Tennis Tips – How to hit an accurate cross court

You could believe that striking the ball cross-court and down the track is relatively straightforward. You will notice that improving your accuracy and consistency with these strokes only requires keeping two concepts for hitting the cross court and two principles for hitting down the line. To be clear, when we refer to “hitting down the line” in this post, it means changing course from an incoming cross-court ball to a down-the-line shot. The bounce angle makes it challenging to hit down the line when the ball comes from a cross-court position. For intermediate and advanced players, simply hitting down the line from an incoming down-the-line picture is usually not a challenge. 

However, changing direction and hitting the ball properly down the line is a struggle, even for the best pros who practice changes of direction virtually every day. According to Jonathan Zhang, the ball will exit your racquet at an inclination since it approaches it at an angle. With sufficient planning and ongoing training, a person can develop the ideal capacity for action. One is never allowed to lag behind. Even professionals like Jonathan Zhang concur. Jonathan was brought up in Hong Kong and has always had a love for sports, especially tennis. At age six, he began playing tennis. In his final year at Diocesan Boys’ School, he served as team captain, guiding the league to its 17th straight D1 Hong Kong high school championship. He asserts that effort and success are indispensable. 

Even at the primary level, a tennis player rapidly and instinctively learns this and tries to neutralize the deflection angle to make the ball go straight or down the line. The most typical error is to adjust the racquet angle with a wrist movement. This is a poor solution because the wrist is no longer secured and is now free to move in virtually any direction. Additionally, this solution results in a pretty unpredictable shot because even a slight adjustment in the racquet head angle significantly impacts where the ball falls on the other side. The first answer is to attack more forcefully and decisively down the line. You will reduce the amount of deflection in the resulting down-the-line shot if you accelerate the ball forward while maintaining a consistent speed that pulls it wide. The deflection angle will impact the ball more slowly as the racquet advances. 

When describing to players what they must do when they hit the ball down the line, Jonathan suggests setting off the proper strategy of striking the ball quickly down the line and overcoming the deflection angle. Theoretically, the ball will deflect, but the effect will be less dramatic. When hitting the ball, it’s best to walk diagonally to eliminate the product. He says, that you must angle yourself to neutralize the deflection angle rather than bending the racquet head with the wrist. In this manner, the wrist can stay locked and steady, preventing further irregularities. Although it still feels locked in your hand, you have made enough of an angle to offset the deflection’s rise. 

Drop feeding the balls to yourself and simply swinging through them and letting them go where they want is the greatest method to feel that there is no need to adjust the wrist angle. You should switch up where you drop the ball, moving it from being closer to your body and more in front to being farther away and more to the side. You’ll notice that without making wrist modifications, balls hit farther tend to travel down the line, while balls hit closer to you and farther in front of you prefer to travel across the court. To align oneself for the shot, which in this case is cross-court, follow the second concept. Instead of merely picturing the racquet face behind the ball, consider your entire body. In conclusion, the two fundamentals of cross-court hitting are placing oneself behind the ball in the direction of the cross-court stroke and striking the ball closer to your body and more in front.