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FEATURE 1
Are Junior Structure Changes the Answer?
FEATURE 2
High School Tennis Don't Get No Respect
NEW APP Tour
NEW 2019 Awards
NEW: Husband/Wife
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DECEMBER
2019
Moving Past 4.0
With Visual Skills
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With the publication
of The Athlete Centered Coach, Bill Patton is working hard to
influential sports culture globally. There is a revolution going
on in coaching, and Bill has always colored outside the lines,
so he is ready for new lines to be drawn. He used to take his
toys apart to see how they worked. He turned those experiences
into a strength. Now he creates innovative templates so that
others can build on success and make it their own. He is most
proud of winning an NCS Championship, and becoming a published
author for the first time. Once when trying to speak another
language to a player he thought he was asking if she was embarrassed,
but he used the word for pregnant. That got sorted out later.
Bill Patton is
Tennis Professional and is currently coaching his 10th different
high school with 30+ years of experience in the field. He has
coached at several schools with many great results. Mainly, the
players had a great time maximizing their games, and playing
on the teams. He is now featured on coachtube.com, with three different
tennis courses.
Bill and his
business partner Styrling Strother have started USATennisCoach,
LLC which trains, certifies, mentors, and collaborates with high
school tennis coaches.
Bill, a Maverick
Leader is co-founder of USATennisCoachl,a Catalyst forOmni Athlete:
The Future of Sport, a PTR and MTM Professional. |
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Moving
Past 4.0 With Visual Skills
By Bill Patton
INTRODUCTION
What passes for vision training
in the vast majority of tennis players is painfully simplistic.
It doesn't capture the vast complexity of how people see. "Watch
the ball" simply is not specific enough of an instruction
it's thoroughly obvious. The issues of the sighting moving objects,
is as complex as the workings of the human brain. 'Keep your
eye on the ball', does not address the various problems players
have in seeing the ball well.
Many of these complications of
how our visual skills and abilities differ, explain why players
get stuck at the 4.0 level and below, because as the ball travels
faster and spins more, the adversity created by locating the
ball is greater. Each person also has a track record from their
sum of experiences, that either helps them build, or destroy
confidence in dealing, with a certain kind of shot. In fact,
way less than 100% of your visual experience comes through your
eyes right now. A healthy percentage of what you are seeing is
already stored in your brain, especially if you are in familiar
surroundings. For the beginner, every ball is new and thus an
emergency as per Peter Burwash.
The brain and perceptual research
show how much people differ in their ability to fully attend
to the flying fuzzy object. Do you know which is your dominant
eye? That is quite helpful in using it better, and it's common
that folks don't know which eye does more seeing. The time-space
continuum and how the supercomputer in our heads fools us about
what is the present, past and future, play a role in how effectively
we focus. Our state of mind and our preparation, from how early
we get up in the morning, to how well we sleep and our general
ability to manage our thinking also affects how we see. |
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The conventional wisdom that
is commonly taught is not all bad, but it does leave players
on their own to figure out for themselves how to do what the
coach asks, even when that request does not really make sense.
Some,but not all learners seem to be able to overcome that problem,
but we can teach better by not placing impediments in the student's
way.
How does anxiety affect the ability
to perceive the ball well?
People like to argue about whether
special glasses help, but real prescription and contact lenses
certainly do. I include a discussion about the relative pros
and cons of the use of sunglasses.
The training of skills of using
your eyes in different ways is one thing, but the actual exercise
of the eye to make it stronger and faster is also contained in
this book. |
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Understanding how players process
information visually, and even verbally can create breakthroughs
in performance in a variety of ways. We have a finite ability
to process tasks in our brains, and when the CPU gets too busy
with multiple tasks, things bog down. Common notions that players
hold about focusing may actually be holding them back from playing
better over longer periods of time in a match. We will discuss
how that works, or does not work.
Ball tracking is maybe the least
utilized and most fundamentally important visual ability on court.
I have some exercises to help explain how to use your peripheral
vision, trusting your mind to reconcile what you thought it might
not be able to do. There is a system of visual transition, and
while I don't understand any of the exact times of shift from
one skill to the other, thinking about the system will help you
to explore on your own. Maintaining attention, and the mental
game aspects of concentration and focus create a great interface
between vision and other mental skills that you are probably
already using.
The legendary exercise 'bounce-hit'
is examined and modified into a framework that might even be
more effectual in the long term. Some ball perception activities
that can help you discover how to see the ball better are shared
from Inner Tennis: Playing the Game (Gallwey), and other sources.
The use of targets, and the results of shots help train the brain
and the eyes to take that feedback and turn it into better performances
if you know how to do that. Without any tactile experience, we
would have a completely different visual experience, because
it's the feeling of things that educates the eye more than any
other sense about where we are in space. |
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Using racquets, cameras and other
pieces of equipment can help round out the full visual range.
A discussion of anticipation versus reaction can save players
a lot of errors and anxiety, as well as some ideas for match
preparation on the day of your competition. There are some compromising
positions people find themselves in, but not in an ethical way,
and I also share my personal foibles even in the midst of re-writing
this book a few years back. We end with the need for rest, and
how your eyes and your mind can be so much better tools for you
if you give them a break.
In this intro, I touched on everything
that is contained in this work, and I hope you gain a lot from
it. Feel free to reach out to me.
As players experience a paradigm
shift in how they understand the ball and the court, a period
of time and a myriad of experiences, trial and error, decision
making and evaluation will flesh out the whole experience. Part
of what makes up the dominance of Novak Djokovic is that he is
superior in not only reading and reacting to the ball but making
a decision very rapidly about what he will do with an incoming
ball. He will be used as an example to flesh out the understanding
of some of the major points of the book. Having a better understanding
of how vision works and differs among individuals has enormous
implications for teaching tennis. This would seem to affirm that
the experience of learning should be done through the eyes of
the student. Coaches then act as a guide to offer a different
perspective, helping bridge the gap in the understanding of the
student to see the court and the ball, in a new way.
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