In the last article I wrote on the serve and the return tactics for clay court players. Today I will show you what strategy that works best for the ground strokes, and court movement.

Today’s clay court players usually have very strong and consistent ground strokes. A clay court specialist bases their strategy by dominating the point from the baseline. They usually also have their forehand as his/her strongest weapon.

When you play tennis on the clay court, you should try to set up the point as the pros are by using your forehand on 70 percent of the court area. What that means is that you have to run around your backhand and hit inside out or inside in forehands. An inside out forehand is when you run around your backhand, and hit your forehand to your opponent’s backhand. An inside in forehand is when you are running around, and hits your forehand down the line on your opponent’s forehand.

When you run around your forehand, you should make sure that you put pressure on your opponent by hitting aggressively. You have 3 choices where you can hit the ball, and they are:

1. Inside out – hit the ball deep
2. Inside out – hit the ball short cross court
3. Inside in – hit the ball deep. By hitting the ball inside in, you might open up your court side which might hurt you because your opponent can hit a short cross court ball back to your forehand. So, when you choose to hit inside in, make sure that it is a winner or almost.

When the ball lands on your backhand, you have two options that you can use to dominate the point.

1. Hit a flat down the line backhand to your opponent’s forehand.
2. Hit a short crosscourt backhand to your opponent’s backhand to open up the court.

But, before you can hit penetrating shoots, you have to build up the point with consistent stroke patterns. Some of the mostly used strategies are:

- Move your opponent around the court by:

• Changing the directions of the ball.
• Trying to wrong foot your opponent – hit behind your opponent when he is on his way to cover the empty side.
• Forcing your opponent to come up to the net by hitting drop shots.
• Using the X strategy – hit a deep crosscourt ball to one side, and hit the next shoot short crosscourt to the other side.

- Attack your opponent’s weakest side. If your opponent has a weak backhand, make sure that you attack that side, and hit a winner to his forehand side whenever he is out of his court position.

-Keep your opponent behind the baseline by hitting high topspin balls that bounce over your opponents shoulder.

Mix up your game by hitting drop shots. In today’s tennis game, you see that the professional tennis players use a lot of drop shots when they are standing inside the baseline. When you hit a drop shot, your opponent should be well behind the baseline. This is a good tactic to use if you want to disrupt your opponent’s rhythm of play. A good tennis tip on hitting a drop shot is that you should practice on disguising your drop shot.

You should have good court positioning and movement

What this means is that you should aim to have the same court positioning and movement characteristics as the greatest clay court tennis players have.

Those characteristics are:
• You should play close to the baseline.
• Move to hit as many shots as possible with your biggest weapon.
• You should move forwards, so that you can take the ball early and preferably on the rise.
• After returning a forcing shot, you should recover to your correct court position quickly.

When you play tennis on the clay, it is important to have the ability to slide on the balls that are far from the reach. This is why the hard court tennis specialist players have a hard time when they play tennis on the clay court. They have never had the opportunity to practice on the sliding technique. If you do not slide before you hit the ball, you will slide after you have made contact with the ball, and you will lose important time to recover from your shoot. Your will probably have a hard time to reach the next shoot from your opponent.

Since the points last longer on clay and the tennis matches last longer than usual, it is important to have a good physical endurance. Before the clay season starts, it is wise to work on the endurance by doing more running exercises. You can do these running exercises on the tennis court, or outside the court. I prefer to practice the endurance on the tennis court because I like the exercises to be as tennis specific as possible. I do not see the purpose of running long distance training for tennis players. Because if you practice long distance training for a too long period of a time, you might actually get slower on the tennis court.

I hope that I have been able to give you some tactical advices and tennis tips on how to play tennis on the clay court.

Related posts:

1. How to play tennis on the clay court (part 1)
2. How to play tennis when it is windy
3. How to beat a pusher
4. What is your game plan?
5. How to win against a left handed player