Why I bought my first tennis ball machine

(Written back in 1995)

Why I bought my first Tennis Ball Machine

Hi there, my name is Rick Goulet and I'm a 41 year old tennis player

who picked up tennis again after a break of 23 years. I've just

recently bought a Prince Tennis Ball Machine after attempting to

research the subject on the Internet. This is an attempt to provide

others with a little more information on the subject than I was able

to find.

Some of my friends tried to talk me out of buying a ball machine, but

I had some very strong motivations.

I wanted to get involved in tennis tournaments so I needed to improve my game, and I
wanted that to happen quickly.

I needed a lot of work on the basics, like stoke production. My backhand was as
       weak and it needed a lot of work. I also wanted to learn the drop shot and I needed
       to work on adding spin to my shots. Another goal was to make one of my shots into
       a big weapon.

I had a lot of free time and wanted to play tennis everyday but I had trouble find people
to play with.

My best friend only wanted to play games and I knew that if I wanted to get a lot better what
I needed was to work on getting the basics down good. A tennis ball machine seemed like
the perfect solution. A ball machine would let me work on the basic stokes as much as I needed to, as often as I wanted to.

Even when I've found a practice partner that was willing to help me work on the areas I needed help on the sessions never seem to get enough concentrated work done in them. A ball machine allows me to speed up the sessions so that whatever I work on gets 100's of

attempts in a few minutes.

A big advantage of a ball machine over a practice partner is that I don't have to return the shot back to my partner so we can keep th My tennis ball machine ready for a workout e ball in play. When playing games I noticed that I had a habit of hitting the ball right to the person I'm playing against. The ball machine allows me to practice hitting winners because I don't have to worry about giving my practice partner a workout. I was warned that a ball machine was a waste of money because it would be useless after it helped me improved my stokes. If stoke production was all that I was interested in then it would have been cheaper to hire a tennis pro to help me. To me a ball machine's real value is allowing me to work on hitting accuracy so I can hit winners on demand.

So far the machine has met all my expectations. My game is improving and I can go out and practice at anytime without having to first find someone that wants to do the same thing I do at the same time I do. Working with a ball machine has a different feel to it than working out with a real person, the ball machine can make things too easy. So now every chance I get to play with a real person I take them up on the offer just so I can get a more realistic tennis practice.

My first tennis ball machine

Why I bought my first Tennis Ball Machine