My best friend at the time and I were really into tennis in high school. We would talk about it nonstop during summer, from what kind of rackets were the best kinds to the newest updates in the world of tennis. He was a better tennis player than me and taught me lots of tennis tips while training for hours on the court. We were practicing for hours during many days of the week to make the JV team at our school.
Our training paid off. I made the JV team and he eventually went on to play Varsity. I was happy nevertheless, because he had been playing tennis for most of his life, while I just started really playing for a couple of months. It was my “second-hand” sport, but what drew me to the game was the constant action and awareness involved when playing the game. When dealing with sports, I don’t like standing around. I always want to be on the move.
Unlike basketball however, you can’t just be on the move running up and down on the court. Every foot step you take on the court matters, because tennis is a game about control. If you cannot control how you play, how you move, and how you occupy court territory, then you will not be a good tennis player. These things are essential to the game.
Just like when you swing at the ball, the most important thing you have to master is top spin. Without top spin, the ball will go flying out of bounds every time. Top spin helps the ball stay inbounds because the ball spins “inwards” causing the pathway of the ball to curve, rather than making it a straight line.
In order to have a perfect projection it requires control of how fast you hit the ball and how much top spin you put on the ball. This can only be done practiting swinging at the ball hundreds of thousands of times.
The second half of winning the game is understanding your opponent’s weaknesses. Unlike basketball which you have four other players on your team to support you, the only other person out there to support you is yourself. That’s why you must be able to identify the opponent’s weaknesses and exploit them.
If they are only good at hitting the ball from the right, hit at the ball at their left every time. If they like to lob the ball up in the sky, make sure you hit it so back so fast they it catches them by surprise. Some people have no idea how to return balls that spin a lot, so adding more spin than usually can really mess up their swinging pattern. Whatever it happens to be, identify and exploit your opponents weaknesses, then you have the edge everytime.
Now, comparing actually practice to basketball season, practice in tennis was a breeze. Running was minimal. Tennis is a pretty straight forward game – no need for complicated plays or military-like drills. Just hit the ball back. Games were always fun to play because they were fast paced and mostly because you could control how you wanted the game to be.
This is what I liked about tennis. You were responsible for every point and you were responsible for your wins and losses. I liked this because unlike basketball, if your teammates don’t know what they are doing and do things like ball hog the ball or are just plain clumsy, you suffer as a team due to something that is not entirely your fault. But with tennis, you have 100% control over everything.
What did I learn from tennis that can be applied to life? Well the first thing is life is about control. Whatever outcome you want in life, you are the person in control of it. Not the person across from you, not your friends, family, neighbors, people you see on TV; you are 100% in control of what your day will look like tomorrow do to you actions today. You can either lose in life or win in life, the choice is up to you and just like tennis, you must constantly practice in order to make things perfect. As they say, practice makes perfect, and it’s no different from playing tennis or playing life.
The second thing is if you happen to be in a business where it is highly competitive (most business are competitive anyway), one thing that may help you out is learning about your opponent’s weaknesses. It may not be necessary thing to exploit them, but see what they don’t have that you can add to make your position better. Just like tennis, this requires observing you opponents while learning from their behaviors at the same time. Then just doing something different and better. By just mastering this one trait, you’ll usually advance further than other people doing the same thing.
If you watch any professional tennis game, you can learn a lot from the players and how they go about winning the game. You can see it in games that really matter and how much effort they put in just to win that one point. Sometimes rallies will seem to go on forever, but in the end, you’ll that the person who understands their opponent more and has control over the game, ends up winning.
Gain a competitive edge by learning from other people, but most importantly don’t let life just win you over. Take control.
Photo Credit: jModus
