Developing a Weapon:
Andy Roddick’s Forehand

So the decision was to work with Andy’s grip and help him develop a world class forehand. So we spent many, many hours in the course of a couple of years just cleaning the ball up and trying to hit through the ball.

We focused on what it would take to be successful in pro tennis, because to be successful in pro tennis, you've got to be able to end points. You've got to have weapons. And maybe that was one difference compared to other young kids who might have been winning with a similar grip.

The result was that his forehand became multi-dimensional. Andy is consistent. He can hook the ball around the court with spin and move it around, but he also can step up like Agassi and hit through the shot.

I believe if you really practice doing this, you can do it no matter what grip you have. But you have to develop the mindset that this is what you want to do.

Preparation

When I think of Andy’s forehand, I think of torque. Look at how he takes the racquet back. His left hand is on the throat.

This is key, because he gets a great upper body turn. He keeps that left hand on the racquet as long as anybody I've seen and that's crucial. These are great fundamentals.

Backswing

Andy’s backswing is quite high. As he's gotten bigger and older and stronger, Andy’s has added more loop to his backswing, he's added more height.

Like Andy’s grip, that backswing is not something I would teach to a young player. Usually, with little kids, I have to condense the backswing first, and then as they get older, you can add length.

Andy’s back swing is quite high, but the one thing he doesn’t do, he doesn't break the plane of his shoulders. By that I mean he doesn't take the racquet back behind his body. He keeps it on the right side of the body.

Watch how Andy holds his hands and how long he keeps them up. This is key for timing and acceleration. A lot of kids I see get the racquet too low, too soon.

What happens is they drop the racquet too early, so the swing to the ball is almost like a separate segment. This creates a push—they just can’t accelerate in the same way.

So I have to change the whole timing mechanism. Their timing is off and that's usually what ruins strokes: timing.

What I like them to do is when they turn their shoulders, start the loop, and then keep the racquet up. From there the racquet actually drops into the hit and you create momentum. This creates more racquet head speed.

You can see this with Andy. The drop goes into the hit. You can see the racquet head actually gathering momentum.

He always had a little wiggle in the motion on the way down. There's a little play in the racquet prior to contact. He always had that, even from the first day I saw him. So I stuck with it.

It’s really an idiosyncrasy. You don't really recommend that, because that can produce a lot of errors. But it wasn’t ever a problem for Andy, because he was firm on contact.

You can see that when the drop goes into the hit, you can see that his wrist is really laid back. He gets firm on contact and can still hit through the ball solidly.

Stance

Andy sets up with the right foot behind the ball. Obviously when you're on the run or when you're under duress it's not going to happen. But this is his basic set up.

Andy has that great coil, but he's also measuring, he's stalking it, he's lining up the ball. Even though the loop is quite high, He's very much under control. It's not like some wild, flailing back swing like you see with some club players.

Playing on All Courts

Another thing about his forehand, he can play on all surfaces.
One thing that worried me: I didn't want him just to have what I call a clay court forehand, where he would hit too much top spin.

That's my biggest concern when people hit a lot of top spin--that they understand how to get through the ball and flatten it out. And obviously Andy can do that and that just makes him a lot more versatile. A lot of the players from, say, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, they really don't have the ability to flatten out the stroke because they didn't practice it enough at a young age.

So we spent a lot of time hitting balls up around the shoulder, figuring out the angle of the racquet, the angle of the wrist, so that he could clean it up.

Watch on the high ball how he puts the racquet right behind the ball and flattens it out. Notice the height of the racquet, it's almost level with the ball.

I think everybody has the ability to flatten it out if they are taught that way. I just didn't want him to set the table, get a three-quarters court shot and then hit one of these heavy top spin strokes down the corner, where he can't finalize.

Some guys with the extreme grips, they'll still put heavy spin on the high ball and they'll make all their shots. But the quality of the ball is not there. If the ball doesn't jump off the racquet, it's not going in a straight line.

So, if it's low, Andy can still get a great shot. If it's at his waist, he can hit a great shot. If it's at his shoulder, he can hit a great shot, whereas most people with this type of grip, they're one-dimensional, and he's not.

Compared to these other players, Andy looks at the court much differently. You know he is looking to take advantage because he knows he can drive the high balls on clay courts.

Contact

The contact point is in front. Even when he was little he always hit the ball in front. It's like some people can get there and some people can't. And he was always in front.

You never see Roddick late on the forehand because he has such fast hand speed. You never see him decelerate the racquet. You might see him put less speed or more speed on the ball. But there's always so much whip.

It’s like the racquet head is being flung at the ball. He never pushed the ball. There's no choke in his stroke, as they say. There's a lot of freedom, he's not stiff on the stroke.

Freedom, fluidity, relaxation, calmness, these all go into the power mode. He was never trained any other way, so maybe that's one of the reasons why he's always hitting in front. You can tell just by his eagerness to the ball that he’s just going fire it.

There's a theory to go for it when you're little, you know, accelerate, don't be bashful. But sometimes what happens is these kids start missing, they can actually get worse. They start trying to keep it in play. Even though they're making their shots, they're decelerating all the time.

Andy always wanted to accelerate and hit the ball very aggressively. Even when he would make errors, I would tell him it's a positive error because I just saw tremendous racquet speed, a lot of acceleration. I told him to keep going for it.

Let's face it, when you get under pressure, people have a tendency to push the ball and decelerate. A coach can have such an influence in making a stroke world-class, but the influence can also be detrimental.

I do think that when Andy feels pressured, he puts maybe a little bit too much spin on the ball. But when he is in his finest hour, he's taking some of the spin off of it and cleaning it up. But either way he's always accelerating. And I think that's why he has a world-class forehand.

He's thinking, be aggressive, accelerate, really go for it. He's always hitting the ball in front. These are the things that make his forehand a weapon.

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