Stop running back to the middle after every ball

The centre mark is a convenient landmark and a poor recovery target, because it ignores where the opponent can actually hit from.

Most coaching from the age of about ten onward carries a hidden instruction. Hit, then get back to the middle. It is easy to teach, easy to police from a chair at the net post, and wrong often enough that it costs matches.

The better recovery point is the bisector of the angles available to your opponent. If you have pushed them wide into their forehand corner, the widest ball they can hit crosscourt and the widest they can hit down the line define a wedge, and you want to stand where those two edges are equidistant. That point is not the centre mark. It is a metre or more toward the side you just hit to.

Ignore this and you get a familiar pattern. Player hits a lovely deep ball to the corner, sprints dutifully back to the middle, and gets passed down the line by a shot that had no business winning the point. The down the line ball travels a shorter distance and arrives earlier. Recovering to the geometric middle of the court hands the opponent that shorter option for free.

The complication, and the reason I would not teach the bisector as an absolute either, is that opponents are not equally capable across the wedge. A club player dragged wide on the backhand can hit crosscourt and nothing else. Standing on the true bisector against that player wastes half your positioning on a shot that will not come. Standing there against somebody with a reliable down the line backhand is exactly right. So the honest version of the rule is that recovery position is a bet on your opponent's shot menu, updated point by point.

That reframes what a court coverage drill should look like. Feeding two balls to alternate corners and demanding a touch of the centre mark in between trains the wrong habit at high intensity, which is the worst combination available. Better drills have a decision in them. Feed wide, then make the player choose their recovery spot before the next ball is fed, and vary where the next ball goes so that lazy central defaults get punished immediately.

The fitness benefit does not disappear. It just stops being the only thing being trained.

The best movers I have watched are rarely the fastest. They are the ones who were already standing near the answer.