Epistemic anguish at the tennis courts

I

There are many ways to play tennis poorly. There are failures of athleticism, where the feet are too slow or you have the cardio of a Koala. There are failures of judgment, where the wrong shot is chosen at the wrong time. The most existentially painful are failures of technique. These occur when you have the wrong grip, step with the wrong foot, swing from the outside-in rather than inside-out, or commit one of the dozens of errors that prevent perfect and reliable energy transfer from your body to the ball.

Errors of technique are insidious because they’re nearly invisible from the inside. We can understand when we’re tired or slow, or when we’ve made the wrong decision (we don’t reach the ball! We hit it out! Instant feedback). Understanding when we’ve made a technical error is more difficult on three fronts.

First, it’s possible to play the game with poor technique. What makes tennis a popular game — not just a great one — is that it’s accessible. Nearly anyone can buy rackets and balls, head to their local park, flail in the direction of a ball, and hold a rally. There’s no specialized knowledge, no years of practice, that stand between an amateur feeling like they’re doing roughly the same thing the pros do.¹ On the spectrum of pickleball to polo, it stands left of center. At all levels of competition, matches are won by people with strokes that would make a coach weep. See this guy who is receiving a free education for his tennis. Even some of the greatest players in the world, like Ruud, Medvedev, De Minaur, and Rublev, have strokes I would not teach my children.

Daniil Medvedev - former world #1

Second, the “intuitive” way of playing tennis is plain wrong. Everything is the opposite of what you’d think. You want to swing down? You need to swing up. You want to use that grip? Use this grip. You want to step with the left foot? Use the right. You want to bring the ball down? Again, swing up, but hard. I’ve had the privilege of teaching the correct serve grip before. The reaction is always disbelief, then frustration.² We always think the “correct” way of doing things should be easier. In this case, it leads to 30 minutes of hitting serves into the neighboring court before you even entertain it could be a good idea. I think the serve is the hardest stroke to teach well, but multiply this by the forehand, backhand, volleys, etc… and this is what it’s like to learn tennis right.

The final barrier. Even if you know what your body is supposed to look like from the outside, it’s unclear what it’s supposed to feel like on the inside. I have a hunch developing this proprioception, or sense of your body in space, is very difficult. Do most people know what their faces look like at this very second? Probably not. Do most tennis players know what their non-dominant hand is doing at the moment of contact with a ball? Unlikely.

It used to amaze me how dancers (seriously good dancers, like Sean Liu) could master complex routines in less than an hour. Then I realized they spent their lives practicing in front of a mirror getting instant feedback between a movement and how it looks. The feedback loop for tennis technique is the sluggish process of getting told what to do, trying it, and having a coach tell you whether it was right.³ The alternative is to film yourself, which is slower but the only other way for someone to get positive or negative feedback on a shot-by-shot basis.

These three barriers are an epistemic mountain that stands between tennis players of every level and their goals. Unfortunately it is largely invisible and players slam into every day. Most don’t care because they have no goals. I suffer when I see someone that does. They practice, compete, chastize themselves for missed opportunities, and celebrate small victories. They’re spending their Sunday morning, alone, on the ball machine. They’re driving to some random high school in suburban Texas for a league match against the third best player in Waco because UTR points are at stake. In other words, they’re invested in the game and want to take theirs as far as it can go.

From my very amateur standing, never having played for money, tuition, or glory, know they can’t achieve this with their technique. It’s like seeing an aspiring musician practice with a broken instrument, but none the wiser. How they move their body creates walls they can’t even see. For as long as they seriously pursue their goals, it will cause them strife. ⁴

II

I didn’t write this to liberate recreational players from poor technique. (That requires more than a blog post). I wrote this because I see myself in them. How many times has someone more skilled than me — in any domain — listed the things I’m doing wrong with a hint of fatalism and concluded “he’ll never make it like this”? The answer is probably “a lot.”

The invisible epistemic barriers I describe above are domain agnostic. Feedback loops, in general, are unreliable. Good processes can yield bad results, bad processes can yield good ones, etc…. Arriving at the correct “technique” for any endeavor might be difficult, and more reliant on a culture you have no contact with rather than deduction. I also see proprioception as a direct analogue for metacognition, which is a hard prerequisite for conscious improvement almost anywhere.

Overcoming these in any domain is probably the same. You start by being lucky. My dad played D1 tennis. He began teaching me when I was 5. The quickest way to competence at anything is probably a fountain of wisdom, and a reliable feedback loop, at your dinner table.⁵ You continue by being dissatisfied. At every level, everyone is likely doing something wrong. At the risk of cliché, it’s on us to figure out what that is, understand when it happens, and correct it.