Mental Warfare In Singles

By Kyle Mollison, USPTA

Continuing with our series on mental warfare in tennis, we examine some tactics to assert your mental dominance on the singles court.

Manage the Pace of Place

The pace of play and the tempo of the match is one of the easiest way to assert your mental dominance on a singles court. According to the Friend at Court (the official rule book for tennis), players are allowed 20 seconds between points. When you are up, winning, or have won a few points in a row, take shorter breaks between points in order to keep your momentum going. If you are losing, take all of the 20 seconds allotted. This will help you get your mind back right, as well as put the brakes on your opponent and stop them from running away with the match.

Rope-a-Dope

In all types of matches, whether friendly social matches, or highly competitive USTA or NCAA matches, being overly friend can be very disarming to your opponent. I think back to a USTA match I played before:

I was playing a play up player in singles and I was not playing well. I was completely out of it. So I started talking to my opponent. On changeovers, in between points, after he hit a good shot, after I hit a bad shot. By playing overly nice and playing the “victim” I was able to take the competitive edge away from my opponent. After barely squeaking by the first set winning in a tiebreaker, I cruised and won the next 6 games in about 10 minutes. My opponent went from completely being in the driver seat until he graciously gave it up to the overly friendly rope-a-doping he was playing.

By using these tactics you can really get a strong foothold in a match and win matches that you might lose otherwise because you aren’t playing your best, or are playing a technically stronger opponent.