For the tennis enthusiast, summer offers endless opportunities: long sun-kissed days with more time to play, plus the joy of watching the professionals compete on three distinct surfaces: clay at Roland Garros, grass at Wimbledon, and the hard courts at the US Open.
While the rhythmic thwock of the ball is mesmerizing, and it’s thrilling to marvel at the pro’s prowess, the average recreational player can actually improve their game by watching professional tennis—if you know what to look for…
Why Watching Works
Tennis coaches have long known that osmosis is powerful. As Patrick Mouratoglou, who rose to fame coaching Serena Williams, said, “When you see people doing the right thing all the time or most of the time, it comes into your head and then you do it more naturally…I know a lot of people who improved just by watching. That’s the best way to learn, because you don’t think, you just copy, without trying.”
In the 1990s, Italian scientists found the reason why: certain brain cells — now called mirror neurons — fire both when a person performs an action and when they simply watch someone else perform the same action.
When you watch a pro execute a backhand, the neurons in your brain associated with your own backhand fire in response. Your brain is, in a measurable sense, practicing along.
However, this only works if you already have some experience with the action being observed. A complete beginner gains almost nothing neurologically from watching Sabalenka serve because there are no existing motor maps in the brain to activate. But a player who has been serving for years, who has hit thousands of serves and has established neural pathways for the movement, can genuinely feel the motion in her body when she watches an expert execute it.
Separately, studies have shown that recreational tennis players who watched videos of professionals serving— in structured sessions where they were specifically asked to focus on the server's foot position, ball toss, and racquet angle — significantly improved their response times after just eight fifteen-minute viewing sessions. The watching worked. But only because it was intentional.
Next time you’re settling in to watch an exciting singles or doubles match, here are three ways to get the most out of the experience, and improve your own game…
Patterns. Professional coaches, including Monica Seles's former coach, Mike Sell, observe that better players have only one or two patterns of play through a match. They find what works and commit to it. Most amateur players have far more patterns and are more scattered: reacting to whatever comes at them rather than constructing the same proven sequence repeatedly. When watching top players, count how often they go back to the same serve-return combination, the same rally-building sequence, the same approach shot setup. Then ask: what are my one or two patterns? How can I develop a winning sequence?
Rituals. This is the most easily actionable thing a recreational player can take from watching professional tennis. Watch the rituals: the specific, repeated, deliberate way every top player creates a pause between points to reset and focus. These rituals are tools for controlling the match's tempo and preventing the emotional residue of the last point from contaminating the next one. Pick one ritual from a player you admire and try it in your next match, whether it’s bouncing the ball three times before serving, a mantra you repeat to yourself, or a routine to keep your feet moving. The specifics matter less than the consistency.
Recovery. When a strategy stops working in a professional match, and a player is losing, watch what they do. Does she change her pattern? When does she change it? How does she change it: by varying serve speed or location, approaching the net, or changing her baseline position? The losing player in a professional match faces the same problem every club player does when a match starts going wrong: how to adjust in real time to an opponent who is beating you. Watching how a professional solves that problem — or fails to — can be more useful to a recreational player than watching the winner execute perfect shots.
