Aim higher over the net and most of your errors disappear

The average club player misses into the net several times more often than long, and fixes it by trying to aim more carefully.

Count the errors in a set of club tennis and sort them into two piles. Balls into the net, and balls beyond the baseline. The net pile will be substantially larger, and this is close to universal across amateur tennis. Then watch how players respond to it. They concentrate harder. They try to be more accurate. They do not raise their target, which is the only thing that would help.

The reason the imbalance exists is that the net is a hard boundary and the baseline is not. A ball hit a foot too low is dead immediately. A ball hit a foot too long is out by a foot, and a ball hit a foot too short of your intended depth is still in play and still a decent shot. The penalty structure is asymmetric, so the optimal aim point is not the middle of the available window. It is higher than feels correct.

Professionals hit with far more net clearance than television conveys, and the camera angle is largely responsible for the misconception. The standard high behind the baseline view compresses vertical distance, so a ball passing four feet over the net looks like it is skimming it. Sit at court level at a tournament once and the first thing that surprises you is how high the ball goes. Rally balls travel well clear of the tape and the flat drives are the exception rather than the pattern.

Topspin is what makes the higher target affordable. A ball with real rotation can cross a metre above the net and still land inside the baseline because the spin brings it down, and this is the actual point of topspin for an amateur. Not power. Margin. A flat hitter aiming a metre over the net is hitting it out, so a flat hitter has to play close to the tape, and their error count reflects that whether they notice or not.

The drill is trivial and almost nobody does it. Run a string or a rope a metre above the net, rally, and make the string the target rather than the net. Two sessions is usually enough to reset a player's sense of what a good ball looks like.

Consistency is not concentration. It is geometry, and it is adjustable this afternoon.