By the time I hit my 10th consecutive unforced error on Court 12, I realized I needed much longer than a one-hour tennis clinic to clean up my act. Alas, a 60-minute time frame was all I could space during my recent outing at Racquet Club, a storied locale that has, through its history, welcomed the likes of tennis greats Fred Perry, Jimmy Connors, and Madison Keys. And now, me. “Relax before you hit the ball,” tennis pro Larry Gottfried advised me after I dumped the ball into the net once again. Easier said than done, I thought. But the bigger takeaway was that after a handful of strokes, Gottfried saw something that no one had been able to pinpoint before in my tennis game: a mental glitch that spilled over into my physical play. It was that type of trained eye, that level of experience, that I needed to rework how I contacted the ball.
On a whim, I signed up for a Tuesday morning group session called “FUNdamentals Tennis Clinic.” Perhaps I leaned too much into the word “fun” in the title when I sauntered up to Court 12 on a sunny, near cloudless morning.