Heinz Schwarz tennis commentary "Looking Differently ," author of the book "Are You Still Playing Real Tennis or Are You Already Winning Something?", is titled "Coach Me Like Djokovic" and attempts to transfer training approaches that Heinz learned and practiced while coaching the young Novak Djokovic at the Niki Pilic Academy in Munich to training methods that can help us "average tennis players" improve.
For this transfer to succeed, coaches shouldn't try to completely overhaul the playing style and technique of experienced tennis players and tinker with them at great length. Rather, the coach's task should be to coax the best, the maximum potential, out of the existing abilities of an experienced player. Of course, Heinz also has some helpful tips for us players. And you'll learn why the "winner" isn't always the be-all and end-all.
As always, very entertainingly written - enjoy reading!
"In my professional life as a tennis coach, I was fortunate enough to witness, and even assist at times, one of the most successful tennis coaches, Niki Pilic, as he trained one of the most successful tennis players, Novak Djokovic. As is so often the case in life and in tennis, from my personal perspective it was a classic case of 'Things don't always go as planned!'".
Up until then, I had almost fanatically rejected any professional involvement in competitive tennis; all my efforts had always been directed towards the recreational side of the sport. The fact that I was able to watch from the best seats in the house, as I put it in my book "Are You Still Playing Real Tennis or Are You Already Winning Something?" (I was the managing director and head coach of the Pilic Academy in Oberschleißheim near Munich), was actually an irony of fate.
In my younger years, I had gambled away my finances with an oversized recreational tennis project. Pilic, with this academy, acted like a roulette player, betting solely on that one number – "superstar development" – and ultimately getting it in Djokovic. This led to the peculiar situation that I, who had just gambled away my own fortune and was now undergoing a personal rehabilitation program at this Pilic academy, had to take on the role of the "economic advisor.".
I mention this so openly because I categorically reject the romanticism inherent in the "heroic tennis" of our industry, which is constantly presented to us in our business, which is a "business with people's wishes and hopes," and perceive it as one of the biggest obstacles to performance improvement.
Bernd Ochensberger, the managing director of Zischka Reisen, has dubbed our joint attempt to transfer my experiences and observations from the elite level of this sport to the average player. If I may say that it should actually be "Coach me like Pilic coached Djokovic," or perhaps even more precisely, "Coach me like Schwarz recognized the Pilic coaching of Djokovic," then I would have satisfied my consultant's ethics, but I realize that it doesn't come across as a particularly effective slogan. However, I think everyone understands the meaning. Fundamentally, transferring world-class mechanisms to the average player is a double-edged sword, because too many elements of genius are inherently intransferable at the world-class level.
However, what is transferable are the basic structures of approaches, and I would identify these on two levels: firstly, in the fundamental development of a personal game, and secondly, in the fundamental strategies for shaping one's personal game in the match situation.
In this commentary, I only want to suggest the basic development of a personal game based on Djokovic's training and formulate a transfer process to our recreational tennis (I will "fantasize" about the basic strategies in shaping a personal game in match situations elsewhere, and will do so using the example of Rafa Nadal, whom I only know from television and whom I admire as a "grandmaster of ingenious simplicity").
The fundamental development coaching of a game, using Djokovic as an exampleEver since I saw how Pilic trained Djokovic, if one can even call it training in the conventional sense, I have been trying to translate this highly successful model of "gentle but consistent coaching" to the normal class, especially in the upper middle class of tennis.
We in the general tennis world are all influenced by the idea that the "coach's intervention" must and should primarily take place at the teacher level. This stems from the fact that the great theorists of the German-speaking world, namely Richard Schönborn in Germany and Dr. Helmut Hauer in Austria (I'm not familiar enough with Switzerland, but there's surely someone comparable; "sorry, Switzerland!"), reacted to a rapidly increasing number of tennis players in the 1970s and 80s (rightly and very well executed) by "curriculum-based" tennis instruction.
In my opinion, this was and still is a good basis for beginners, but today, even in recreational tennis, we deal more with "fairly good players" than with beginners, and due to the "Schönborn-Hauer" influence – even if we haven't read it (it was "orally and factually passed on," meaning it was essentially handed down from one generation of tennis teachers to the next) – we tend to treat even these "fairly good players" in a somewhat "perpetual beginner mode" during tennis lessons.
But for precisely these “fairly good players”, it is at least worth considering whether they should be more strongly included in the coaching class à la Pilic/Djokovic rather than keeping them in the Schönborn-Hauer class of “eternal beginners” (which these two great men of German-speaking tennis never intended or formulated).
The essence of the Pilic approach (coaching-centered) consists of two elements which, in the traditional view (teacher-centered), almost fall under suspicion of being "wrong and uncommitted".
"Can do everything except shoot" or the main problem of the upper middle classAs already mentioned, we are not talking about tennis lessons per se, but rather about training with recreational players of the upper middle class, i.e., people who have often been playing for 20 years or more, are usually good athletes in and of themselves, win or have won quite a lot in tennis, but who, according to their own perception, still cannot "really do it right" and who repeatedly confirm this slightly distorted self-perception by saying that they can't really do the "really awesome" shots (who can?!).
If you encounter such a group in the typical (and correct) manner of a tennis instructor and ask them what they want, then at this skill level they essentially always say the same thing, albeit with varying nuances, which could be roughly summarized as: "I can do everything except shoot!"
This is roughly how a legendary image advertisement for Baden-Württemberg, produced for cinemas in the 1980s, caricatured it.
