Pro Tennis Player Stroke Library

Welcome to FYB’s pro tennis player stroke library! This area contains video of the top players on the ATP and WTA tours hitting in high definition and slow motion.

These videos were filmed at the 2009 BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, CA, and at Washington Kastles and Philadelphia Freedoms World Team Tennis matches. At the BNP Paribas Open, FYB was able to film most of the tennis players in the top 10 on both tours. Some examples, as you can see below, include Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray, Andy Roddick, Ana Ivanovic, Jelena Jankovic, Dinara Safina, and Daniela Hantuchova. At recent World Team Tennis matches we added Serena and Venus Williams, as well as some former players such as Andre Agassi and John McEnroe.

So how should you use the Pro Tennis Player Stroke Library?

In the tennis lessons section, we present the forehand, backhand, serve and other shots in a way that’s designed to get you to understand what the fundamentals of each shot are. Once you’ve got a handle on those fundamentals, you can use this stroke library to compare what you know with what the top tennis players are doing. What you’ll find is that despite the fact that each player’s strokes look a little bit different, they all do a few things — the fundamentals — the same.

Should you copy what your favorite tennis player is doing?

The answer is, “it depends.” You can get yourself into A LOT of trouble by trying to copy your favorite player. For example, you shouldn’t copy Andy Roddick’s serve just because you think it looks cool. You should be copying the underlying fundamentals of the shot. In a sense, you’ll be copying all tennis pros if you do this — not just Roddick. It’s VERY important to understand that the idiosyncrasies of each player do not affect their execution of the fundamentals. Roddick’s abbreviated backswing doesn’t get in the way of the fundamentals. The problem most club-level tennis players run into when they try to copy a particular pro’s idiosyncrasies is that they do so in a way that DOES interfere with the correct execution of the fundamentals. That’s what you need to work very, very hard to avoid. With that in mind, we can definitely learn from watching the pros!

NOTE — THE LIST IS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER.