Crosscourt Notebook is an independent writing project about tennis technique, equipment and training. It is not a club, an academy, a coaching business or a retailer. Nobody here sells rackets, sells lessons, or takes bookings. That is worth stating plainly at the top, because a great deal of tennis information online is written by people with something to move, and the reader deserves to know which kind of page they are reading.
What this site is
It is a set of long-form reference pages, written to be read once carefully rather than skimmed weekly. The subject matter is deliberately evergreen: the mechanics of a serve, the way a clay court changes a rally, the trade-off between a stiff string and a soft one. None of that changes from season to season, which is why there is no news section, no results coverage and no rankings.
Each page tries to do three things:
- State the problem before the solution. A tip is only actionable if you know which situation it belongs to.
- Explain the mechanism. If you understand why a lower string tension gives more depth, you can work out what to do when it gives too much. If you have only memorised "string lower for power", you cannot.
- Be honest about uncertainty. Some of what circulates as tennis fact is convention, some is genuinely contested, and some is marketing. Where that is true, the page says so rather than picking the confident-sounding version.
What this site deliberately is not
There is no coverage of professional matches, tournaments, rankings or individual players. This is a considered choice, not an oversight. Writing about living people means making claims about them, and a small reference site has no business asserting things about somebody's career, form or private life that it cannot verify. Where a technique is genuinely associated with a style of play, it is described by the style, not by borrowing a name.
There is no news, no schedule, no results and no commentary here either. If you arrived expecting something else, this is the entire site: fourteen pages about how to hit a tennis ball better and stay healthy doing it.
Finally, there is no shop and no affiliate marketing. Equipment pages describe categories and characteristics — head size, swingweight, string gauge — and stop short of recommending particular products. That is the level at which advice generalises. Below it, it becomes a sales pitch.
Who it is written for
The imagined reader is an adult club player, somewhere between a confident rallying standard and a competent competitive one, who plays regularly and has started to notice that effort alone has stopped producing improvement. That reader is well served by explanation and badly served by drills-without-context, which is most of what is available for free.
Complete beginners will find the rules and scoring page and the glossary useful and may find the stroke pages assume too much. Coaches will find nothing here they do not already know, though they may find the framing useful for explaining things to students.
Sources and corrections
Where a factual question has an authoritative answer, this notebook defers to the body that owns it. The Rules of Tennis, the court dimensions, the specifications a ball or racket must meet — these are published and maintained by the International Tennis Federation, and its text is the one that counts. Coaching material draws on the publicly available instruction resources of the USTA and the LTA. The sections that touch on heat, hydration and injury lean on published sports-medicine guidance, principally from the American College of Sports Medicine.
Nothing on this site is medical advice. The injury page exists to help you recognise patterns and take them seriously, not to diagnose or treat anything. If something hurts in a way that persists, that is a question for a clinician who can look at it.
A note on the pace of change
Tennis instruction has a fashion cycle. Grips, stances and swing paths that were taught as errors thirty years ago are now taught as fundamentals, and some of today's orthodoxy will be revised too. The material here tries to distinguish between the parts that follow from physics — where the ball goes, given a racket face and a swing path — and the parts that are stylistic convention. The first kind is durable. The second kind should be held loosely.