Wheelchair doubles

Hi Alois and Jeff,

I have a tactically question for you.

Last week a couple of my TT buddy's went to a tournament (sadly I had to work and couldn't attend this time).

The club had a double tournament. I asked how they did, they got third.

I asked who won and he said 'the wheelchair guys'. (there has been two players in wheelchairs coming out to tournaments at this club since the spring. These guys are decent players, but all of us from our club that travels to this club for tournaments have beaten these guys.

I asked how they won. He said, they don't have the same rule for hitting in sequence as non-wheelchair players. So they just push and block everything. Two strokes they are very good at.

These are my ideas of tactics against these players.

1. Loop as many of their serves as possible. They rarely serve short as wheelchair rules prevent short serves. Plus with doubles you can set up camp and wait for the serves as you know exactly where it's going.

2. Serve long medium under spin. Very high chance they'll push. Then we loop high, deep and with a lot of spin. 

3. We coordinate our attacks with a one two punch strategy.

I loop high, deep and with a lot of spin.

I would think a high percentage of these wlll come back high.

Then you smash out wide, more focus on wide than with power.

What are your thoughts?

One players has inverted rubber on both sides, the other has inverted on the FH and long pips on the back hand.

Hi Rory,

Interesting that the wheelchair players won the tournament.  They don’t have to take it in turns to hit the ball like standing players.  This can be both easier and more difficult as they need to work out when it is your shot to play.

One good tactic is to play the ball wide.  The other good area in doubles is to hit down the middle where the players need to make the decision about who’s shot it is.

Pushing or blocking isn’t necessarily something that is better or worse to do, it just depends on the particular wheelchair players that you are talking about.