The more things change...

The posts have been lagging, I know.

I've been at work on a number of projects behind the scenes that may all prove to be "game-changers" in the sense that the results of this work will, more than likely, fundamentally change the way we understand how to achieve ultimate performance in throwing and swinging sports.

As a bonus, this work may also finally provide a "bridge" that makes biomechanical analysis understandable and therefore, easily usable for all swinging and throwing athletes who want to increase their performance level.

In the coming weeks and months, I'll begin to reveal some of the incredible revelations and discoveries we have made through all of this ongoing "R & D" effort by the "Chain Gang" from the tennis world and beyond, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, I decided that I would post a column I wrote just about a year ago for my partner-in-chains' regular online column on www.aroundhawaii.com. After another season measuring the stroke speeds of collegiate and junior tennis competitiors, the article unfortunately, hasn't lost one bit of relevance.

Without further ado, here's that article:

133, 119, 97.

What do these three numbers have to do with the question posed in the title of this article?

The title of the article asks one of the fundamental questions that's constantly looming in the minds of American tennis fans and followers: who's coming up the US tennis ranks to become the next Pete, Andre, Jimmy, John, or Andy? In the glory days of American Tennis, I think that question was phrased more like "How many are coming up?" rather than "Do we have anyone coming?" as it appears today.

So what do the numbers 133, 119, and 97 have to do with developing prospective American tennis champions?

Well, these are the average serve speeds generated by the 4 men who reached the 2007 Wimbledon semifinals (Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and Gasquet) plus the last Amercian man standing, quarterfinalist Andy Roddick.

The average fastest serve speed of this "Final 5" was 133 MPH (Roddick's fastest serve on average was the highest among the 5 highest at 142 MPH). Their average first serve speed was 119 MPH, and their average second serve speed was clocked at 97 MPH.

What's the point I'm trying to make here? Before I get to that, let me introduce three more numbers...

107, 91, 74.

What do you think these numbers represent?

Well, these are same serve speed measurements (average fastest serve, average first serve, and average second serve speeds) for a sample of 20 NCAA Division I tennis players taken from teams ranked between #5 and #25 in the final national rankings for 2007.

These 20 players include a former NCAA D1 Singles Champion, 4 players who were selected as 2007 NCAA All-Americans, and 8 players who participated in the 2007 NCAA D1 Individual Championships.

The point is that there is a HUGE difference in the performance capability (as represented by serve speed) between today's top college tennis players and the top ATP pros.

The difference between the two levels is measurable, and in the case of serve speed, the difference is about 20 to 25 MPH for both first and second serves. Does having a powerful serve alone explain the difference between today's NCAA All-Americans and the top ATP players?

No, it goes way beyond the difference in serve speeds in that the top touring pros today are fundamentally physically (athletically) superior in virtually all physical aspects of tennis: serve speed, movement speed, groundstroke speed, speed endurance, etc. when you compare them to even the best college players. The difference between the best collegiate players and ATP pros basically extends to every physical attribute required to compete at the professional level today.

In the past, the difference between the performance level of an NCAA All-American was not very different from ATP players. Many of the past NCAA D1 Singles Champions, say up until the early to mid-1980s, could come straight off of campus and perform (and win) at the ATP level, say, as if they were already ranked among the world's best 80 to 100 pro players. Today, the typical NCAA All-American plays at a much lower level compared to his ATP brethren. From what I've observed in recent years, the top D1 players are playing at a level comparable to a pro player ranked somewhere between 400 and 700 in the ATP rankings.

For all of the casual tennis fans out there, what I mean is that in the past (before 1990), it was entirely possible that a top college player could walk off campus in summer and become immediately successful at the main tour level or even at the Grand Slam level. In contrast, today's top college players would be hard pressed to perform successfully in pro tennis' minor leagues known as the Challenger and Futures Circuits. Again, tennis has evolved to a much higher, much more athletic level in the past 20 years, and the difference between college tennis and pro tennis is clearly diverging very rapidly.


OK, now I have three more numbers to throw your way...

100, 91, 71.

These are the same serve speed averages (measured during live tournament matches) for a sample of 34 nationally-ranked (ranked anywhere from #11 to 1500 nationally), 18 and under junior boys.

The serve speed difference between the ATP pros and the "typical" US junior player is 30 mph, which is even greater than the difference between college players and the top ATP pros.

The serve speed difference between the top ATP pros and highly-ranked college players is around 20 MPH.

That is a huge difference in terms of performance.

