TENNIS STROKES

Pictures for
comparison
and
education

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This TENNIS STROKES page

! Note !
Higher-resolution photos may be added
(or substituted), if I ever find time to
find better pictures --- which may be never.

INTRODUCTION:

I had long planned (about 1995 to 2006) to put together web pages of tennis strokes, but I was especially motivated after hearing Cliff Drysdale, a tennis announcer at the 2007 Australian Open, point out that Roger Federer holds his head so that he looks toward the contact point of the ball and racket even after he makes contact with the ball --- i.e. for a fraction of a second while the ball is flying away from the racket.

I had noticed this many times in the past and have often suspected that it has a lot to do with how Federer has dominated the game.

In fact, in tennis practice sessions in years past, I have tried to concentrate on keeping eye contact with the ball right up to contact with the strings --- and even to keep my head in its position at contact for a fraction of a second after contact with the ball .

I find it almost impossible to do the latter. And it is hard to keep eye contact with the ball, right up to contact, on a consistent basis.

Hence, it is amazing to me that, in collecting pictures of Federer striking forehands and backhands, without exception, he performs that eye-contact-and-frozen-head-position feat over and over and over --- so consistently that it must be an ingrained habit to him that he would have trouble undoing.

These pictures of concentration provide a main reason-for-being of this web page --- and they change the page from the rather hum-drum tennis-strokes photos page that I had originally envisioned.


That is Federer and Andre Agassi, on top of the
Hotel Burj Al Arab in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Federer technique versus technique of other players :

For comparison, I provide photos of other players here (via links, below, on this page) --- seen as they are striking forehands and backhands.

You will see that almost all other players (with the exception of Tim Henman on his backhands and a couple of others noted below) are looking more or less in front of their racket as the ball

  • approaches,
  • makes contact with, and
  • leaves
their racket.

Rafael Nadal seems to come close to Roger Federer's consistency, on both eye-following-ball-to-strings and momentary-freezing-of-head-at-contact ... on both backhands and forehands.

But I had difficulty finding suitably good photos of Nadal showing his eye-focus.

This may be because Nadal seems to hit his backhand in front of his body, so he seldom is found looking to the side of the court.

And, on forehands, Nadal hits with such an "open stance", he is usually facing the net rather than looking to the side of the court.

Bjorn Borg, Richard Krajicek, and Steffi Graf also seem to do a good job of eye-focus, but I need more photos to verify consistency.

The photos of Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras and Andy Roddick indicate a lack of consistency in eyes following the ball to the strings.

In the several pictures I found of Carlos Moya, he seems to be looking toward the other end of the court (toward his opponent) as he strikes the ball ... consistently, both on backhands and forehands.

On considering contemporaries of Federer, one has to wonder if a player like Moya or Juan Carlos Ferrero or Radek Stepanek, whose games seem to be past their peak (circa 2007) --- or possible "contenders" like Roddick or Marat Safin --- would significantly improve their game if they could emulate the Federer eye-on-ball-up-to-ball-contact-then-freeze-head method.

When you look at the Federer photos below, note that his eyes are on the ball as it approaches the racket --- all the way to the racket.

At contact of ball with racket, his eyes are either still on the ball --- or, at least, are looking at a point between his hand on the racket handle and the contact point of ball with racket.

In fact, many times it looks like Federer is looking at the throat of the racket as the ball strikes the racket.

In any case, his gaze follows the ball right up to contact --- and is not aimed somewhere out in front of the racket, which is the case for almost all other players, as seen in photos taken just before, during, and just after contact with the ball.

Also note that when the ball has flown several feet from his racket, his gaze is still at the point of contact --- i.e. his head is frozen for a fraction of a second in the position that it was in when the ball contacted the racket.

    (Since the ball is flying at about 80 miles per hour, which is about 120 feet per second, if his head is frozen for at least 5 feet of travel of the ball from his racket, this means that his head is frozen in position for at least 5 hundredths of a second.

      (80 miles/hour * 5280 feet/mile / 3600 seconds/hour = 117.3 feet/sec
      and 5 feet / 117.3 feet/sec = 0.051 sec)

    So his head is frozen for a very brief amount of time, but it IS noticeable when you watch him in action --- and examine still photographs.

    Even if he holds his head frozen until the ball reaches the net, this is a distance of about 40 feet, so his head is frozen for NO MORE THAN half a second.)


An Example :

Here is a photo that demonstrates what the words above are trying to convey.

