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An example of a player at the net not having enough time to react to the visual information so he was hit in the face instead of having his racket hit the ball.

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One of my favorite moments in tennis growing up was when my coaches ended practices with a game called volley wars. The reason why I enjoyed the game so much was because it was an extremely fast paced game that relied on my ability to react to the tennis ball. My two opponents hit from the volley position on the court while my partner and I were standing on the opposite side of the net in the same position. The game aimed to improve reactions and timing of quick volleys. To be successful in this game, and ultimately not to be hit by the ball, reaction to the ball is crucial in determining when to move my racket and decide what I’m going to do in response. The critical value of Tau that I had previously established from playing determined at what point I would start moving my racket. As the image of the tennis ball expands on the retina, the time to contact decreases. So after many games where I was hit by the ball or completely missed the ball on my reaction, I developed knowledge that could help determine the threshold I would start to move my racket at. This follows the results López-Moliner et al. (2007) found in their study that knowing the size of the tennis ball and its rate of expansion sets a threshold value. My previous knowledge of volleys and first few practices playing the game allowed me to gain experience of the rate of expansion at different speeds. The more I played, I became capable of deciding when to start moving my racket to hit the ball at different expansion rates. Now when I play, I don’t have any purple bruises with part of “Wilson” stamped into my arms and can time my movement to coincide with the moving ball.

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The far player is representative of having practiced the approach shot and forcing his opponent to play a short ball for which he is prepared to run up and hit.

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My high school coaches always emphasized to me in practices to learn and “play the pattern” on the tennis court. Most opponents will follow a pattern when presented with a certain type of shot. With lots and lots of practice, this led me to understand the association between my shots with the return hit of my opponent and I tended to anticipate a certain reaction from others. This is especially true for “down the line” shots where I would hit the ball to the same side of the court I was hitting from instead of playing the ball back cross court. The pattern allowed me to prepare myself and anticipate an approach shot where I’d move into the volley position up at the net to finish the point. After so many hours of practice, I became good at anticipating this event and the spatial timing of it, and as a result, when I would hit the ball down the line, I would always move in towards the net and be in a good position to finish the point.

The great amount of practice I did to learn this pattern decreased my reaction time needed to move up to the net. At first, I never liked practicing drills with this pattern because I was so bad at reacting to the short ball that was played in return. It felt like never ending sprints up the court and either bombing the ball into the net or playing it way out of bounds. But with practice, I was able to anticipate where the ball would go, and in turn, be able to get to the ball in time because my reaction was shorter. This is indicative of the advantage that anticipation allows in processing information. I was able to anticipate a reaction and prepare my actions to the stimuli I encountered. The more I practiced, the quicker I was able to anticipate the shorter ball and react to the shorter ball faster. Instead of an “oh no” moment when that ball came short and had to sprint up to the shorter shot, I could react to and perform the approach shot much better.

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Pick Up Class GIF by Tennis TV - Find & Share on GIPHY

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Discover & share this Tennis TV GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

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Younger players are more overwhelmed and not able to process many pieces of information because this processing hasn't been well developed.

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Thinking back to when I first started playing tennis, I and 9 other 2nd graders came waltzing onto the court with our rackets and a bottle of water ready to become the next Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal. I remember that first summer I learned to play it was very much getting down the basics. The second summer, we all came back even more excited because we learned how to play points against each other. Our instructor told us to only focus on hitting the ball to our partner and how we had learned to hit it. I remember when I got older and started teaching the new kids that my instructor had told me to teach everything as simply as possible and to focus on one thing at a time. This was because younger players can really only focus on very few things.

As I got older, practices became harder because more layers were added onto skills and getting good at something required me to focus on what I learned earlier and so many other aspects. When it was time for me to improve my serve after a few years, my coach didn’t just focus on one thing at a time. Instead, she combined different aspects and told me how to move my wrist differently, the angle of my hand compared to the racket, ball, court, and feet, and the follow through. It was a lot to grasp at first, and even when breaking it down into simpler pieces, there was more to focus on than when I had first learned to serve back in 2nd grade. Because I was older, the development of my information processing progressed and I was able to process more information at the same time. I could focus my attention on multiple aspects, recall past memories of serves, and be better at the information processing mechanism. Improving my serve now relied on so many different things, and I can process a lot more information at the same time because with age, there was more cognitive development.

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Zach Galifianakis Algorithm GIF by Product Hunt - Find & Share on GIPHY

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Unfortunately I couldn't find a picture of me doing a corner kick, but here is one of me playing and using procedural memory to dribble the ball up the field.

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Just don't think about it and it'll be fine

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Just don't think about it and it'll be fine

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Back in high school, my sister and I were always the ones switching off to do corner kicks in soccer games. While it was a lot of fun to have the responsibility, it was also very stressful if game situations were difficult to adapt to. It was sometimes difficult to predict where my teammates would run to, and if I thought about it too much, I can pretty much guarantee you that my kick would suffer. This was especially true in early high school games. Corner kicks were almost an automatic motion that I had learned to do over the years, and while I became very good at them, if I altered part of the movement because I told myself to, the nonconscious and automatic kick I had learned wouldn’t be executed. That is because in instances where I wanted to achieve a certain angle or alter the height or length of the ball, I would go over each aspect of the movement in my head. I was attempting to recall declarative memories from when I had learned parts of the skill in previous practices. Because I hadn’t regularly thought about what I was doing, it was difficult to translate what I was thinking into my actual kick so I ended up making errors. My fault had been trying to bring the nonconscious and automatic skill into conscious thought, and therefore, instead of being able to just look and see where I wanted to place the ball and doing so, I was thinking about the movements and kicked the ball way too short and low.

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Diamond League Running GIF by RunnerSpace.com - Find & Share on GIPHY

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