However, if you compare the juniors to the college players, there is very little difference in serve speeds between the juniors and the college players.

This makes perfect sense because the top college teams recruit is primarily, if not exclusively from the available pool of junior players who have high national junior rankings. Therefore, you wouldn't expect a big performance difference between the nationally-ranked junior player and a college player.

What's interesting to me is that with all of the physical conditioning work that's typically done in the great majority of college tennis programs, and especially at the top college programs, why isn't there a greater difference in the serve speed performance between the juniors and the college players?

After being an insider to two top college tennis programs over the 2006-2007 season, the reason is pretty obvious. It's because, in terms of increasing racket speed (the physical basis of serve speed), conventional (football-centric) conditioning ideas and methods that are typically used to train even top college tennis players simply have no impact on racket speed, and therefore have no impact on serve speed.

For all of the hundreds of hours that most college tennis teams devote to lifting weights, pulling resistance bands, throwing medicine balls, and stretching over the course of every season, none of these exercises has ever been shown to increase their ability to serve or hit groundstrokes faster.

The majority of college players, coaches, and strength coaches THINK or PERCEIVE that they're hitting faster serves and groundstrokes as a result of all the off-court training they do, but when you actually MEASURE the actual stroke speeds (as I have done over the past season for 2 different teams), a very different picture emerges. And we'll explain and explore those differences next month.

Finally, let's end this article by showing you these three numbers:

133, 118, 98.

These numbers represent the serve speed profile of 3 of the 4 Junior Boys Semifinalists (Donald Young, Vlad Ignatic, and Greg Jones) at Wimbledon this year. Compare them to the pros in the main event...They're virtually the same as the Wimbledon Men's "Final 5" listed at the beginning of this article.

What's the take-home here? On one hand, who really knows if those 3 boys are actually going to become successful on the ATP Tour, much less champions at that level?

On the other hand, at least from a quantitative performance perspective, those 3 boys are at least capable of hitting serves at speeds comparable to that of the top pros, whereas the college guys and the average nationally-ranked junior player fall 20 to 30 MPH short of meeting that measurable, quantitative performance standard.

It's very much like saying that in order to have a reasonable chance of becoming a Major League Baseball pitcher, it helps to be able throw your fastball over 90+ MPH. Or, if you would like to become an Olympic Gold Medalist in the 100 meter dash, you have to be able to sprint 100 meters in under 9.9 seconds.

So, for those of you Donald Young ("DY") doubters and nay-sayers out there (by the way, DY won the boys' singles at Wimbledon), at least DY can bring the serve at the same level as the sports' current greats, so his potential for success at the pro level is not such a far-fetched idea after all.


See you next time...

TTFN!

TennisSpeed visits Europe-Part 1

March has been an interesting time for me as I traveled across the Atlantic for the first time without my “boss” and children for companionship and translation.

I was invited to make a presentation about our work with the SpeedChain in tennis at a special, one day seminar (on March 1st) exploring the frontiers of high-performance tennis development that was organized by the Tennis Education Group based in Palma de Mallorca, Spain (yes, that Mallorca that’s home to Carlos Moya and Rafael Nadal).

Tennis Education Group is the brainchild of Spanish Federation Coach, Jofre Porta, whose mission is to help bring to light the best and most advanced methods, concepts and techniques involved in training and developing world-class tennis players. Jofre also founded his own tennis academy based in Palma de Mallorca together with Moya called Global Tennis Team.

For those of you who don’t know who Jofre Porta is, he has already had a remarkably successful coaching career, as he is the man who coached Carlos Moya from the juniors to becoming the French Open Champion in 1998, all the way to helping Moya become the #1 player in the world in 1999. Jofre also played a critical role in coaching Rafael Nadal in his formative years (between the ages 8 to 17). Jofre was in charge of helping Nadal getting established on the right foot as a professional (he appears in the "No Strings" episode featuring Nadal), and even today, although he no longer travels very much on the tour, he continues to coach Moya from behind the scenes from their academy in Mallorca.

IMHO, Jofre is one of the best, if not the best tennis coach on the planet without question. His knowledge, wisdom and experience are virtually unmatched…
The combination of his intelligence, intensity, creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, honesty and passion for the game, and his genuine interest and concern for the well-being of his players separates him from the other, perhaps more “famous” coaches at the pro level.

