Focus, Focus. This is a mantra repeated at all levels. Focus on what? Most of the time you hear, “focus on the ball”.

Is that all there is to focusing? Attentively watching the ball? Or is there more?

I am adventuring that you are acting and reacting within a period of time, sometimes a few seconds or fractions thereof, and that some moments in time are more important than others. Putting more attention on these moments and details than on the peripheral ones gets the player zeroed-in on the task at hand and a better result.

Take the serve, for example. First you go through your balancing act, feeling comfortably lined-up and ready to serve. Then you toss the ball while raising your arms in a coordinated move and dropping the racquet behind. These are just a routine. What happens next? Your toss is never perfect, even at the top level of the game, so you have to adjust the position of your racquet hand in relation to the ball, prior to executing your normal upward and pronation move. I call this adjustment “finding” the ball. And it is never the exact same.

This late process requires more attention than the previous moves, those previous ones repeated by feel and habit. Now your attention is on the ball up there and the position of your playing hand and the focus has changed to an awareness of what is happening and on how to adjust. So much that you leave the tossing hand up there for a second, creating a slight pause.

This pause is a major factor. Don’t pause and you will not “find” the ball.

At the highest level of performance, the player not only “finds” the ball perfectly regardless of the toss, but also focuses through the ball. We could define this action of the player as focusing on that span of time starting just prior to contacting the ball and expanding through the impact and follow-through.

Amateurs sometimes resort to change their serve motion according the results of the toss. Top pros have decided on the serve motion prior to the toss, and they follow through according to plan: a slice, a topspin serve, a flatter one, or a combination.

One caveat: the longer the upward and across follow-through on the serve, the easiest it is to control what happens to the ball. This is main the reason top players exaggerate follow-throughs on all strokes, except on the volleys, which are stops.