June 26th, 2009 by Owen Jones

Tennis psychology is the same as understanding the workings of your opponent’s mind and assessing the effect of your own strategy on his/her head and also understanding the psychological effects resulting from the different external causes on your own mind.

Nevertheless, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own mental processes. So, you have to study the effect on yourself of the same thing happening under various conditions. This is because you react differently in different moods and under different conditions.

You must understand the effect on your game of the resulting irritation, pleasure, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction is. Does it increase your efficiency? If so, try for it, but never offer it to your opponent. Does it deprive you of concentration? If so, either remove the reason, or if that is not possible, strive to ignore it.

Once you have correctly assessed your own reaction to circumstances, study your opponents in order to decide their temperaments. Similar temperaments react similarly, and you can judge men of your own type by yourself. Other characters you have to seek to compare with those whose reactions you already know.

A person who can control his/her own mental processes runs an great chance of determining those of someone else for the minds works along definite lines of thought and can be studied. One can only control one’s own mental processes after studying them very carefully .

A steady, phlegmatic baseline player is seldom a keen thinker. If he was he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is usually a fairly clear indicator of his/her kind of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who usually advocates the baseline game, does so because he hates to stir up his/her slow mind to think out a safe strategy of getting to the net.

However, then there is the other type of baseline player, who would rather remain at the rear of the court while supervising an attack intended to disrupt up your game. He is a much more dangerous player and a deep, keen thinking opponent. He achieves his/her results by changing his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variety of his/her game. This player is a very good psychologist.

The first type of tennis player mentioned above simply strikes the ball without much thought about what he is really up to, while the latter always has a definite plan and adheres to it.