Let’s put it to you this way, how many other coaches do you know have taken not just one, but two players all the way from the juniors to Grand Slam Champion? I cannot think of anyone but Jofre who has accomplished this incredible feat in recent memory…

Being Jofre’s guest at his academy gave me the opportunity to see his coaching philosophies and methodology in action on a daily basis. And what I saw I can only really describe in these terms: it was as if I was looking into a crystal ball and seeing what the sport would look like, say, 5 to 7 years in the future. Jofre is training his players to play the sport of the future, not the past like it’s done in most tennis nations, including ours.

It’s not that you wouldn’t recognize existing or established drills and training exercises in their training system—it’s how they are integrated and executed in the context of Jofre’s vision of the tennis of the future that was nothing short of well, genius. Add to that mix Jofre’s own unending curiosity, creativity and openness to new ideas—he is constantly searching for any and all ideas that will help his players develop the skills necessary to compete at the sport’s highest levels—and he and his team have developed novel drills and exercises, on and off-court that exist nowhere but at Global Tennis.

And now, the SpeedChain is in the process of being integrated into the “Global System”, as the SpeedChain training device and training methodology fits seamlessly into one of the most fundamental training principles and goals of Porta’s vision of high-performance tennis: to maximize a player’s capacity to generate speed, acceleration and power in all facets of their physical game.

Jofre told me that the SpeedChain will enable him to break through many of the existing barriers and limitations of current training and conditioning methods and he sees the benefits of training of the SpeedChain extending well beyond increasing a player’s speed and power to helping train and develop, among other things, an athlete’s kinesthetic sense, proprioceptive capacity, balance, coordination, anaerobic fitness and other fundamental athletic skills and attributes.

Anyway, it was a fantastic stay for me at Global Tennis…

There were many hours of stimulating discussion with the coaching team at Global as well as with the other speakers invited to the seminar (including a leading Spanish exercise physiologist, and one of Spain’s leading sports psychologists, as well as Jofre and his head physical trainer, Pedro Zierof), and it was truly a privilege to be a part of what's happening at the “cutting edge” of tennis coaching and training.

What I learned in those 6 short days in Palma has fundamentally changed many of my own ideas about coaching tennis, and how to train and develop a high-performance player. (We’ll get into the details of those changes in future posts). The open exchange of ideas and knowledge between everyone was something that I will remember for a very long time, especially considering the “culture of secrecy” that generally prevails at the highest levels of the sport.

And, you can’t imagine how honored I felt to have Jofre tell me that I would always be welcome in the world of Global Tennis.

More stories, photos, and info from Europe to come…

TTFN!

2007 ITA Convention Impressions

A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of making a presentation about what we’ve being doing with the SpeedChain to about 100 college tennis coaches at their annual convention (“2007 ITA Coaches Convention”) in Naples, Florida (12/14 to 12/17/07).

First, I want to thank all of the coaches who attended the presentation, and I hope that we were able to provide them with some new and useful information regarding how to increase the overall performance level of their players.

Second, I want to express how grateful I am to the person who has been the greatest supporter of the SpeedChain and TennisSpeed, and who is a true legend among modern American tennis coaches, the one and only Greg “The General” Patton (former USTA National Coach, Collegiate Tennis Hall of Fame member and currently Head Men’s Tennis Coach at Boise State University). Our presentation would not have ever happened if not for all of Greg’s help in getting TennisSpeed get off of the ground.

Third, I want to say thank you for all the support given to TennisSpeed over the past two seasons by our 4 collegiate early adopters of the SpeedChain:

Boise State Men’s Tennis (Head Coach Greg Patton)

UCLA Men’s Tennis (Head Coach Billy Martin)

Colorado Women’s Tennis (Head Coach Nicole Kenneally)

Syracuse Women’s Tennis (Head Coach Luke Jensen)

Overall, I thought that the presentation at the convention went quite well (I am thankful that I have had some experience speaking in public in front of larger audiences—that turned out to be one upside of my whole academic science experience), and the I think our message was well-received by the coaches who attended. And, we also received a wide range of very interesting and challenging questions from the coaches regarding the SpeedChain training concept, and our findings from our various pro, collegiate and junior early adopters.

From the TennisSpeed side, what was especially interesting was that we learned who among today’s college coaches are the great “seekers” of advanced (coaching) knowledge and who want to learn the most cutting-edge ideas and methods to help their players find their highest level. Not surprisingly, most of these coaches lead programs that have been very consistently successful season after season.

Alongside our presentation, there were also a number of other interesting talks and on-court clinics given by various experts in the American tennis community at the Convention, including one by celebrated American coach Nick Bolletieri, but the one presentation that stood out in my mind was the featured on-court clinic led by former Top-5 player, Todd Martin on Saturday afternoon (December 15th).

