FOCUS Q: Should I watch the ball or the target? A: It’s a strong question that I’ve been asked only once in my life, but I had a ready answer having thought about it. Since the sport is kills, this explains it, but it applies to all shots. In the early days of RB the court walls were white, the balls black and there was great contrast. I watched BOTH the ball and the corner I was going to kill into. There was about 50-50 focus on each item. This focus can be one picture in the eyes of both the ball and corner; or it may be a quickly alternating frame by frame of the ball, then corner... I used primarily the method of seeing both ball and target simultaneously - the big picture but staring only at two objects. It should be noted that most of the Power players, unlike me, focused mostly on the ball during the stroke. They may have caught a glimpse of the corner during the downstroke, but as the racquet closed on the ball their attention was entirely on ball. Hence, they had more focus for the power, and less for accuracy. Then, over time, glass courts came into play. The new green or blue balls were camouflaged against it. There was probably a political decision for the ball color instead of basic black as a difficult to see sphere promoted the harder hitting champions. When the court walls went all glass, even the front like an aquarium, I had difficulty seeing the corner and ball in one picture. The ball was lost in the glass, and the corner was lost in the glare. I had to switch techniques to focus on the ball, while hardly perceiving the corner. The best is to think outside the box: try everything. As an aside, when I started teaching the game before pro RB, the standard method that I invented was to tell the player to aim for the target, gradually increasing pace on ball. Five years later, with the introduction of the fast ball, I began teaching the opposite. Hit the ball hard, slowly honing in on the target. The latter is what I emphasize today, sad to say. The game demands it. Power to accuracy, instead of accuracy to power.
Posted on: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 02:21:24 +0000
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