Proposal and evaluation of a practice session including a learning tennis wall

Abstract

Tennis is a challenging sport to learn. Novice children players (5-8 years old) need a certain amount of practice to reach both consistency and mastery in their strokes. In an attempt to support the coach and help the players to remain active, ©Artengo designed an equipment consisting of increasing the hitting volume during a practice session: The Tennis Wall. The objectives of the present study were i) to propose a practice session including the use of the Tennis Wall, ii) to evaluate the influence of adding the Tennis Wall on the hitting volume in a practice session with novice children tennis players. A practice session with the Tennis Wall allowed to hit about 3 times more balls for each young tennis player compared with a traditional practice session. Although the results of this study need to be confirmed with a larger sample of participants and more training sessions, they suggest that the Tennis Wall can be an interesting support to learn tennis due to the increased repetition of strikes which contributes to skill acquisition.