learning the game

Machar Reid, Miguel Crespo, and Damian Farrow

Learning is commonly understood to permeate the careers of most tennis players rather than simply occur at a discrete moment in time, or stop soon after players are able to execute the game's basic skills. When conceptualized in this way, learning can be appreciated as a dynamic process, in which every interaction with the coach and the environment has the potential to shape progress. Individual idiosyncrasies, resulting from differences in physical size and learning styles, can also influence the ways in which players digest information, respond to coach instructions, process feedback and ultimately improve. This chapter therefore considers the growing body of evidence that allows us to explore the interaction between player and coach.

What factors influence learning a skill during practice?

What type of practice will best improve my tennis?

A coach's decision on how to structure practice depends upon factors such as the age and experience of the learner, as well as the complexity of the skill to be learned. Interestingly, research examining how to most effectively structure practice to improve player learning has provided some counterintuitive findings that challenge the accepted coaching practice of "drilling" or "grooving" a stroke — using large numbers of repetitions and minimal variation.

One way of structuring practice is to address the amount of mental effort needed to perform a skill. Low variability or blocked practice — repeating the same shot multiple times before doing the same with a different shot — means that a learner's mental effort to produce each shot is low (also known as low contextual interference). High variability or random practice — varying the shots — means that greater mental effort is required (known as high contextual interference). For example, if a flat tennis serve is practiced and then another flat tennis serve is hit from the same position, the mental effort for the second serve is not as demanding as the first. However, if the player were asked to hit a groundstroke instead of repeating the serve, they would use more mental effort to generate the new movement sequence.

Research into the contextual interference phenomenon reveals that practicing a number of shots in a random manner leads to improved retention of the practiced skills, compared with practicing each task separately for a block of trials. For example, blocked practice would involve practicing one skill (such as the forehand groundstroke