By USPTA Elite Professional Craig O'Shannessy (@BrainGameTennis), excerpted from Num3ers product on braingametennis.com

What exactly is consistency? Does it have a number? How many is too many?

Stop for a minute and think about all the players, in all the countries in the world, practicing every single day to improve. They are hitting millions of balls to develop their skills in our wonderful sport.

But are they practicing the right thing?

I use the term “reverse engineering” a lot to describe how I coach. That means starting with knowing what the finished product is, and then working backwards to create it.

Think of all the players on the courts in London, Lima, Los Angeles, La Paz, Launceston, Leon, Lisbon and Leipzig. They are hitting ball after ball after ball after ball after ball with no real defined purpose or strategy, and no real understanding that hitting lots of balls in a row isn’t really what happens in a tennis match anyway.

Don’t get me wrong – you do need to hit A LOT of balls to get better at this sport. Muscle memory is a big deal.





Hitting a lot of balls to develop consistency is a good thing.

The problem is overkill.

Too much mindless hitting. Too many pointless forehands and backhands.

Points typically don’t last that long. Practice needs to reflect that reality.

Don’t overdose on something in practice that doesn’t occur even 1% of the time in a match.

Long rallies = broken strategies.





Playing long rallies is not a tactic you should be seeking, and it’s certainly not something that happens with any regularity on the pro tour.



Let’s get crystal clear in these three areas:

Unfortunately, most players practice much differently than how they play matches. We aim to create long rallies in practice, but they are such an extremely small part of the the reality of playing a match.



You need to hit a lot of balls to develop your technique, but you don’t need to practice long rallies because they are so incredibly rare in a match. Other factors weigh far heavier in determining the final outcome.



Long rallies are typically the result of something gone wrong much more than something gone right. There will be some matches you play where running the opponent side to side, time and time again, is the perfect tactic. But most strategies don’t take 10 or 15 or 20 shots for a player to develop. They happen earlier in a rally, where the pressure quickly rises to either force an error or hit a winner.



Most players would love to hit 15+ consecutive balls in practice, but is that really happening in matches?



Let’s take a close look at rally length data from all of the Grand Slams.

MEN – Grand Slam Long Rally Length Data

These are some crystal clear numbers. You would think long rallies happen more on the pro tour, because these players have refined their games so well, that they should hardly ever miss. You would think that long rallies are a good thing, showing the amazing shot tolerance of the best players in the world.

You would be wrong.

Firstly, a little math refresher, so you know what you are looking at – .01% means 1%. – .0003% literally means 3% OF 1% – minuscule, or basically non-existent.

Long rallies of 27 shots (12 to 13 shots for each player) don’t come close to even making up 1% (.01%) of points played in a match. They are not even on the radar!

What’s interesting is that there were more long rallies of 27+ shots at the U.S. Open and the Australian Open than the French Open. That’s a good lesson for all of us – what we think is true may just be a myth.

WOMEN – Grand Slam Long Rally Length Data

The common school of thought is that the women’s game is full of longer rallies, since the ladies don’t quite have the firepower to hit as many winners. You would expect many more longer rallies, especially at the upper end of the spectrum. You would think the ladies rely more on consistency, pushing rallies more than the guys.

Better get the facts first.

This is another great example of how numbers flip conventional wisdom on it’s head. The women’s game is not dominated by long rallies. The shot tolerance on the women’s tour is not greater than the men’s tour. Tennis is indeed dominated by “First Strike” tactics much more than trying to get one more ball back in play.

Comparison: Men v Women

I find the table below so fascinating. These must be the lowest numbers of anything that’s getting tracked in the game. For example, the men only played 2% OF 1% of long rallies of 30+ shots in the past four grand slams. It’s such an extremely low, minuscule number that it bears no significance whatsoever. AND the ladies are less!



Think of it this way:

PRACTICE COURT – We seek longer rallies. We think longer is better. We spend the majority of our practice time hitting ball after ball, seeking this style of point in practice.

MATCH– It’s irrelevant. It happens so infrequently you can completely ignore it. Long rallies are unicorns.

BIRTHDAYS – Imagine if you celebrated your birthday at the exact same rate the ladies played a 30+ rally in a Grand Slam event. Well, that would be three birthdays in 195 years, (71,113 days), or about one every 65 years. It’s a non-factor.

2014 US Open

For both the men and women, 80% of the longest rallies happened in the first week of the tournament. 20% happened in the second week.

It’s important to note that 88.5% of the matches (rounds 1-3) occur in the first week, so on the surface, that all looks like it matches up pretty well.

But it’s not quite that simple.

In week one, everyone is involved. In week two, the elite and in-form are the only ones left. From the quarters on for the men, only three rallies out of 3,085 made it to 26 shots (13 shots for each player). That’s 0.0009. That’s about one in a thousand.

Why would you spend time on the practice court preparing for a situation that only comes around one time in a thousand?

It’s to nobody’s real benefit to play a 20+ shot rally because there is no pattern being developed, no strategy being executed. It’s far more hoping the opponent will miss rather than making them miss.

Yes, consistency is something we absolutely love, but how many balls do you need to make in a row in order to be certified consistent – 4, 6, 10, 20?

To boil it all down, playing 20+ shot rallies (10 shots each) has it’s place in the sport, as you sometimes seek to break down your opponent both physically and mentally. But honestly, who wants to have to hit 10 to 15 shots all the time to win the point? How mentally and physically exhaustive is that? Burnout is just waiting to happen.

When you see extended rallies, think of them as “outliers.” For a brief moment in time, for whatever reason, both players can’t miss, but reality will surely kick right back in on the next point.

Originally appeared in the January 2016 issue of The Standard, the official newsletter of the USPTA Southern Division.

