(By Larry Hodges) Invariably, when a player is caught out of position and so can’t get to a ball, they think they are slow. I know players who voice this regularly, constantly yelling, “I’m too slow!” Sometimes I correct them, but usually I just shake my head slowly. Almost always the problem wasn’t that they […]

(By Larry Hodges) In last week’s tip I wrote about toweling. In it, I mentioned the Pavlovian Response, also called Classical Conditioning. It’s not just towel breaks. You should develop the same routines before matches, and before every point, both serve and receive. If you do so, you’ll develop that Pavlovian response that prepares you for the match […]

(By Larry Hodges)  According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.” The link above gives some of the many ways a towel helps, such as (I’m not making these up!) “use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; […]