They featured their global corporation founders and leaders, like Würth or the Mercedes-Benz board, speaking with a Swabian accent, and then had their impressive presentations conclude with the slogan "We can do everything except speak High German."
This linguistic comparison is 100% applicable to our situation in striving for the best possible tennis game and couldn't be better illustrated than in this image advertisement. It works with a suggestion that is somehow perceived as "true and correct," which, while not actually true, is difficult to refute due to its very strong suggestive power. There is no necessarily causal link between Standard German and intelligence/success. Likewise, there is no necessarily causal link between Swabian dialect and intelligence/success.
The compelling reasons in this situation lie elsewhere: On the one hand, they lie in the fact that a latent feeling of inferiority exists in dialect regions regarding their own language interpretation. And on the other hand, they lie in the fact that language interpretation is not the primary basis for success, but rather factors such as technical understanding, diligence, thrift, orderliness, perseverance, etc., are the foundation for success
The same dynamic plays out in upper-middle-level tennis: this level of play can usually play every shot reliably and accurately from a moderately difficult position, precisely where they intend to, provided they intend to, believe they are allowed to, or believe their skill level is sufficient. Anything beyond this already quite high level is then, due to a certain complex or disdain for these abilities (dialect in the linguistic realm; "just being able to play" in middle-level tennis), invariably attributed to a lack of "standard German" or "technical" skills.
However, this attribution is a serious error from a learning and developmental perspective; it merely creates another area of difficulty that, contrary to popular belief, usually doesn't help in solving the actual problems. To put it in sports science terms, form and function are being confused.
But to avoid getting too theoretical: if one wants to bring about an improvement in the upper middle class that isn't immediately and completely negated by the collateral damage that the "unfamiliar and unpracticed" inevitably entails, one could choose a different strategy.
In my view, this strategy must always be based on the premise that the "new," the "better," the "higher-quality" is not something truly original, but merely an extension of what is "already mastered."
Transferring the coaching model of Pilic/Djokovic to our regular classWhenever I make suggestions for improving tennis, they are exactly that: suggestions. To put it simply, a suggestion is not the "more liberal little brother" of the rule; suggestions and rules are not related at all. They are diametrically opposed. Put simply, the natural habitat of the rule in tennis is the beginner level and the corresponding "teacher aids," while the natural habitat of a suggestion is the advanced level of play and the corresponding "coaching aids.".
It is, of course, undeniable that certain mixed situations exist; if one considers the upper middle class ("can do everything except shoot"), then all those who think in terms of instructors will repeatedly discover countless rule and instructor situations, which do exist, but which are not at the heart of the problems at this level of play.
To put it cynically, I always tell such players, who are already very good and have absorbed countless tennis coaches' tips over decades, that I won't be able to teach them if, despite all their motivation, all their talent, and all that undoubtedly good advice, they still can't do it or—as they like to say—have forgotten it again.
It's roughly like having your files so poorly organized on your computer that you have everything you need but can't find anything right away, and someone suggests a storage expansion instead of optimizing your organization within the existing storage capacity.
Put simply, one possible approach to the situation of the "fairly good mid-range player" would be to assume that he/she can do what he/she can and that he/she can't do what he/she can't, accepting this as a given and focusing all efforts on optimally utilizing this existing mix of abilities and deficits.
Despite the individuality such an approach would require, the main problem of this level of play can essentially be generalized:
Anything relatively simple is mastered skillfully but undervalued, or overshadowed by a hint of insecurity. As a very good slice player, I always joke that when someone objects to the slice being "sucky," I retort, "Maybe yours is, but mine is really good!" The first thing I think a "fairly good player" with a "highbrow complex" needs to change is letting this all-too-common negative interpretation of "simple structures" take root in their mind and heart. While simple doesn't mean it covers everything, mastering it is, by definition, an important aspect of quality and certainly not a weakness to be ashamed of.
The second common "structural error" among "fairly good players" builds, in a sense, on the first "structural error of negatively interpreting simple structures." If one views simple structures primarily and often only as "something to be avoided and overcome," then this almost inevitably leads to the conclusion that the best way to distance oneself from these simple structures is to move as far away from them as possible.
If you think structurally about what you want to achieve with a shot (any shot at all), two extreme motivations emerge: the least is simply to get the ball into the court somehow, no matter how, as long as it's in the court. The most extreme, on the other hand, is to aim for a (ideally) powerful winner with your shot.
In terms of the quality of your shot compared to the simpler shots, this is certainly the best option, but in terms of meaningful improvement in quality – as anyone who has played tennis for any length of time knows – it is, of course, the least suitable option.
In reality, the "music" in the middle class takes place between the extremes (incidentally, also in the world class, but they have a higher success rate of extreme shots) and this "music" consists of two motivational themes:
The author, Heinz Schwarz, actually holds a doctorate in law, but discovered his love and passion for tennis coaching during his studies, a passion that has stayed with him ever since. His coaching experience includes stints at the Niki Pilic Academy, which he managed as director and where none other than the young Novak Djokovic trained at the time.
Today, Heinz runs a tennis school in Dachau, Bavaria, and is a very active and successful senior tournament player. He is also an expert colleague and brand ambassador for Zischka Tennis Reisen . You can see Heinz live there on certain dates.
For those of you who would like to read more by Heinz Schwarz, we highly recommend the book "Do you still play real tennis or are you already winning something?" We have of course already reviewed the book, so you can find out more about it beforehand.
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