Welcome to Strategy Tennis Part two. Hopefully, you've watched Strategy Part one because it's going to build on that in this video and this video, we're going to talk about how to mount a great strategy against your opponent. 

Now you might be thinking why strategy is so important or how can I mount a strategy in tennis? And that's important question. So having a strategy means that you're going to have an advantage, you're going to set the points up to favor what you like to do and avoid things that you don't like to do. 

Now the first concept I want you to understand to have a great strategy when you step on the court is match ups. How can you set up match ups that are advantageous to you and avoid those match ups that you don't like? That's what we were like. Wouldn't you like to step on the court and hit all the shots you want to hit the way you want to hit it and hit the shots your opponent doesn't want to receive all the time? That would be great. 

To do this, we have to think about a game plan the way we think about a game plan. Here is my first finding out what your opponent's strengths and weaknesses are. Then you're going to plan exactly what you're going to do after that. 

Then you're going to test it out because guess what? It's great to have a plan, but once you step into the court and you try to start executing that plan, things are going to change.

Maybe they'll go well or maybe they'll fall apart. And then the final one is adjust. So let's go through and see how exactly you would take this and implement it in the match. Now, first thing we want to talk about is how do we find your opponent's weakness? How do we know what their weakness is? Well, here's a simple way of doing it that I use all the time to this day.

 I feed the ball directly to my opponent and see what they choose. Because guess what? People like choosing things that they like is very rare that someone is going to choose something they don't like. So by feeding the ball directly to them, guess what they're going to do? They're going to choose their shot. They really like and favor. 

Now, you know, potentially what their weaknesses, or at least what their strength is. So by knowing this, you can start thinking about your matchups before you go any further, you have to think about what do you like to do and what do you dislike doing on the court? 

Once you know this, you start thinking about how can I create these matchups against my opponent's potential weakness? So let's pretend here I'm playing John. I feed a ball to John, and John chooses his forehand. Hence, I think his backhand is going to be a weaker shot. 

Well, then I like my forehand, so as many situations as I can create, I'm going to try to hit the ball to John's backhand. Now, in some situations is going to be harder than others.

But if I set up the court correctly, I can start pinpointing more balls to the backhand because I think it's going to fall apart. Now, here are some other ways to find out if your opponent has a weakness. 

Generally, when someone has a weakness, they have really jerky, tight strokes. So if you see somebody doing really jerky tight swings, that generally might be a weakness. Another thing is they probably miss it more than the other shots. 

So if you're rallying with someone in the warm up start to look for shots, they potentially might miss or run around or run away from. I always love when I start to warm up and my opponent doesn't take volleys. Maybe they take one and they run off and I'm like, Hmm, that's a sign that it might be a weakness. 

So when we're playing the points and they put me on the run or put me in trouble, I'm not going to go for a ton on the run. I'm going to make them hit a volley because I want to know I need to test that out, but that's later. So now that we know that we want to set these matchups, which now we're going into the planning phase from our last video.

Video One of strategy, you know, high percentages is going cross court. And if you want to go down the line, you have to wait for a good time or you can go down the line if you lift the ball up, buying yourself more time and making sure that when you go down the line, you have tons of margin.

And because of this, you might set the situation up where if I'm going cross court with John and I don't want to go there, I'm going to choose one of the balls that aren't really challenging me a lot and go to this backhand and try to pinpoint my strength to his backhand over and over again. 

Once I do this and I recover to the new position or the new center. What I also might want to do is set up my forehand in the backhand corner to go to his backhand and do it over and over again. This is the planning phase. 

You can see how I've created a pattern and meaning that I'm going to go cross court to the forehand until I get a good shot. And then I'm going to go down the line with tons of margin, tons of safety. Or maybe I might run around and hit inside out forehands, meaning my forehand from my backhand side to John's backhand using my forehand. This is now the planning stage, so you have a game plan now. 

The next phase is testing, meaning that I have this idea in the warm up. I know what I'm going to do. I know John's weaknesses, strength potentially, and I know my weaknesses right. I'm going to try to execute that. 

And this is where the fun starts. If you're going good and everything goes the way you want it to go.

That means John's going to probably be missing more points now if that works, and he lets you do that, continue that until you win the match, then the match is over and you don't have to do anything. 

But if John's a smart player, what he's going to do is also make an adjustment. He's going to figure out that maybe I don't like my backhand, so he's going to probably try to do the same thing to me. And so what I'm going to do is notice, what is he doing to be able to do that to me? 

Maybe after going to his backhand using my forehand, John then takes his backhand down onto my forehand to see if I'm going to go back and we're going to go back and forward. This leads us to the final phase where we have to adjust now. 

Adjusting is a tricky phase, sometimes because we want to make sure we're using the most high percentage shots to go for when we're adjusting. I don't just want to randomly start taking every ball to John's backhand, especially if I'm on the run on my forehand side, running off the court, trying to go to the backhand. 

It's a very low percentage shot, but I do want to choose those moments when the ball sets up, and I have more time and I'm ready to hit the shot that could go to John's backhand with tons of margin. And that's the thing you have to weigh when you're thinking about adjusting.

You want to adjust still using high percentage shots and not just go crazy trying to hit winners and on the run shots to John's backhand. Sometimes I may need to go back to his forehand to play the high percentage shot and wait for a better opportunity to go to his backhand. 

And if you understand these things when you're playing, you're constantly trying to find a new weakness that might have developed because sometimes even when you're playing, John's forehand might go off for a little bit. If I notice that I might start hitting John more forehands and then I'm going to go through the stages of what's my new plan and then I'm going to try to test it out by executing.

 And then finally, I'm going to adjust if needed. Now here's one question I get a lot, Kevin, should I adjust if it's still working? No, if it's working. Take it all the way to the bank. Take it all the way to game set match. Do not change. The only time you should change if it's not being successful as it was in the beginning.

Sometimes even that when you're doing something that's working and then it stops working, you might need to change it up a little bit and then go back. And these are the things you have to think about when you're thinking about how to adjust to make sure you're winning the most matches you can because you're being strategic on the court.