Basic Tennis Psychology (Part 1)
Tennis psychology is nothing more than understanding the workings of your opponent’s mind and assessing the effect of your own game on his/her head and also understanding the psychological effects resulting from the different external causes on your own mind.
Nevertheless, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own mental processes. So, you have to study the effect on yourself of the same thing happening under various conditions. 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, pleasure, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction is. Does it increase your efficiency? If so, try for it, but never offer it to your opponent. Does it rob you of concentration? If so, either remove the reason, or if that is not possible, try to ignore it.
Once you have correctly measured your own reaction to conditions, observe your opponents in order to decide their temperaments. Similar characters react similarly, and you may judge men of your own sort by yourself. Other characters you have to seek to liken with those whose reactions you already know.
Someone who can control his/her own mental processes has an great chance of reading those of another for the mind works along certain lines of thought and can be studied. One can only control one’s own mental processes after carefully studying them.
The regular, unemotional baseline player is rarely a keen thinker. If he were, he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is often a fairly clear indicator of his/her kind of mind. The impassive, easy-going player, who usually displays the baseline strategy, does so because he hates to stir up his/her slow mind to think out a safe method of getting to the net.
However, then there is the other kind of baseline player, who would prefer to stay at the rear of the court while supervising an attack intending to break up your game. He is a very dangerous player and a deep, keen thinking antagonist. He gets his/her results by changing his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variance of his/her game. This player is a very good psychologist.
The first type of player mentioned above merely strikes the ball with little thought about what he is actually doing, while the latter always has a definite plan and adheres to it.