Split-step timing beats raw speed on a tennis court

A court is small enough that the first half-second decides everything, and sprint training keeps addressing the wrong half.

A singles court is twenty-seven feet wide. Even at full stretch, the longest run a baseline player makes in a rally is a handful of steps. So the idea that a player is a good mover because he is fast has always struck me as a category error, because there is barely enough distance for top speed to exist, let alone to matter.

What matters is the half-second before the run starts, and that is a timing problem.

The split step is the small hop a player makes as the opponent strikes the ball, landing with the weight on the balls of both feet just as the shot leaves the strings. Its job is to put the legs into a loaded, pre-tensioned state so that the first push can happen in whichever direction turns out to be necessary. Get it right and the player is already moving before the ball crosses the net. Get it late and he lands flat-footed while the ball is in flight, which means he has to load first and then push, and that sequence costs perhaps two tenths of a second.

Two tenths does not sound like much. On a court that size it is the difference between arriving balanced with a choice of shots and arriving stretched with one.

The uncomfortable part is that the timing is set by the opponent, not by the player, which means it has to be recalibrated for every different swing he faces. A server with a slow, high toss demands a different rhythm from a compact one. Players who look sluggish against a particular opponent are frequently not tired, they are landing at the wrong moment, all afternoon.

I would spend more of the training week on this than almost anything else, and hardly anybody does. Movement work still tends to mean cones, ladders and sprints, which build a capacity that is rarely the binding constraint. Watching video of an opponent's service motion and hopping to it is dull and looks like nothing.

You can see who has done the work. It is not the quickest player on the court.

It is the one who somehow never seems to be running.