Monday, October 8, 2012

Slow Serving

A radar gun was being used at my tennis lesson last week. Not to measure how fast I drove out of the car park, but to demoralise us with the knowledge of the slowness of our serves. I took a few warm-up swings and then gave it everything, blasting the ball with all my might. The gun said 124 km/h.  Do you know how slow that is? It's less than half the speed that top men reach. The Williams sisters can serve over 200 km/h. And I remember as a teenager visiting the Questacon science museum in Canberra where they had a radar gun in a funnel and you could throw tennis balls at it. And I could throw over 125 km/h. So how on earth, with a high tech, highly strung racquet with thousands of practices can I be serving slower than a teenage boy can throw?

I suspect the point of the radar gun is to entice us into paying for more coaching, to learn the magic techniques that allow a twelve year old girl to serve faster than an adult. And yes, I will play along and continue paying until I can serve at least as fast as I can throw !

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