Tennis Volley Skills - Show Your Back

Doug Kegerreis: Hi! I am Doug Kegerreis, President of Chantilly International Tennis, and today you are learning how to play tennis.

The skill we are going to look at in this clip is the Volley. The Volley is when you take the ball directly out of the air. Some people refer to the volley when you hit the ball back and forth, in tennis we call that a Rally. So, make sure you get rally and volley separated. The volley is when you hit the ball out of the air.

Couple of very important skills needed in order to hit the volley. One is that you must eliminate your backswing. Its very difficult to time to hit when you are striking the ball directly out of the air. So, a bigger backswing is going to make it more difficult to time. It also takes a lot of force when the ball strikes your racquet directly out of the air.

For those two reasons, we need to set the racquet. So, the tip of the racquet is pointing up to the sky. That does two things, that discourages a backswing, number one. Number two, it sets your wrist upward which puts your wrist in a much stronger position. So, racquet up involves tip up and that involves discouraging the backswing, eliminating the backswing and putting your wrist in a strong position.

Second, on the volley is showing me your back. Thats been an excellent reference point I use to get people turning sideways whenever you hit the volley.

As I mentioned before this is a game of getting sideways and body rotation, even though, there is not a lot of body rotation on the volley, there is some turning on the volley. So, you can see on my forehand volley, I am showing you my back, my left shoulder blade and that gets my shoulders turn.

On the backhand it would look like this, I am showing you my front shoulder blade, it gets my shoulders turn. That also eliminates the old windshield-wiper, you see people hitting volleys all over the world like this using the same side of the racquet face.

The proper way to hit is turning the shoulders using one side of your racquet face, turning your shoulders using the other side of your racquet face. So, remember, on the volley, racquet up and show me your back to get sideways.

Next, were going to talk about actually hitting the ball and the skill of keeping the racquet still and wrist firm on the volley.