Part three of the tennis gloss "Anders hing'looks" by Heinz Schwarz , author of the book "Are you still playing real tennis or are you already winning something?" is entitled "Coach me like Djokovic" and attempts to transfer training approaches that Heinz experienced and practiced when training the young Novak Djokovic at the Niki Pilic Academy in Munich to training approaches that can help us "normal tennis people" advance.
In order for this transfer to be successful, coaches should not try to completely change the style of play and technique of experienced tennis players and tamper with them on an epic scale. Rather, it should be the coach's job to get the best out of an experienced player's circumstances. Of course, Heinz also has helpful tips for us players. And find out why the “winner” is not always the ultimate.
As always, very entertainingly written - enjoy reading!
"In my professional life as a tennis teacher, I was lucky enough to be able to watch and sometimes even assist one of the most successful tennis coaches, Niki Pilic, as he trained one of the most successful tennis players, Novak Djokovic. As so often in life and also in tennis From my personal perspective, it was a classic “Firstly, it turns out differently, secondly, than you think!” number.
Until then, I had almost fanatically refused to get involved professionally in competitive tennis; All my efforts have always gone into the recreational aspect of this sport. The fact that I was able to watch from the best row, as I put it in my book “Do you still play real tennis or win something” (I was the managing director and head coach of the Pilic Academy in Oberschleißheim near Munich), was actually an irony of fate.
When I was younger, I gambled away financially with an oversized recreational tennis project. Pilic acted economically with this academy like a roulette player who always only bet on this one number “superstar formation” and then received it in Djokovic. In this constellation of ours, the strange situation arose that I, who had just gambled myself away and was allowed to go through a personal rehabilitation program in this Pilic Academy, had to take on the part of the “economic wise man”.
I mention this so openly because I am still categorical about the romanticism that lies in the “hero tennis” of our industry, which we are always led to believe when we are still categorical in our business, which is a “business with people’s wishes and hopes”. reject it and perceive it as one of the biggest blockers to improving performance.
“Coach me like Djokovic” is what Bernd Ochensberger, the managing director of Zischka Reisen, called our joint attempt to transfer my experiences and observations from the top level of this sport into the normal range of our sport. If I could 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” I would also have satisfied my consulting ethics, but I realize that it is suboptimal as a slogan comes across. But I think everyone knows what is meant. Basically, the transfer of world-class mechanisms to the normal range is an ambivalent story because there are too many untransferable parts of genius in the world-class.
What is transferable, however, are the basic structures of approaches, and I would recognize these on two levels, namely, on the one hand, in the basic development of a personal game and, on the other hand, in the basic strategies in the design of one's personal game in the match situation.
In this gloss I would only like to indicate the basic development of a personal game based on Djokovic's training and to formulate a transfer process to our recreational tennis (I will "fabulate" elsewhere about the basic strategies in the design of a personal game in the match situation and will do so using the example of Rafa Nadal, who I only know from television and whom I admire as the “grand master of ingenious simplicity”).
The basic development coaching of a game using the example of DjokovicEver since I saw how Pilic trained Djokovic, if that can even be described as training in the conventional sense, I have been trying to translate this successful model of “gentle but consistent coaching” to the normal class, especially in the upper middle class of tennis.
We in the normal sector are all influenced by the fact that the “intervention of the trainer” must and should take place primarily at the teacher level. This is because the great theorists of the German-speaking world, i.e. Richard Schönborn in Germany and Dr. Helmut Hauer in Austria (I don't know enough about Switzerland but there is certainly someone comparable; "sorry Schwytz!") in the 70s and 80s of the last century to a rapidly increasing number of tennis players (correctly and also very well done) had reacted with a “curriculumization” of tennis lessons.
In my opinion, that was and still is a real basis for beginners, but today in recreational tennis we are dealing more with “pretty good players” than with beginners and we tend to have a “Schönborn-Hauer” bias in tennis lessons - even if we haven't read them (they were "orally and factually handed down" i.e. basically passed on from one generation of tennis teachers to the next) - to treat these "pretty good players" a little in "eternal beginner mode".
But it is precisely for these “pretty good players” that it is at least worth considering whether they should be included in the coaching class à la Pilic/Djokovic rather than keeping them in the Schönborn-Hauer class of “eternal beginners” (which is what this one is). two great men of German-speaking tennis never intended or formulated).
The essence of the Pilic approach (coaching-centered) consists of two elements that, especially in the traditional view (teacher-centered), almost fall under the suspicion of being “wrong and uncommitted”.
“Being able to 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 we are talking about training with upper middle class recreational players, i.e. people who have often been playing for 20 years or more, are usually good athletes in and of themselves, win quite a lot in tennis, etc won, but who, according to their own perception, still can't do it "really properly" and who repeatedly confirm this slightly distorted self-perception by saying that they can't really do the "really cool numbers" (who can do that?!).
If you meet such a group in the typical (and also correct) tennis teacher manner and ask people what they want, then at this level of play they always say the same thing in different nuances, which could be roughly summarized with the sentence: “I can Everything except shooting!”
That’s roughly what a legendary image advertisement for Baden-Württemberg, produced for the cinema in the 80s, caricatured.
