The volley, a lot of people know a lot about ground strokes but when it comes to the volley that is another story. There are some differences in the ground stroke and the volley and we are going to be talking about some of those differences and how they affect you mentally.
The volley is taken out of the air and closer to the net, you have less time to prepare and you have to be aware of the fact that when the ball bounces on the ground it loses around 50% of its speed. That of course doesn’t happen when volleying, so the ball is very quickly near you. It also means that your opponent has less time to react and read your shot. That means that you don’t have to hit the volley as hard as opposed to the ground stroke which forces errors.
The main point I want to get across here is that you don’t need a great shot to win that point you just need a normal shot. So many players don’t realize this, especially if they are normally playing the baseline. If they hit a normal baseline shot nothing special happens they have to hit the ball harder or go for the winner. If you play a normal volley into an open space you will normally win those points. When a player tries to hit the ball hard that causes them to over swing on the volley. The body is just responding to “hit the ball hard” command that you are sending it.
When you are at the net you have 1 to 1.5 seconds to respond to the ball. This is why you need play time that teaches you to react to the ball. This is the hard part of the volley and the experience of playing to learn to make quick and automatic decisions is a must. You can’t learn volley from a book or just from doing drills all the time you need real game time to perfect this skill.
To sum up this lesson there are many players that fear coming to the net. But the only way to over come this fear is “just do it”. Eventually though you will start getting lucky and those volleys will start to fall. Then you get lucky so many times that it won’t be luck anymore.
Happy Hitting,
Laura Farris
