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Welcome to the Atlanta Tennis Podcast.

Every episode is titled, "It starts with tennis" and goes from there.

We talk with coaches, club managers, industry business professionals,

technology experts, and anyone else we find interesting.

We want to have a conversation as long as it starts with tennis.

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Hey, hey, this is Shaun with the Atlanta Tennis Podcast,

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With that said, let's get started with 10 minutes of tennis.

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Hey, hey, how we say? This is Shaun with GoTennis! and the Atlanta Tennis Podcast.

We are here with world renowned tennis coach.

I don't know if I actually have permission to call you that,

but I like calling you that Justin.

World renowned tennis coach Justin Yeo, the Aussie in Puerto Rico.

I have a friend who calls himself America in Spain.

So he's the American living in Spain.

You're the Aussie in Puerto Rico.

My buddies in Pennsylvania called me the ferner.

Said, "Oh yeah, the ferner."

It's spelled F-U-U-U, and yeah, ferner.

Yeah, exactly. That's a good Alabama kind of talk.

Like that.

But today we are talking about what player style are you and what game style fits your abilities.

So Justin, Yeo, that sounds like two questions to me.

So let's start with the first.

What player style are you?

Are there really people out there that don't already know?

Yeah, look, that's a pretty detailed question that now in 10 minutes,

but I'll do it the fastest we can.

I'm going to quote some Mike Borrell here because Mike Borrell is fantastic at the little ones.

What he has recognized and I've been saying this for probably two decades as well,

there's a bit of personality behind your game style.

And that's where a lot of players don't get it right.

And we can sort of use examples for Afer and Federer.

One very quiet, one very out there.

I used to ask kids, would you rather sit in a corner and read a book?

Or would you rather go watch a movie?

You can sort of get an idea of personality.

They're quiet one and this one's the rowdy you've won.

And you have to work with a personality sometimes to help the game style.

Because if you try to get them nice and calm and just move the ball around and be passive,

they might be a raffer and you're not utilizing their strength of their personality.

So that's a good one for little ones to start to identify how to get the right game style

around their personality.

Then you then need to put them in a competitive situation and see whether they like to attack

or whether they like to stay on the baseline and rally the ball.

Their mind, maybe their mental ability isn't right there yet.

So they actually struggle and start to make errors quickly.

So you have to try to force and work with the strength of what they have.

I've seen that in a lot in June.

June is a, get within four shots and they make an error or a winner.

Then you've got to start to structure things better in those four because that's sort of where

their mental state or their attention span is.

Whereas some will say, "Well, you need to get them to hit 50 balls."

Well, their eyes and their maturity won't allow them to hit 50 balls.

So the quality of striking and the style of play is not going again with their personality.

So, or where they're at, obviously.

And then you see kids that win a lot of tournaments that can play the game of chess.

And they just sit there mentally and visually can see everything.

And we'll just eat people alive all day long.

So that's on the junior side.

It takes a lot.

You've got to talk with your coach.

You've got to do a lot of assessment.

You've got to do an olive analysis as the player grows.

More analysis, more analysis.

But if I was good to put my coach development hat on.

Junior coach development hat from Australia.

The first thing I would say for most coaches or kids is start to work with them

on understanding how they can learn as many game styles as possible.

So that they learn that the game right now is the game that's going to be again involved in 10 or 15 years.

So you have to start to give them some of the tools that's going to give them a chance in 10, 15 years.

If not, you can't teach them like their 80s with a win screen right beforehand.

They ain't going to work.

So right now we're seeing everything's built on time.

Taking away time, taking the ball on the rise, getting to the net.

So the sooner the coaches start to teach them the more advantages they have in those game styles.

Flip it the other way.

And we go to a 40-something year old, a 30-something year old, or a 50-something year old.

They need to look at their physical capabilities and then say, "Alright, what can I hand or what can I hand?"

Because some of them, like myself, I'm 15-hour and I'm reinventing my physicality, didn't realise my hips were so bad.

And the trainer twice a week is destroying my hips.

But when he's doing it, what he's proven is it's not a degenerative thing.

I've just haven't trained them or strengthened them or given them mobility.

And because of that, I'm reinventing and I can actually run further, drive cross-court harder.

Service improves a lot. There's a lot of things.

So you have to work your options.

When you get to a later stage in life, you have to start to realise what you can do physically to play a certain game style.

Is that made sense?

Absolutely.

And as an adult, I'm going to ask this similar question.

I seem to ask when we have these conversations, which is, "Okay, we have the ability to look at a young player or a beginner."

And ask these questions early.

But let's say we're asking it late.

Like you say, I might have to physically stick with what I'm stuck with.

Well, like that.

I'll stick with what you're stuck with.

But in that case, it's a scenario where I've got to figure out what I have.

So those are my abilities.

And stick with that game style. But if that game style doesn't fit my personality,

I've got this strange cognitive dissonance going on.

Like asking me personally, Sean, the player, to hit 50 balls in a row,

I'm just going to walk off the court.

Yeah, I'm boring.

I'm just boring myself.

What?

And to leaving the court.

I'm going to hit a drop shot eventually.

It's just how my brain works.

But the more I play the other style,

the more my personal style works well.

So it's a combination of like he used to bring in multiple styles,

being able to do many of them.

So my question being, how many styles are there?

Are there just two?

There's offensive and defensive.

Is there, how many styles are there?

Three, four?

Have we quantified that?

Yeah, but we've quantified it.

You know, you can talk about an all-rounder.

You can talk about aggressive baselineer.

I think that's pretty much what we've come down to.

If you really look at the players these days,

and the players, these players nowadays,

have to have an all-round game.

Because if they don't have defensive slice,

or you know, cross-court winner,

or even just be able to hold a rally and come to the net,

you know, one of the things that Jokovic showed very obvious

that no one really talks about is I call it the opportunity world

where, you know, a ball slightly inside the baseline,

takes an early move backwards, waits for the opportunity and runs forward.

So there's definitely all-round player is the way to go.

And you've got to teach that as soon as possible.

But for players of amateur's, I think you're right.

I mean, you know, their physicality is a certain way

that they need to try to be an expert at the first four shots.

And I don't think if, you know, you could grow up in the 80s and the 90s,

we were all thought, "Rather, rather keep the ball alive,

get to the net, chip them charge," or all that stuff.

But we were taught to hit a lot of balls.

And there was never a purpose around zero to four shots,

like get it done, you know, and get into patterns of going that way.

Then I'll go that way, just like shooting pull, eight balls, right?

You start to think about, "I'm going to go that one,

and then I'm going to go that one, and then I'm going to go that one."

We didn't do that a lot, or total up in the tennis.

There's zero to four shots.

I mean, Craig Shonesy has proved that the average point is, you know, one or two shots.

If you look at the data, and even if the data, he's proven that zero to four

is where people need to be teaching themselves to do something.

And I still see a lot around, I still see a lot of balls.

And all you're putting is traffic and, you know, yards and miles on your body,

when you really should be trying to work on structures and patterns.

Well, that leaves us into next week, which is talking about patterns, singles versus doubles.

If I've got a good pattern that works for me, if my kick serve to your back hand coming in,

hitting a volley cross court on the ad side works really well for me, but it doesn't work on the

do's side, I need to know that. And I think that suits my abilities as well.

But if you don't have a nice kick serve, maybe that doesn't suit you.

So the player style doesn't work there.

Justin, you know, I appreciate your time. We'll talk to you again next week.

Thanks so much.

Yep, you're welcome.

Well, there you have it.

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