They had their global company founders and leaders appear there à la Würth or the Mercedes-Benz board of directors, “waffle” and then end their impressive presentation with the slogan “We can do everything except standard German”.
This language comparison is 100% applicable to our situation in the pursuit of the best possible tennis and could not be presented better than in this image advertising. He works with a suggestion that is somehow perceived as “true and right”, which is not true, but is difficult to refute due to its very high suggestive power. There is no necessarily causal connection between Standard German and intelligence/success. However, there is also no compelling connection between Swabian and intelligence/success.
The compelling connections in this situation lie elsewhere: On the one hand, they lie in the fact that in dialect regions there is a latent feeling of inferiority with regard to one's own language interpretation. And on the other hand, they lie in the fact that language interpretation is not the primary basis for success, but factors such as technical understanding, hard work, thrift, order, perseverance, etc. justify success
That's exactly how it happens in upper middle class tennis: this league can usually play every shot safely and placed pretty much exactly where it wanted from a medium level of difficulty, if it wanted to or believed that it could or believed that was enough.
Everything that goes beyond this already quite high level is always due to a certain complexity/disdain for these own abilities (dialect in the language area; “only being able to play in” in middle class tennis) due to a lack of ability in “High German” or “technical” attributed. However, with this assignment you are making a serious mistake in terms of learning and development strategy; You just open up another area of difficulty, which, contrary to popular belief, usually doesn't help you solve the actual problems. To put it in sports science terms, you are confusing form and function here.
But in order not to get too theoretical: if you want to bring about an improvement in the upper middle class that is not immediately completely eaten up by the collateral damage that the “unfamiliar and unpracticed” brings with it, you could also choose a different strategy .
In my opinion, this must always be based on the fact that the “new”, the “better”, the “higher quality” is not something that is truly independent, but simply an extension of what is already “skilled”.
Transferring the Pilic/Djokovic coaching model to our normal classWhenever I formulate any suggestions for improving tennis, they are just that, suggestions. Formulated like a slogan, the proposal is not the “more liberal little brother” of the rule; the proposal and the rule are not related at all; they are diametrically opposed and, to put it simply, the natural habitat of the rule in tennis is the beginner level and the corresponding “teacher aids” and the natural habitat of the proposal is the upper division and the corresponding “coaching aids”.
Of course, it is also undisputed that there are certain mixed situations;
So if you start from the upper middle class (“can do everything except shoot”), then all teacher-centered thinkers will always discover countless rule and teacher situations that exist, but are not at the center of the problems of this league. To put it cynically, I always say to players who already play very well and have had tens of years or more of tennis teacher advice that I won't be able to teach them if they have done it so far, with all their motivation, all their talent and... Still can't do all of this certainly good advice or - as they like to say - have forgotten it again.
It's a bit like if you have organized your files on your computer so poorly that you have everything you need but can't find anything straight away and someone suggests expanding your storage instead of optimizing your organization within the available storage potential.
To put it simply, a possible approach to the situation of the “pretty good middle class player” would be to assume that he/she can do what he/she can do and that he/she cannot do what he/she cannot do and one accepts this as a given and would put all one's efforts in the direction of optimal use of this existing skill deficit mix.
Despite all the individuality that such an approach required, the main problem of this league can be generalized:
Everything that is relatively simple is skillful but undervalued or is overshadowed by a hint of complexity. As a very good slice player, I always joke that when I hear the objection to the slice that “slice sucks,” I like to counter it with: “Maybe yours, mine is really good!” The first thing I think you have to change as a “pretty good player” with a “High German complex” is that you let this common negative interpretation of “simple structures” into your head and heart. If something is simple, it may not cover everything, but mastering it is by definition an important part of quality and not a weakness to be ashamed of.
The second common “structural error” in the class of “fairly good players” builds, so to speak, on the first “structural error of the negative interpretation of the simple structures”. If you look at simple structures primarily and often only as “something to be avoided and overcome,” then it almost naturally leads to one thinking that the best move away from these simple structures would be the one that goes very far away from these simple structures .
If you think structurally about what you want to achieve with a shot (whatever it is), then there are two possible extreme motivations: the least would be that you just want to get the ball into the field somehow, no matter how, the main thing is into the field.
The maximum, however, would be that you want to achieve a (in the best case) breakthrough winner with your shot. In terms of differentiating the quality from the simple variants, this is of course the best option, but in terms of a useful increase in quality - as everyone who has been playing tennis for a long time knows - it is of course the least suitable option.
In truth, the “music” in the middle class takes place between the extremes (by the way, also in the world class, but they have a higher rate of extreme hits that succeed) and this “music” consists of 2 themes in terms of motivational structure:
The author Heinz Schwarz actually has a doctorate in law, but discovered his love and passion for being a tennis teacher during his studies, which has never let go of him to this day. Coaching stations included the Niki Pilic Academy, which he headed as managing 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 a fellow expert and brand ambassador at Zischka Tennis Reisen . You can also experience Heinz live there on certain dates.
If you would like to read more from Heinz Schwarz, we highly recommend the book “Are you still playing real tennis or are you already winning something?” Of course, we have already reviewed the book, so you can get the best information in advance.
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