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All players, club to professional level, have their favorite shots to hit.

Big forehands, slice backhands, volleys, slice, topspin or flat serves. We practice these shots over and over again in lessons, team practices, ball machines and hitting on backboards. However when we get into matches, sometimes our shots seem to spray all over, find the net or go out by a good distance. What is going wrong here? This doesn’t happen in practice. What am I not aware of? The answer might be your contact point.

Your contact point, whether dictated by you or by your opponent, decides the personality of the shot being hit back. Generally speaking, we hit with either a topspin drive, a slice or a more looping type of a shot. Your effectiveness and consistency is determined by your ability to identify where your contact point is going to happen and then match up the proper grip and shot selection to that contact point. Many unforced errors are caused by incorrect shot selections and grip match ups to the contact point.

Simply put, bad match ups equal bad shots. Let’s look at three distinct contact point match ups.

Comfort zone