Doubles skills help singles skills. Controlled and consistent serves and service returns are the benchmarks of a good doubles player. Add to that the necessary agility of net play, a strong overhead, and angled touch shots, and you ve got a doubles player who can obviously play singles as well. However, the opposite is not necessarily true. A gritty baseliner in singles seldom does well in doubles.
College coaches seek players with doubles skills.
That s right, and one of the biggest complaints from college coaches is that their freshman players do not possess the skills required for doubles at the collegiate level. At a recreational level, the most common form of competition for both men and women is doubles. The largest league city in the country is Atlanta with nearly 100,000 players competing, for the most part, in doubles action. Therefore, giving a child the skills required for doubles further ensures that they will enjoy tennis their entire lifetime. Doubles encourages far more social interaction than singles.