One simple tip I constantly tell myself for both my forehand and my backhand to generate power is to not forget to step in. For my right-handed forehand, that means bending my knees, getting a heavy step forward with my left leg and driving forward. I find that in long rallies it’s easy to forget this step, especially when you’re sprinting side to side constantly!

I tried both at the same time recently! Some random thoughts about both that may or may not be helpful: 1. The USTA Flex League’s level seems to be all over the place. Not sure how they calculate it because they don’t use your pre-existing USTA rating, but I think the quality of games can vary more than UTR. By contrast, I think UTR’s matchmaking is much better, in my opinion. 2. USTA flex league requires you to install their app, but it’s actually really cohesive and pretty well-made! The only thing is since it’s an app rather than just normal texting, people probably respond slower lol. 3. USTA is cheaper than UTR, and technically gets you more matches. But honestly, sometimes people just never put in the effort to schedule their match so that aspect of it doesn’t matter much. 4. Playing in the UTR league improves your UTR rating, so it’s nice to see your progress as you get better! The USTA flex league does not improve your USTA (NTRP) rating, the only way to do that is to actually play regular season USTA leagues where you join a team.

Hope this helps and feel free to ask me more questions about either league or just competitive tennis in general!

@Chelsea Deng I agree with Brian! For me, I think you have to head into wall practice with the mindset that the balls you are getting back from the wall are not going to be the same as an opponent’s ball. If I’m practicing ground strokes on the wall, I’m solely focusing on my own form and stepping into the ground stroke. So I don’t mind letting it bounce two or three times when receiving, because I’m just focusing on my own body with the wall.

Let me know if that’s a little confusing lol

For my game, since coming back to tennis last year I’ve been solely focused on ball-bashing and improving my groundstrokes, just to help me feel confident with tennis again. But now that I’ve been getting back into match-play the past few months, I think that the biggest contributor to winning more matches for me is being able to step into the court and put points away at the net! A good simple drill to practice doing that outside of matches is having an approach shot feed into a volley. I think for most of us at 4.0 and under, our opponents will have a hard time dealing with a solid net game.