Mixing spins beats hitting harder

Against a grooved baseliner the answer is almost never more pace, it's a ball that arrives at a different height.

Play a match against someone who hits a clean, repeatable, medium-heavy ball and you'll notice something demoralising. The harder you hit, the better he plays. He isn't overpowered by pace, he's fed by it, because a fast ball with consistent height and spin is the easiest possible thing to time.

So stop feeding him.

The mechanism worth understanding is that a groundstroke's difficulty comes mostly from where the ball is at contact, not how fast it got there. A player has a preferred strike zone, usually somewhere between the hip and the ribs, and inside that zone he can produce his best shot at will. Above it his leverage collapses. Below it he has to hit up, which limits both his pace and his angles. Everything you do tactically should be about how often you can put the ball outside that window.

Which is why a two-ball pattern beats a big forehand. Heavy topspin cross-court, bouncing high on the backhand. Then, on the reply, a low driving slice to the same corner. He's just had to reach up above his shoulder, and now he's got to get down under a ball that's skidding at knee height. Two consecutive maximum adjustments in opposite directions, and the second one usually comes back short.

The thing that makes this hard to execute is that both shots have to be good. A slice that floats is worse than useless in this pattern, because a floating ball gives him the exact mid-height contact he wanted in the first place. If you can't hit a slice that stays low, don't run this. Go and build the slice first. Similarly the topspin ball has to land deep, because a heavy ball that lands at the service line just sits up in the strike zone with extra time attached.

There's a rhythm argument too, and it's the real reason this works at every level. Tennis is a timing sport and timing is learned within a rally. Three balls of the same shape and your opponent has calibrated. Change the shape and he recalibrates, and recalibration takes a shot or two, and during those shots he's playing at maybe eighty per cent of his level.

The cost is that mixing spins produces more unforced errors from you, because you're switching swing paths and grips constantly. Accept it. A slightly messier game that keeps an opponent out of his strike zone will beat a tidy one that keeps him inside it, and it isn't close.