TennisOne Lessons

How we worked to develop Becky's game and reach a professional ranking

Tennis started out in 1995 as physical therapy to assist Becky in rehabilitating from a form of viral encephalitis. We could not be on the court for more than an hour once a month before she started having severe headaches. This period lasted about six months, but from the start, we began our study by applying systems analysis and neuroscience.

Starting in the spring of 1996, Becky began playing USTA amateur tournaments. For the next three years progress was slow, as the scientific information that we needed was not available.

Becky Brown on Court

In the spring of 1999 Becky decided to enter professional tournaments. Our goal became to see if an adult with no previous experience could reach professional play. With the relatively small amount of information we had developed so far, Becky made progress winning three first round matches over the next two years. On the other hand, she lost easily to experienced players. When questioned about why she played poorly against these players, she explained that the other players' depth of experience intimidated her. Consequently, she was unsatisfied with her inability to play against the best players or win a second round match. She constantly felt like she was an imposter.

To accelerate Becky's progress, in late 2000 we began to analyze slow motion video of the professionals to understand how they were producing their strokes. This turned out to be a key missing link in our approach. We broke down the strokes of the top male and female players using Andre Agassi and Elena Bovina as models to study. The result was the development of the EASI Tennis system in 2002 about a year and a half later. During this time we reduced her tournament play so that we could focus on getting the information right. As a result, she lost her ranking due to lack of participation (her highest rank at that point was 1107 in fall of 2000).

Our next step is to return to tournament play this spring.

To contact us, please email to: webmaster@tennisone.com