By Mark Rearden, West Lake Country Club | October 1, 2019
So, how did all of this grunting in tennis get started? I am not positive, but I believe it all began when we, as coaches, started encouraging our players to exhale as they hit, rather than holding their breath. In principal and theory it is a great idea. Holding your breath while hitting makes the stroke a bit more restricted and certainly less free flowing. When we first began advocating this idea we encouraged our students to exhale as they hit, much like any other exercise or athletic skill where coaches stress breathing (exhaling) during the positive part of the movement.
As a coach I have long encouraged my students to avoid holding their breath while hitting. There are those players out there who will unconsciously suck in a big breath of air and hold it while swinging to make contact with the ball. It is almost as if they are bracing for impact. Not a good scenario. So in that situation I will set up a very controlled hitting session where they must let me hear them exhale as they hit. It doesn’t matter how they do it as long as I hear it, so I am positive they are not holding their breath.
Like many other good intentions, we seemed to get off track and take a good practice and make it extreme. Players begin grunting (some subtly and some not so subtle) as a means of making sure they are exhaling while they hit. As a practice it makes sense and can be very helpful to the player. Where it goes astray is when the player morphs that practice into a full fledged punctuation mark that is added to each and every stroke. This completely removes us from the point of why the practice began. Now, we have added it as part our signature to the game. It some cases it may just be adding flare to what we do out there. In other cases it may be to get on our opponents nerves. Either way it, how this all began has mutated into something I don’t believe is beneficial to our sport.
Even a casual observer of the professional game (much more prevalent on the women’s side) can see or hear that the shrieking going on out there is not part of anything that is truly necessary. When the decibels of the grunt are tied to how hard the ball was hit or the importance of the situation then we have moved well past merely exhaling to keep the swing uninhibited. Often as I watched the collegiate male players at the Palmetto Tennis Center, I saw a different version of grunting. Many of the players would make an “ehhh” sound that is absolutely for effect and nothing else. And the curious thing is that it may come at impact, after impact or when the ball has practically crossed the net. No longer does any of this have anything to do with stroke production efficiency. It is now part of the show.
The unfortunate part of this entire scenario is that we may never get the genie back in the bottle. On the women’s side many of the top players who are the most important to our game are the most obvious enthusiasts of grunting. Officials seem to tiptoe around this issue when it concerns a Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova or Victoria Azarenka to name just a few. That is not to say they bend the rules for them, but you rarely hear them get cautioned on television or at least when I am watching.
There are rules on the books for those of us who play regular USTA events and for those who play ITA (Intercollegiate Tennis Association). Those rules are written as hinderances and can be called against the opponent if it is extreme or bothers someone on an adjacent court, but you rarely see it called there either. The real challenge is knowing how to regulate the offenders who seem to take it a step too far. Each official sees it differently. Because I am immersed in tennis on a daily basis, I have become inured to it and normally don’t notice it like I used to. Because of that, it takes an extreme example of grunting to assault my ears, but when it does, it hurts my soul to hear players using their grunts to drive home a point, rather than an expelling of air to better hit a stroke. Mark my words, it will never be the same.