Beginner Tennis: 3 Types of Backhand

Video Transcript

"Okay, the backhand... we all like to hit nice big forehands but our opponents a lot of times will try to hit to our backhand. Now generally the backhand, for a lot of players, is their weaker shot. But when you watch the pros on TV, their backhand sometimes are their most solid shot. But generally your backhand is not your winning, the stroke you'll hit winners with, but it's a very important stroke. At the pro level, most players cover about 40% of the court with their backhand and they try to use their forehand for about 60%. But there's three types of backhands for the most part. There's what's called a slice backhand, which is where you take the racket up like this, and you come, and you hit somewhat underneath the ball, producing underspin, so when the ball goes away from you, it's spinning towards you. There's also what's called a one-handed topspin. We just demonstrated a topspin on the forehand, so the one-handed topspin backhand is where you take the racket and you come from below the ball and go up through the ball, and that will create topspin, so the ball will then loop, and drop in on the other side. And then there's the ever-popular two-handed backhand, where you have both hands on the racket. Andre Agassi was a very famous player that had a two-handed backhand. And you just hit it like that, and that's a two-handed topspin backhand. So those are the three backhands that we're going to cover in this segment of the series."