You are asking exactly what I was hoping you would ask. Thank you for your attention to detail and your inquiry. I am open minded to the old ways if they are proven to create tennis players and build tennis popularity. In 1994, my history notes the headline screamed Is Tennis Dying on cover of Sports Illustrated. Paul Annacone, former Head of USTA and coach to Sampras while a pro, noted this week in an interview that in 1994, after twenty million people had quit the game, that that period should have been our greatest period in popularity with Courier, Sampras, Aggasi, Chang, Todd Martin, as USA champions abounded. Annacone says kids should be taught to emulate the pros. But per Modern Tennis Methodology, or MTM, which I am considered an expert in, we only teach that modern tennis is accomplished with a few simple tenets that allows every player to find their own athletic potential. I didn’t say every player starts with western grips. I used a SW myself though I go western given MTM teaches dynamic grips.
Most of my players start with SW grips although I did develop an amazing four year old boy that was then the youngest student ever admitted to Macci’s who had a huge western grip that Macci could not believe the kid could rally twenty balls from the baseline with. I do however, disagree that pros consciously choose to hit with closed stance. Even Nick Bollettieri in the new TEnnsi magazine says all great forehands are hit with an open stance and in his Killer Forehand Series he edited it in 2008 to state for the first time that “hitting a killer forehand from a closed stance is like trying to shoot a cannon from a canoe” (translation: it doesn’t work very well). When I was Head Pro of Dwight Davis Tennis Center with it’s 19 courts, I called the pros in and told them I had two rules that could never be broken: 1, don’t’ teach anything the pros don’t do and 2. If I catch any coach teaching a closed stance forehand except as occurring naturally you are fired on the spot. It was a great year, we brought so many players into the game that five years later were still playing the game. At one point, I had seven number one high school players that came from that first year program, all open stance, many of them with western grips.
In MTM, we teach footwork through drills. For example, the can (cone) drill or the figure eight drill as it’s known teaches to land on the outside foot and then pull back towards the center by loading off the right foot and exploding to the left. This drill keeps you from pushing your racket through the target line, a harmful piece of data to students. I teach players to learn to leap up and forward into the serve, rather than tell them to “jump” and put attention units on their feet or their knees, I put an aerobics platform just inside the service tee and tell them I want them to land on their left foot square on top of the platform. To teach them to hit across the ball on the serve, I might close their stance per McEnroe and ask them to hit up and to the right to allow their torso rotation on the serve to increase.
Guga Kuerten, mentioned in my first post, was coached by Oscar Wegner from six until 14. He was already a world ranked junior so his strokes were pretty much fully developed by then. I once asked Oscar how much did he mention footwork specifically to Guga. His reply was something like this, “we worked on it a lot through drills, but I probably only mentioned less than an hour specifically as to how to move his feet. As he got better, I just demo’d what different pros did, and allowed him to test which worked best for him, and he was bowlegged.”
When I say a beginner can emulate a pro at lower speeds, I mean they hit open stance, with a nice double bend from the first strokes, up and across the ball, finishing over the shoulder smoothly and efficiently, with no herky jerky movement. I have a six year old girl about to turn seven who looks like Sharapova on the court. She is now even serving from the baseline for the first time. I have heard your arguments hundreds of times from coaches, I used to make the same arguments you did. By now you should have read some of the comments from
www.ez-tennis.com, which is about to be transferred to my coaching training site,
www.moderntenniscoaches.com. If you read the History of Tennis Part 3 and compared Quickstart to how the Russians teach beginners, it’s apparent what they do work, and their top players often play less than half of what ours do, another myth promulgated by those who have not investigated the facts like the NY Times and Daniel Coyle did in his incredible book that all coaches should read “The Talent Code, Talent is Made, Not Born, Here’s How.” I have a great article on the book and the Spartak Tennis Academy in Russia that inspired the book at
http://www.moderntenniscoaches.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=18 that will make you realize something is not right in the USA tennis annals if we look at the evidence.
I do things on court that amaze people. I would put my results with any five beginners against any coach teaching any other method in the entire world. All who leave my court are better players. I teach everyone to copy the pros by find the ball with your hand by observing the ball AFTER THE BOUNCE, then feel it move across your strings by hitting up and across the ball, and then finish over their shoulder (in beginning stages this is crucial though Djokovic still does it near his earlobe but as they get better the FH Finish moves nearer the shoulder or bicep) having learned to associate the butt of the racket with where they want to go.
I make no bones that Oscar Wegner’s MTM is the proven best way to teach tennis and given twenty million people left the USA game, whatever scaffolding with the closed stance FH emphasis on stepping into the ball is not working. That is something you will have to just undo later.
If you want to see a five year old kid hit like pro in less than ten minutes, here is an example. You were wrong about the 14 year I taught, when I hit ten balls to him to look at his coordination, he only hit one over the net, most of them he missed. This is a video by Susan Nardi, who I worked with personally in Southern California and who teaches MTM also. This result is not atypical. This child has never touched a racket, just off the street. I do this all the time, but I don't do it often in less than ten minutes. Though he is hitting foam balls, he is emulating a pro by hitting up and across the ball with a beautiful finish, and his timing worked itself out. Here it is:
http://gallery.me.com/suznardi#100000
Can you name a tennis method that gets the acclaim of Oscar Wegner's MTM? For forty years, he hasn't changed his basic tenets that every player, young and old, should be taught open stance, natural footwork, and to hit with topspin from the first stroke and that everything else works itself out if you don't introduce false data, like stepping into the ball by putting weight onto the front foot. There is a reason not a single pro on earth does not use the windshield wiper today. The old turn step and hit through the target line is dead because over time, it was not as efficient as what the first tennis coach who appeared in 1968 claiming everyone should be taught open stance forehands with a wrap finish and hit up and across the ball. Oscar Wegner was that first coach, and if you read the 1975 entry on The Real History of Tennis Part 1, you will note the swing described by the greatest teachers in the USA as WRONG, a mechanical and cramped style, looks exactly frame by frame like Roger Federer. How do you know that beginners can't be taught to emulate pros unless you try to teach them to emulate pros and cut out the contradictory data. Their muscle memory must be developed correctly from the first stroke. I was told to stay away from Oscar's MTM because of the arguments Braden and others made, very similar to what you just wrote. It made sense back then, most of it, until I started teaching per the DVDs and now I train coaches all over in how to get the same results Oscar does.
The Scientific Method tells us the proof of any theory is that if others use the same tenets in their experiment, they get the same results. Let's see, we listened to Braden and Bollettieri and others and look what results we got. We taught like the so called experts teach, and twenty million left the game while tennis boomed all over the world, especially in Spain which was the first country to adopt Oscar's tenets when he was Junior Davis Cup Captain and one of three National Coaches in Spain back in the early 1970s.
Insanity is doing the same thing you did before and expecting different results. The closed stance forehand must die as a beginning teaching tool if tennis is to grow is my claim. Do you think all those famous coaches who claim Oscar is correct are all wrong? Braden? Who credits him as a primary influence today? Macci? Even Richard Williams credits Oscar, not Macci, because the Wiliams sisters might have been the first Americans to hit open stance off both sides, exactly as Oscar advocates and up until the mid 1990s, was the only USA coach advocating such.
Thank you for your consideration.
