The extreme grip that owns the clay season struggles below the knee

A western forehand grip is built for high contact and heavy spin, and it becomes a liability the moment the ball skids.

Grip choice is a decision about contact height, and everybody treats it as a decision about spin. The two are related but they are not the same thing, and confusing them has cost a lot of juniors a lot of matches.

Rotate the hand further under the handle toward a western grip and the racquet face closes at a natural contact position. To hit the ball cleanly with a closed face you have to meet it high, around chest height or above, and brush upward steeply. That produces heavy topspin and it is superb against a ball that has bounced up to meet you. On a slow high bouncing clay court it is close to the ideal arrangement.

Now drop the ball to ankle height on a skidding grass court or a low fast hard court. The same grip has to open the face somehow, and the only way to do that from underneath is to drop the hand very low, bend a great deal, and swing up through a much longer path. It can be done. It takes more time, more knee, and more precision than a player with a semi western or eastern grip needs for the same ball, and the shot that comes out is a defensive lift rather than a drive.

That is the whole story of why certain players look like a different person in June. Not confidence, not the strangeness of grass, not slipping. A technical arrangement optimised for one contact height meeting a surface that refuses to provide it.

The obvious retort is that grips are adjustable, and they are, marginally, within a match. What is not adjustable at short notice is the swing path and the timing built on top of the grip over fifteen years. A player who shifts their hand a few degrees for a grass week has a grip they have never rallied with, on a surface they play three weeks a year.

I would coach juniors toward the semi western middle for exactly this reason, and I know it is unfashionable. The extreme grips win more junior matches, because junior tennis is played on slow courts against high bouncing balls hit by opponents who cannot flatten anything out.

Optimising for fourteen is not the same as optimising for twenty four. The bill arrives later, on grass, in front of everybody.