Masterclasses

Tennis masterclass

Physical development

﻿Today's tennis masterclass is brought to us by Samanta and Mark Bullock. Samanta was the number one wheelchair tennis player in Brazil and was a silver medalist at the ParaPan-Am Games. Mark has been a top coach in Paralympics and disability sport for over 25 years. A massive thank you to them both, and we hope you really enjoy our tennis masterclass.

Hi, everyone at National Oak. My name's Samanta Bullock. I'm the former number one wheelchair tennis player from Brazil. I started to play tennis at age of eight years old and at the age of 14, I had my accident. I stopped playing tennis and when I was 26 years old, I started to play again. I played three World Cups representing Brazil in Italy, Brazil, and in Sweden and in 2007 at the ParaPan-Am we got the silver medal in doubles with my partner Rajane Candida and this was one of my biggest achievements of my career. Thank you.

Samanta was the number one wheelchair tennis player for her country, Brazil. She competed in three world championships and the highlight of her career was winning a silver medal at the ParaPan-Am games.

Hi my name is Mark Bullock, and here I'm going to give a little bit of a lesson on forehand, touching elements of inclusivity as well so for everything I use there will be an audible ball right, for the vision impaired and to engage another sense. Now, so, the forehand is played, as it suggests, with the front of the hand, okay, and we're looking for students to play out to the side a little bit and slightly in front. So, great little teaching aid is one of these hands fixing it to the back, and then I can just having a rally against the wall. Let's say, trying to take the ball out to the side and a little bit in front. And again, so, as you can see what I've done here is used this net to form some targets on the wall, you can mark targets on the wall and use other things so this time I'm going to try and go over the crossbar so I'm going to have to open up the face of my hand a little bit, so it goes a little bit higher. It's natural, the course up and my elbows are a bit more open so out to the side, out in front, just like this. And I can vary my target and I want to go through and over, through and over, through and I missed. So then, to progress it, you can use rackets that's appropriate to the people that you're working with. I'm going to use a small one, again, working on the forehand side. So again, my aim is to play the ball as I was with my hand with the device I had on my hand, this time I'm going to have the racket and the same thing, so I'm going to try and take the ball out to the side, knees and waist tight, like this. Again, and I'm using a target on the wall or in this case a net, to get it through. And again, I can progress it using in my case the bar, to go over, under, over, under, through, over, through. And to achieve that, to go through, my racket face is a little bit more closed. To go over, I open it up to get it over the bar. And you go, you're over. And now, I could mark some targets out on the wall where I'm hitting different directions. The way I'm going to achieve different directions today is actually by using markers on the floor. So I'm still only going to hit forehands, but I've got different targets on the floor that I'm going to try and direct the ball towards. So, what I've done so far, you see on this, I'm going 25 most of the time, then I'm going to tell you to add 100, 25, out to 100, and to do that, I have to alter the face of my racket and point the strings as to where I want the ball to go. So if I want to get it to go out to the 100, my racket is going to be open a little bit so I can direct it out that way to the 100. If I'm over here, and I'll try and get it to the 50, and my racket is going to point in a way that allows it to come off the wall and towards the 50. That'll also allow us to incorporate some movement. So I'm going to focus on using the 25 and the 100. So I'm going to go out from the 100, if I can, and it's going to pull me back. And then I go find the 100, 25, not quite making the 100, so can I do a bit more? Now, the 25 comes right back, it's making me move the correct space to get the ball out to the side. Then I'll go around to that side, 25, close to the 100, oh! Okay, fantastic. And then the last thing I'm going to do is just vary a little bit the pace and the, that I hit the ball and the length at which I hit the ball. So I'm going to hit a few at the wall, and then after a few shots I'm going to try and just drop shot the ball into the gap between the radiator and the net. So here we go. Keep the rally going, over, under and then I'm just going to try and, ah! Made it! Win! Thanks so much everybody, hope you enjoyed that little session, see you again soon.

Mark has been a top coach in Paralympics and disability sport for over 25 years. He's a huge champion of inclusive sport and works with lots of different organisations. If you'd like to please ask your parents or carer to share your work on Twitter, tagging @OakNational and the hashtag #LearnWithOak, we'd love to see some of the amazing work you do and how your tennis skills have developed after this masterclass with Samanta and Mark.

Tennis masterclass

Tennis masterclass

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