No win without serve and return - that was today's tennis camp motto

Training on the third day of the tennis camp with the European Tennis Academy in Naturns started at 8:30 a.m. today. The sun was shining, but it was still pretty cold. The team therefore decided together to complete the first unit indoors.

Today's training day should be dedicated to the topic of "serve and return" - two shots without which it is difficult to win. And despite this knowledge, they are not practiced enough in so many training sessions today - especially the return.

To play in, the focus points from the first two days were brought to mind again: early meeting point, focusing on the ball. So the kids first played in a small field and had to say 1 when jumping up and 2 when hitting. From behind when hitting the ball, the focus was on the backswing movement Saying "Now" at the start of the backswing movement or by calling "Step" when jumping into the turntable position as soon as the partner opposite hits.

No serve without a goal - is that something you always think about?

Then warm-up for serving with targets : the children had to announce which cone they wanted to aim for. The focus point here was: always set a goal first, then serve.

Then implement the focus point: serve, then cross the rally.

Afterwards there was a special return exercise : two children took turns serving, with the return player aiming to make as few simple mistakes as possible. A double fault by the server and a return fault counted as double points.

In the afternoon session, after hitting the ball, we went straight to serve. And then what we practiced this morning was implemented in the match situation. And the children notice very quickly that they were much less able to focus in the match than they were in training in the morning .

“Completely normal” - as coach Alex reassuringly explained to them. The children tried again and again to remember their ability to focus and thus improve themselves - focus cards on the fence of the square helped them with this.

Despite somewhat adverse weather conditions with a rising wind and quite cool temperatures again, the transfer went quite well.

Some impressions from the third day of training