“Coach” Martin’s clinic was essentially a one-hour primer on how to be successful in singles at the pro level. The ideas that Martin presented were indeed fascinating and enlightening, and for many coaches there, counter-intuitive. When you compare Martin’s “4 skills” to the kinds of tactical ideas that are commonplace in today’s collegiate and junior game in the US, the way to be a successful tour pro is almost 180 degrees opposite from the prevailing “Big Strike/First Strike” philosophy so widely held in American tennis at the high-performance level.

Martin’s clinic was titled “Taking it to the next level: 4 skills necessary to transition from college to pro tennis.” Effectively, Martin summarized the four core tactical adjustments (taught to him by former top-10 player, Jose Higueras) he had to make in order to improve his chances to succeed on the tour after two years as an All-American at Northwestern University.

I created a written summary of the ideas that Martin presented over the course of his scheduled hour and you can email me at speedmaster [at] tennisspeed [dot] com if you’re interested in getting a copy (it’s a PDF file, FYI).

Oh, I thought I would close out this post by mentioning this recent development for us here at TennisSpeed…

TennisSpeed has been invited to give a technical presentation about our work with the SpeedChain to the newly-formed Tennis Education Group (TEG) based in Spain (yes, that Spain with the 12 pros ranked in the ATP Top 100) sometime in February 2008.

What’s really exciting about this opportunity is that many of the top federation coaches in Spain are already involved in this new venture (spearheaded by Jofre Porta (who coached Carlos Moya to ATP #1) and Pedro Zierof (one of the top physical trainers in Spanish tennis)), and TennisSpeed is honored to have the opportunity to speak alongside these luminaries of Spanish tennis.

Until next time, TTFN!

(Informal) Serve Speed Survey of US College and Junior Tennis

Last week, I had the privilege of traveling to the 2007 Easter Bowl Championships in Rancho Mirage, California with my new client, who played in the Girls’ U18 Easter Bowl ITF tournament. During our trip, I wanted to conduct an informal survey of serve speeds demonstrated by the various players that participated in that very prestigious National junior tournament.

As it turned out, I had the opportunity to measure serve speeds for some college and pro players as well. We arrived in LA a few days before the start of the Easter Bowl tournament and caught the very competitive dual match between the #1 ranked Stanford women and the 10^th-ranked UCLA women (which ended up 4-3 for Stanford), and I was able to record serve speeds for the Stanford and UCLA players who played #1 and #2 singles. I also recorded the serve speeds of one of the tour players I coach who happened to be in LA that weekend.

Unfortunately, my new client lost her first round match at the Easter Bowl, and we came back to LA and spent two days training at UCLA. During those two days, I was also able to measure the serve speeds of some of the starters(#1, 2, 4 and 6) for the UCLA men’s team, as well as the serve speeds of a Bruin alumnus who is currently ranked in the Top 250 in the ATP rankings.

So, without further ado, here is a brief summary of the serve speeds—for both first and second serves—I measured over the course of our 6 day visit to SoCal. For brevity, I’m reporting the range of serves (fastest and slowest) I measured for each of the levels I observed from ATP to NCAA D1 all the way down to the 14 and under boys and girls at the Easter Bowl.

My “survey” is by no means exhaustive, but I was able to measure a wide range of male and female players from Top 3 seeded players to first-time National tournament participants. Unfortunately, we left the desert before the start of the Boys 18s tournament, so I wasn’t able to take any measurements from their age group.

ATP Men—first serve: 101 to 122 MPH; second serve: 78 to 90 MPH

NCAA Men—first serve: 82 to 104 MPH; second serve: 69 to 85 MPH

NCAA Women—first serve: 64 to 89 MPH; second serve: 64 to 74 MPH

U18 Girls—first serve: 67 to 96 MPH; second serve: 63 to 75 MPH

U16 Boys—first serve: 75 to 105 MPH; second serve: 67 to 82 MPH

U16 Girls—first serve: 65 to 83 MPH; second serve: 58 to 70 MPH

U14 Boys—first serve: 63 to 87 MPH; second serve: 55 to 69 MPH

U14 Girls—first serve: 57 to 73 MPH; second serve: 53 to 64 MPH

Oh, and if you are wondering, the fastest serve I measured (122 MPH) was struck by my pro client who has been training with the SpeedChain since last fall.

I hope you will find these results interesting and informative…

TTFN!