Approach Shot Fundamentals: When the Short Ball Is Worth Chasing

We charted one point during a club practice match last month and it explained more than the rest of the set. A 4.0 player, solid off both wings, gets a floaty second serve that lands a foot inside the service line. He drives a flat forehand crosscourt, hard and low, and sprints in behind it. It looks decisive. Three seconds later he is watching a backhand pass die in the doubles alley, and he turns around with the universal palms-up gesture that means what was I supposed to do with that.

That gesture is the real subject of approach shot fundamentals. Not the swing. The decision. Most intermediate players can hit a clean ball off a short reply — the trouble is knowing which short balls are invitations and which are traps, and then hitting the approach in a way that limits the answer rather than opening the court for a winner past them.

When should you approach the net on a short ball?

Approach when the ball lands short and you can take it at or below waist height and you can step into it moving forward. If any one of those three is missing, the short ball is not yet an approach ball. You can still hit it aggressively. You just shouldn't follow it in. The most common 3.5–4.5 error is treating "short" as the only criterion, when height at contact and your own balance matter just as much.

The forehand above failed on the second condition. The ball had landed short, yes, but it had bounced up near shoulder height by the time he reached it. He hit a falling, defensive-looking drive and chased it anyway. The ball was short. The shot was not an approach.

The three signals worth reading

A short ball gives you about half a second to make a yes-or-no call. Reading three things in that window is enough.

Depth. Is the bounce inside the service line, or just past it? A ball landing inside the service box pulls you forward naturally. A ball landing a step behind the service line tempts you to lunge — and a lunging approach is where pace dies.

Contact height. This is the signal players skip. A ball you can strike between knee and waist lets you drive down through it with margin. A ball above the waist forces you to hit either flat and risky or with heavy topspin that sits up. As a working rule: the higher the contact, the worse the approach, regardless of how short the ball landed.

Your own position and balance. If you are still recovering laterally, or hitting on the back foot, your approach will be a placement gamble rather than a controlled offering. Approaching commits you to forward movement. You cannot commit forward if your weight is going sideways or back.

When all three line up, the approach is on. When two of three line up, hit firm and stay home. That single distinction removes most of the bad approaches we watch at this level.

What actually happens, in order

It helps to walk the sequence the way it unfolds, because the failures cluster at specific links in the chain.

The ball lands short. Your first job is recognition, and recognition is earlier than most players think. The bounce tells you depth before the ball comes up. Good approachers read the landing, not the rising ball.

You move and split-step into it. The mistake here is running straight through the contact zone. You want to arrive slightly behind the ball so you can step into it, transferring weight forward through the shot rather than across it. Pace on an approach comes from this forward step, not from a bigger swing.

You contact it low and out front. Take the ball a touch earlier than a baseline rally ball. A shorter, more compact swing keeps the ball flat and penetrating. A full windshield-wiper topspin swing tends to add height, and height is what your opponent wants — a ball that sits up at a passable height.

You place it, then close. Placement decides the point more than pace does. And only after the shot do you finish moving forward. Closing too early — drifting in before contact — is what leaves players stranded mid-court, the no-man's-land that produces the palms-up gesture.

The link that broke in our charted point was the second one. He ran through the ball instead of stepping into it, which is why a flat forehand off a sitter came out tentative.

Why "deep, down the line" survives the geometry

The standard coaching advice — hit the approach deep and usually down the line — gets repeated so often it sounds like dogma. It happens to be correct, and the reason is geometry, not tradition.

When you approach down the line and follow the ball, you move toward the same side you hit to. That positions you to cover the down-the-line pass directly, and it shortens the crosscourt angle your opponent would need to thread past you, because they are hitting back across a longer diagonal into a smaller window. Approach crosscourt and follow it, and you leave the down-the-line pass wide open behind you — the very lane you just vacated.

Depth matters for a related reason. A deep approach pushes your opponent behind the baseline, which lengthens the distance their passing shot must travel and reduces the angle available to them. A short approach lets them step in and take the ball early, which is the single best condition for a clean pass. The advice holds up because both elements — line and depth — shrink the geometry the defender has to work with.

There are exceptions. Against an opponent who runs around their backhand, approaching to the backhand corner can matter more than line versus crosscourt. On a low slice approach that stays under the strike zone, depth becomes negotiable because the contact height is doing the work. The principle is robust. It is not a law.

A rule of thumb, and the short-ball verdicts

Here is the directive that follows from all of the above: if you have to hit the ball above your waist or while moving sideways, drive it firmly and recover — do not follow it in. Approach only when the ball lets you step forward and strike it low. That one rule prevents the majority of failed approaches we see in this band.

The verdicts below are not absolute, but they sort the common cases.

Back to the point that started this

We replayed the scenario with the same player a week later, this time talking through the read before each short ball. The first sitter, he let bounce, recognized it was rising past his waist, and drove it flat and deep without chasing — then split-stepped at the baseline. The second one landed inside the box and stayed low. He stepped through it, hit it deep down the line at maybe three-quarter pace, and closed. The volley was a formality.

Nothing about his swing had changed. What changed was that he stopped asking the ball to be approachable and started asking whether it already was.

The short ball does not tell you to come in. It tells you what it will allow, and a good approach is just an honest answer to that.