Will Hamilton: After you hit the tennis ball, the next piece of foot work is pretty simple. What you need to do is get your feet and upper body facing the net, so if you hit with an open stance that's pretty easy. Here I am in the open stance having just made contact and my upper body and my feet are pretty much square to the net, so I'm good to go with what I need to do subsequently. But if I hit with the neutral stance like I'm doing here, now I need to bring my back foot. In this case, my left foot around like I'm doing right now and get myself again square to the net.
This applies to the backhand, so you hit with either neutral stance or close stance on the backhand, you're back foot needs to come around so you get your upper body and your feet facing the net. We're going to take a look at three ground strokes, two forehands and a close stance backhand, and what you're going to see is that after I made contact, I get my upper body facing the net. so, this first forehand here is going to be an open stance forehand and from the completion of my first step movement, I move out to the tennis ball, I hit it and now I'm facing the net because again, with the open stance I don't have to do anything because my feet are already more or less parallel with the baseline, upper body facing the net; from here I'm good to go with the rest of my foot work.
With the neutral stance now from the first step movement, I move out, I hit, and now what happens is my back foot comes around to get my feet and my upper body square to the net. Finally, on the close stance backhand I moved the ball and I hit. Now I'm going to bring my back foot around; finally once again, I'm square to the net here and from this point I can proceed with the rest of my foot work. I want to make one final point about this step -- once you get your body facing the net your feet and your upper body are square to the net.
The rest of your foot work is going to be recovering back to the middle of the court. You're done hitting, so from that position you want to get back into the middle of the court and put yourself in position to move to your next ground stroke. So you should get yourself in the process of this thinking conceptually okay, I fit the ball, I'm square to the net. The preparation and the hitting footwork has done. Now you are recovering and again getting in position to move to the next ball.
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