Kiwi Sport | Tennis

LI: to learn the basic grip of a tennis racket

This terms Kiwi Sport coach is Coach Peter. He introduced us to our new Kiwi Sport theme this term. He taught us the basics of Tennis through a Warm Up and Activity.

Warm Up - 
In pairs, our task was to have one person dropping a ball from above the other persons hand(s). The person with their hands out had to, when the balls dropped, turn over their hand(s) and try to catch the ball as quick as they could. We did this to warm up our reactions and reflexes.

Activity - 
In a group of four, two people started off with the tennis rackets. The other 2 people stood behind one person on each side of the tennis net. The task for the people with the rackets was for one of the two people to throw a tennis ball underarm and the other person on the other side had to hit it with the racket. Both sides took a turn to do this using 3 balls. Then we swapped over and did the same.

For the second part of our activity, we were also in groups of four. We did almost the same thing but this time both sides had a tennis racket and one side had to start off with one tennis ball and their goal was to hit the tennis ball to the other side with the racket and try to hit one of the three cones opposite their side. If they manage to hit a ball on the other side, the person on the side that they hit the cone on had to give the cone to the other person. Then we swapped over and did the same. This was a competition because the side with the most cones at the end won.

Techniques - 
We learnt the Forehand and backhand technique. For the forehand, one hand had to be at the bottom of our racket. This hand had to be our dominate hand. For the backhand, we needed to ave to hands on the racket. Our dominate hand stays at the bottom the handle and our non-dominate stays at the top.

For right- handed people, when hitting to the right, we only use one hand which is our dominate hand, to hit, using the Forehand technique. When hitting to the left, we use the Backhand technique and use both hands in the correct order.