Recently I was talking to a tennis coach. He was watching his students play and simultaneously was answering my questions. I found them interesting and decided to share some of his answers with you.

Who will win Australian Open 2021, Djokovic or Medvedev?

I think that Djokovic is the best player right now, and I’ll pick him over Medvedev, but we’ll know soon. The Australian Open is the most unpredictable of the four Grand Slam tournaments.

Why hundreds of tennis academies do not produce top players? What is the main difference between “academies” and private coaches?

In art, they talk about academic art as implying that painters are molded like cookies. You can take a good painter or player and make him better, but you’re not going to create Van Gogh. Education is not done by a majority vote. If a tennis player has to listen to several voices, he is not going to know which one to believe, so he will pick the voice that corresponds most closely to what he already believes. That’s not a recipe for growth.

A few pro players use serve and volley now, almost nobody from the top players. Is serve and volley still alive? Or it may be effectively used only by all-court players as an addition to their play?

The great serve and volley players of the past forty years or so were, in general, great tennis players who added serve and volley to their game. Names that come to mind include McEnroe, Edberg, Becker, Sampras, and Rafter. The fiction of a great serve and volleyer who had no ground game, say Annacone, is a fiction. He was a very good, but not a great player. Now imagine being fluent in French, say, and then being asked to learn Chinese at age 16 or 19. You would need very strong motivation to go through this. Because players are forgoing college to turn professional, they lack the time to learn this new and difficult tennis language. So they don’t.

I’ve heard that technology has rendered the style obsolete. Players are too strong. Returners are too good. But technology also makes the serve faster with more action. And am I supposed to believe that today’s players return better than Borg or Connors or Agassi? The game has always gone in cycles. It will continue to do so.

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