Short ball

Short balls in tennis are opportunities either to start dictating the rallies and pressuring your opponents into mistakes or to finish the points if the balls are really short.

Yet, so many of these short balls are wasted because players do not move quickly and smoothly towards them. Instead, they end up in awkward positions from which they make more mistakes when they should be making points.

While there are many ways to move to a short ball, we can narrow down the movement patterns to two types of footwork used most commonly, depending on whether the ball is just inside the baseline or whether it’s a really short ball closer to the service line.

A simple way to define short balls and movement towards them is to place them in two categories:

• shorter balls just inside the baseline where you need some adjusting steps to get to them;
• really short balls that land around the service line where you actually need to run towards them.