A New Viewpoint for Coaching of Forehand Stroke Skill in Tennis

Abstract

For coaches to acquire common understanding and knowledge in coaching of the skills in forehand strokes, practicing the following three points seems necessary. First, the skills in forehand strokes should be decomposed into several stages according to their roles; secondly, the tasks playing the central role in coaching should be clearly defined in each stage, and lastly, the most important task should be clarified in coaching skills in forehand strokes on the basis of the defined tasks in each stage. In this research, effectiveness is examined for the coaching of the skills in forehand strokes based on such view points. Test subjects were chosen comprising six female students of the middle class, and they were coached for the skill of forehand strokes for about one month. Three measurements were made as for the accuracy in strokes, and the degree of accomplishment of the tasks was evaluated twice. The employed tasks were concerned with racket swinging and foot works.
The results are as follows. The skill of accuracy in forehand strokes improved each time: it improved at the second measurement compared to the first, it improved at the third measurement compared to the second. On the first day of coaching, the average of the scores for the test subjects was 6.0. It went up to 10.8 at the second measurement. It further went up to 17.0 in a big stride at the third measurement. As for racket swinging, the following tasks were employed: the completion of a back-swing should be in time with the determination of the pivot foot; the motion of the racket-head in the first half of forward swinging should be synchronized with the bound of the ball; during the time between the last half of forward swinging and the impact, the motion should be in correlation with the motion of the body trunk; in the first half of follow through, the wrist should be stiffened and the swing should be forward and upward; the player should relax in the last half of follow through. Improvement was observed in all of these tasks after coaching the subjects, compared to accomplishment of the tasks before coaching them. As for the footwork, the following tasks were employed: movement of the first step toward the place of ball-hitting should be fast; the pivot foot should be determined about 50 cm before the ball bounds; more body weight should be retained on the pivot foot when the step-in foot is determined; movement of the first step in returning should be fast. All tasks were better accomplished after coaching than before coaching.