Alley Rally Tennis Drill

Series Summary

Tennis originated in Europe in the late 1800's, and spread quickly throughout the English speaking world, particularly among the wealthy. It is now an Olympic sport and is played by people in many countries and social classes. Played on a flat court made of grass, clay or concrete, tennis players use a stringed rackets to pass a rubber, felt-covered ball back and forth over a net. The rules of tennis and the basic techniques of the players have remained relatively unchanged since the beginning of the game.

Once you have the basics down in tennis, it's still important to practice more technical skills. In this free video, a tennis coach will teach you how to work on your control with a number of drills. You'll learn the alley rally drill, extreme angle rallies, and extreme angle volleys. You'll also learn how to add topspin to the drills, how to move your feet, and how to work on volleys. With these tips and tennis lessons, your control game will improve instantly!

Video Transcript

"Okay, this is called the alley rally, so we're going to use the doubles alley as our practice zone. So I'm just going to hit the ball softly to Darren and he's going to hit it softly back to me. So right now we're just going to focus on keeping it in play in between the two lines of the doubles alley. This will teach you how to keep the ball in play and to hit your targets. So you see we have a very small, relatively small target and we keep it in play. You can hit both sides to Darren, if you want to hit a couple forehands feel free. You can increase the pace of this, so right now we're just going to get in a nice rhythm. This is just under spin, nothing too fancy. See Darren saved it there with a volley of my long shot. So that's the alley rally. Now we can start backing up and we can hit bigger shots. Okay, so this is a really good drill. In the next segment I'm going to demonstrate a little more top spin."