Note that Federer has hit the ball and the ball is completely out of the picture. He is about 75 percent of the way through the follow through of his forehand stroke.

Meanwhile, his head is still looking toward the side of the court ... his eyes are looking where the ball was when he hit it.

The ball is probably near the net by now and he has still not turned to see (out of curiosity or whatever) where the ball is going or what his opponent is doing.

No doubt, in a fraction of a second after this photo was taken, Federer has quickly turned his gaze toward his opponent to anticipate the trajectory of the next shot.

It takes supreme confidence and supreme concentration (or supreme training) to be able to hit the ball and avoid the temptation to immediately look where it is going.

Amazing stuff.

We're not worthy, we're not worthy, ...


Anyway ... hope you find these pictures educational. Enjoy.


How these photos are presented:

You can scroll down this page to see the various photos.

The pictures below are presented so that their width is proportional to the width of the browser window. One consequence of this is that you can change the size of the images by changing the width of your browser window.

Each image is a link. You can click on the link to see the image at its 'native' size in a separate window (or tab).

    (Unfortunately, many of these images were collected around 2007 when images on the web were rather low resolution --- often less than 600 pixels wide or high. I have generally avoided using images less than 200 pixels wide or high because they are just too-low in resolution and do not scale up well.)

See the bottom of this page for some instructions on making side-by-side comparisons of web page photos.


If I have the opportunity, I will add more photos in the future.

The Federer photos are on this page (about 50-plus forehands and 50-plus backhands).

The photos of other players --- men and women --- are on serparate web pages of this site. Those pages are available via links below.

There are also WEB SEARCH links near the bottom of this page --- by which to find more images of tennis strokes.

CLICK on any of the images to see a larger image.


           
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Try a WEB SEARCH on keywords
'images tennis stroke federer forehand'

           
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Try a WEB SEARCH on keywords
'images tennis stroke federer backhand'

           
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Try a WEB SEARCH on keywords
'images tennis stroke federer serve'

Try a WEB SEARCH on keywords
'images tennis stroke federer overhead'

Try a WEB SEARCH on keywords
'images tennis stroke federer volley'


A to M
(Agassi, Becker, Borg, Laver, ... ; Davenport, Henin, ...)

N to Z
(Nadal, Roddick, Sampras, Stepanek, ... ; Sharapova, Williams sisters, ...)

To compare photos :

If you want to compare any two photos, you can right-click on a photo image and, from the menu that pops up, choose an option to open the link (the photo image file) in a separate window.

    (This works in most 'desktop and laptop computer' web browsers.)

You can do this for a couple of links (photos) and re-size the resulting windows so that both windows can be seen on the screen.

The photo windows can then be brought side by side for comparison.

Then close these windows to get back to the window of images.

Disclaimers :

I did not take any of these photos. It would be impossible for me to take all these photos of many different players and many different tournaments. I gathered these photos from the web.

    (Most of these photos are low-resolution images that were common on web sites in 2007.)

Note that the "added value" that I am providing here is the collection, in one place, of these similar photos --- mostly photos taken near the contact of racket with ball. Bringing photos of this type together, in one place, facilitates comparison of the hand-eye (or ball-eye) coordination of the players.

Some of the photos have copyright notices that I did not remove. If the photographer/owner wants these photos removed, I will be glad to do so. But it seems it would be foolish, since this is essentially free advertising for those photographers.

Note that this is not a commercial web site. I am not making any money from this collection of photos. With me, it is a labor of love of tennis --- not love of money.

Some LINKS to find more
TENNIS STROKES pics and info
--- on the web:

Bottom of this
Tennis Strokes page
(an introduction and Federer pics).

To return to a previously visited web page location, click on the Back button of your web browser, a sufficient number of times.

OR, use the History-list option of your web browser.

OR ...

< Go to Top of Page, above. >

Or you can scroll up to the top of this page.


Page history:

Page was created 2007 Jan 24.

Page was changed 2007 Sep 19.
(Some re-formatting.)

Page was changed 2020 Sep 16.
(Added css and javascript to try to handle text-size for smartphones, esp. in portrait orientation. Specified the width of some images in proportion to the width of the browser window. Added some Wikipedia and WEB SEARCH links.)

Page was changed 2020 Sep 25.
(Changed image display from small, fixed-size thumbnails in table-cells to images of changeable size, scaled to the width of the window. Removed all the table cells including their borders.)