Tennis is an individual sport in which numerous skills must be honed and refined to improve play. Because tennis is inherently a two-person game, your ability to practice often depends on your partner's schedule or coach's availability. A ball machine can remove the need for a human partner from a practice, allowing players to work on their specific skill sets for any length of time they choose.
Time
Finding time to practice in a busy schedule is often the biggest barrier against improving your tennis game. Without a ball machine, you will have to find a partner to hit against who is willing to help you work on specific aspects of your game, or employ a coach or club professional to give you lessons in the sport. Owning a ball machine eliminates these factors. As long as you can find a court, you can transport the machine and use it to practice general or specific techniques for as long as you want.
Specific Shots
When you ask your partner to serve to you over and over so you can work on your return game, there will be a lot of trial and error. Unless the partner is a top-flight player, there will be serves into the net, serves that go out of bounds, and, over time, diminishing returns in the velocity and accuracy of the serves. Conversely, you can program a ball machine to fire serve after serve at a specific velocity and as quickly or as far apart in time as you wish. Many machines also feature oscillation controls, which will spray the court with shots, not just hit them right to you over and over.
Overall Game Skills
While working on a specific skill can be vital, developing your overall game is the main element of most practice sessions. Most ball machines can accommodate this request as well. Many machines feature programmable, or variable, trajectory and spin control. Variable trajectory allows the machine to fire anything from lobs to serves to ground shots while spin control emulates top spin, backspin and flat shots.
Ball Capacity
In a typical practice between two players, each carries two to four tennis balls in his pockets in addition to the one in play. When these are expended, players must take time out of the practice to collect the balls from all over the court or open a new can. Tennis ball machines can hold anywhere from 50 to 300 balls, allowing you to practice the same shot over and over without having to pause and perform housekeeping duties on the court.
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