our website called Tennis Tips for Beginners This article, Basic Tennis Psychology (Part 1) is released under a creative commons attribution licence.