Serena's Comeback, WTA Burning Questions & Coach's Mailbag ft. Sophie Amiach

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Gill Gross** (1:24)
Hey, everyone, Gill Gross here, and it is time for a Coach's Mailbag, where I encourage you to put your instructional questions and comments into play. I'll be joined by a great guest, Sophie Amiach, who has been around the game for so long as a former pro, as a coach, as a commentator.
She has just come out with a new book called Tennis Smart & Simple. It is for coaches and players of all levels and ages. It really digs into a lot of fundamentals and also has a video element to it. I will put the link to that in the description, the Amazon link to check out Sophie's book.
We also at the top get into some WTA topics. Serena's Comeback and then going through some of the top players. I asked Sophie my burning questions before getting into your comments about tennis, the game itself, from an instructional angle. Alright, without further ado, here's Sophie Amiach. You said early on that you had great coaches growing up, brilliant coaches, but it was when Billie Jean King started coaching you free of charge for a couple of years that she was at another level, that you learned more from her and started to see the game differently from her. What was different, what was unique about the way Billie Jean King looked at the game and passed whatever she knew along to you?

**Sophie Amiach** (2:50)
Well, for me, at the time, I was coming back from injury and I had dropped in the ranking, and at that time, I was about 100 in the world, and then I dropped to about close to 600 in the world, and at that time, there was no protective ranking. So that means protective ranking is when you can come back at the ranking you've been to for X amount of tournaments, and that's helpful, and that happened three months after I started playing again. Bad luck, but bad luck in good luck, because with that bad luck, a friend of mine who worked for Billy at World Team Tennis, Chris Van Gendron, and said to Billy, Sophie's going to quit tennis, she's 24, she just get injured, and Billy said, you can't quit 24, that's when you start your career.
She said, tell her to come here. Billy had just retired, she was 44 years old, and she said she wanted to have somebody to hit with. And I'm like, well, what do I have to lose? My life is over right now. I was in a big time depression. I was just pretty much putting weight on alone, watching at the time Netflix equivalent. And so I get there and Billy pretty much asked me to give her a lesson at the court. And I was like, I'm sorry, but Billy, I think giving you a lesson is going to be awkward here.
And she said, no, no, I want to, I want to, so I started to try to tell her to bend her knees and get her racket back. And then she called me back at the net. She goes, okay, well, you know, tell me more about how do you hit topspin?
And I started to demonstrate, just starting to go away. And she was, no, no, no, I can't see, I'm blind. You have to tell me. So close your eyes and tell me. And I give her some kind of way of talking about topspin and saying, you know, and then at impact, you close the racket face. So you get topspin. And she goes, OK, so if the racket face is closed, where's the ball going? And this is how it started. And the way of teaching for her was the end result, backtracking, which I started to teach to all my students when I started to teach later on.