Tennis tactical board: serve targets, the serve plus one, court position and doubles

Tennis has no formations to draw, and that is exactly why a board helps. A point is a pattern — where the serve goes, where the reply is likely to come, where the next ball should be hit — and a pattern that has been drawn and practised is one a player recognises in the middle of a match, when there is no time to think it through.

Why tennis needs a board

In a team sport the board shows where players stand. In tennis there are one or two players a side, and what matters is where the ball goes: which target the serve aims at, which reply that invites, and what the next shot does with it. Those patterns are what a player carries onto the court. During a match they make their decisions largely on their own, so the patterns have to be learned beforehand, drawn and then hit a few hundred times in practice.

A board also keeps them. The patterns a player built against a big server in spring are still there when the same opponent comes up again in autumn.

The court you draw on

The whole court, the net across the middle, and the lines that carry the meaning:

The baselines, 23.77 metres apart. The server stands behind one, between the centre mark and the sideline.
The service lines, 6.40 metres from the net, and the centre service line between them, which together make the four service boxes.
The singles sidelines, 8.23 metres apart, and outside them the doubles alleys, which take the court to 10.97 metres.
The net, 0.914 metres high in the middle and 1.07 at the posts. A ball on a line is in.

The player the drawing is about is white and always on the left; the opponent is dark blue. The ball’s path is dashed yellow and the ring marks where it bounces; white arrows are movement.

Serve targets

Serving from the deuce court into the opposite service box: wide, at the body and down the T.

Every serve goes diagonally into the opposite service box, from the right of the centre mark on the first point of a game, the deuce court, and from the left on the next, the advantage court. Inside the box there are three targets that matter. Wide pulls the returner off the court and opens it up. Down the T, along the centre line, crosses the net at its lowest point and takes away the angle of the return. At the body jams them and is the hardest to return with a full swing.

A good server does not have a favourite target so much as a plan: which one on the big points, which one to set up the next shot, which one on the second serve. That plan is drawn once and then practised target by target.

The serve plus one

A wide serve pulls the returner out of the court; the return comes back cross-court, and the server hits the next ball down the line into the space that is left. Dashed yellow: the ball. White arrows: movement.

The first shot after the serve decides more points than the serve itself. The idea is simple and has a name, the serve plus one: serve to open a space, then hit the next ball into it. A wide serve in the deuce court drags the returner beyond the sideline; the return usually comes back cross-court, and the server, already moving towards it, sends the next ball down the line where nobody is standing.

The pattern works only if the server expects the return before it comes, and that expectation is what the drawing builds. Other patterns follow the same shape: a serve down the T for a short return in the middle, a body serve for a weak reply the server can attack.

Where to stand after a shot

The opponent can hit anywhere in the shaded angle, from down the line to the sharp cross-court. The player recovers to the line through the middle of it, a metre off the centre mark, not to the centre mark itself.

After every shot the player has to get back into position, and the instinct is to return to the centre mark. The better place is the middle of the angle the opponent can hit into. From the corner of their court, the opponent can play anything between a ball down the line and a sharp cross-court; the line that splits that angle in two meets the baseline away from the centre mark, towards the side the player has just hit from.

Standing there, the player is exactly as far from a ball down the line as from one cross-court. Standing on the centre mark leaves one of them short and the other long, which is exactly the gap an opponent looks for. It is a small distance on court and a big one on a board, where the angle can be drawn and seen.

Doubles

One up, one back: the server serves wide, the returner goes cross-court, and the server’s partner at the net crosses and volleys at the feet of the opponent on the service line.

Doubles has formations after all, and they are what a doubles board is mostly used for. The standard one is one up and one back: the server’s partner at the net on the other side, the returner’s partner on the service line. Teams also play both at the net, both back against a strong serving team, the I-formation, with the net player crouched on the centre line and moving left or right only after the serve, and the Australian, with the net player on the same side as the server.

The best-known play in any of them is the poach: the net player crosses the middle to cut off the cross-court return and volleys it at the opponent closest to the net, or through the gap between them. It only works if the server knows it is coming and covers the side the partner has left, which is why partners agree on it with a signal before the serve — and why it gets drawn before it gets played.

Still or animated

A still drawing shows where the ball should go. An animated one shows when — the returner still moving wide as the server steps in, the net player leaving just as the return is struck. In tennis that timing is most of the game, which is why those are the drills worth drawing so that they move. How that works, and when arrows on a still picture are enough, is covered in animated drills.

From the board to the session

On most tactical boards the drawing is where the work ends: an image, saved somewhere. In Ultimate Coach it is where the work starts. The pattern you drew becomes a drill, the drill goes into a training session plan, and the session goes into the calendar and out to the players, who see the same court and the same pattern on their phones before they arrive.