Handling the Choke: What to Do When You Are Serving for the Set

You are serving at 5-3. You have played well for forty minutes. Suddenly your arm feels foreign, your toss is wrong, and you are hitting the ball as though you have never held a racquet.

This happens to everyone, including professionals. It has a mechanism, and the mechanism suggests what to do.

Why it happens

Under pressure, attention shifts inward. Instead of running an automatic, well-practised motion, you begin consciously monitoring it. This is sometimes called reinvestment: you start supervising a skill that runs better unsupervised.

Conscious control of an automated movement makes it slower, choppier and less accurate. That is the physical part of choking, and it explains why the advice to concentrate harder makes it worse.

Between-point routine

The single most useful tool, and the one professionals visibly use. It occupies the twenty seconds that would otherwise be spent thinking about the score.

A workable four-part routine:

1. Response. React to the last point, briefly. Allowed. Two seconds.
2. Relax. Turn to the back fence, breathe out slowly, loosen the grip and shoulders. Adjust the strings. Four to five seconds.
3. Prepare. Decide the next serve or the next pattern. One clear decision, not three.
4. Ritual. The same physical routine every time: same bounces, same breath, same look at the target. Then play.

Do it on every point of every match, not only the tight ones. A routine that only appears at 5-3 is not a routine, it is a signal to your body that this point is different.

What to do with the plan at 5-3

Simplify, do not change.

The common error is to become cautious: take pace off, aim safer, push the ball. This changes the motor pattern you have used successfully all match and produces the worst version of every shot.

The second error is to go for more, trying to end the game quickly.

The right answer is to play the same tennis with a simpler plan. Pick the serve you have made most all match and hit it at the same speed. Pick the pattern that has worked and run it. No new ideas at 5-3.

Physical interventions

• Long exhale. Out-breath longer than the in-breath, two or three cycles. Directly slows the arousal response.
• Loosen the grip. Tension travels down the arm and destroys racquet head speed. Consciously soften the hand between points.
• Move your feet. Static feet are a symptom of tightness. Small steps before every point.
• Slow down. Rushing is the most common visible sign of nerves. Use the full time between points, deliberately.

Focus externally

Give your attention a specific external job on each point: watch the seams on the ball, pick a precise target on the court, notice your opponent's toss. Any external focus displaces the internal monitoring that causes the problem.

Afterwards

If you lose the game, it is one game. Players who choke a serve for the set and then lose the set almost always lose it in the following two games, to frustration rather than to nerves.

Reset the routine, hold the next service game, and remember that the person on the other side is at least as nervous as you are, and probably has no routine at all.