 Hey everyone and welcome to another video. So this week I had the privilege of playing with a professional ATP player and I managed to get a little bit of footage from our session. So I thought I'd share the footage with you and talk through some of my observations and what it actually felt like playing with an ATP player. Let's check it out. So as I mentioned I was lucky enough to play with an ATP player this week. His name's Dan Little, he's 24 years old and he's from the south coast of the UK. A few years ago he graduated from the University of Utah in the States after spending four years on a scholarship program. Since then he's been playing on the tour and recently has had a really good run of events including a couple of doubles titles with his partner Ben Jones. The reason I hit with Dan this week was he was having some of his rackets customised by our professional stringer Paul Skip, who some of you may know if you've seen some of my previous videos. Paul is the head stringer at Wimbledon as well as stringing underground slam events but he also runs his racket stringing and customising service locally. So we quite often have professional tennis players come and visit the club for his services. Dan has a new set of rackets so Paul was matching them up for him. During the customisation process Paul gave Dan a couple of rackets to test out to find out which one he preferred so that Paul could then match up the rest of his rackets in that way. We had a good hours hit so he could get to grips with the rackets and we filmed five minutes of it to show you guys so let's take a look. So here we are hitting up and down the middle. As I mentioned Dan was getting a couple of rackets customised so he really just needed to get a feel for the ball. What he would do every five minutes or so was switch between the two rackets to see which one he was most comfortable with. Although it was quite a casual hit you can hear by the sound of his strikes that he was hitting the ball pretty heavy and pretty clean. One of the biggest things that you'll notice when you see professional tennis players play is the way that they move around the court. They're always on their toes they'll never stand still. Something you'll also notice when you see the top players play is their efficiency. They get a lot of power from minimal effort and that is down to the way that they use their kinetic chain. Again although it doesn't look like there's much effort there's a lot of racket head speed and that's down to Dan's use of his legs, his coiling of his upper body and his timing. Timing is vital for this as well and you'll notice that Dan makes contact out in front of his body pretty much all of the time. As well as the light footwork and the really effective split stepping you'll notice that Dan has a really early preparation. As soon as he's landed that split step he'll make his unit turn whether that be to his forehand or his backhand like so. There are a couple of miss hits, a couple of nets and even a shank that goes over the fence. I wanted to keep this in to show you that everybody makes mistakes. You'll notice that from the court here the court hadn't been swept for a good hour. This video was from the end of our session so there were some little sand castles at his end of the court which made for difficult timing but throughout the session I definitely missed more than he did. One of the biggest things you'll notice with footwork is every single time I make contact with the ball Dan will make his split step. If you watch for the timing of Dan's split step you'll notice that he's in midair at the time of my contact point. Having a good split step and really focusing on the timing of your split step can make a huge difference to your early preparation. It will allow you to land and push off to that next ball straight away. If you watch the next few rallies you'll really appreciate how well he split steps and this is automatic for him. He doesn't need to think about this. This is something that's happened over years and years of training so for junior players it's something that's really important to work on at a young age so that it does become ingrained and if you're an adult club player it's definitely something that's going to help your game. When it comes to seeing professional serve this is an area that really separates them from the rest of us. Although Dan wasn't serving his biggest you can see that he was getting an awful lot of power on these serves but not just power he was putting them exactly where he wanted them. You can see me down the other end returning as normal but what you don't know is that Dan actually told me where he was going to hit his serves and I was still struggling to make them back. Dan started with aiming a few serves down the tee. He then told me when he was going to go out wide and also practiced a few slice and topspin serves. You'll notice the only reason I was able to get some of these returns back is because of two things. Number one I was really focusing on the timing of my split step making sure that I was midair as he contacted the ball so that I was ready to pounce upon landing but what you'll also see is I've kept my swing very short. I didn't have any time to take my racket back behind me so keeping my take back short allowed me to use his pace to return the ball. Dan's a tall guy but he also makes the most of that by really extending up to the ball gets off the ground makes contact with the ball well above the net allowing him to hit super flat super direct but also when imparting spin it made it even more difficult. So those are some of the observations that you can see and hear on camera. One of the biggest things you probably noticed is the sound of his hit. It's very clean and it's very big but what you can't see on camera is how I felt at the other end of the court. When receiving Dan's shots whether they be forehands backhands or serves you can feel the huge amount of weight to his hit. When I describe the weight of a shot it's a combination of speed and spin and when in a casual rally with Dan the weight of his shots was so much heavier than anything that I'm normally playing against. It made me feel like I didn't have very much time but also pushed me way back behind the baseline. As well as the weight of the shots what I also felt was that Dan was taking my time away with his early contact out in front and his great length. I could see that Dan wasn't going full tilt with his shots so in a match setting when he's got full use of the entire court that's going to be a nightmare to return. Now how is Dan able to get ATP points and to compete against these top players in the world and from meeting him on this one occasion I can tell you that outside of his amazing tennis ability he was very open minded, hard working and humble and as a coach I could tell that he was very coachable. What I mean by coachable is somebody that asks questions and that genuinely wants to improve. In my opinion there are thousands of players out in the world with amazing tennis ability physically, technically and tactically but what sets the best players apart from the rest of us is their attitude and being coachable, wanting to learn and develop and having that open and growth mindset is vital when it comes to being a champion. So it was an absolute pleasure hitting with Dan. Next time he's down I'll try to film us playing some points so that you can see what damage he can really do. So there you go I hope you found that interesting. If you did let me know what you thought of it in the comments below and if you haven't done so already I'd love it if you'd consider subscribing to the channel. I've invited Dan back to the club for the grass court season and I'll hopefully be hitting with other players over the coming months so when that does happen I'll definitely film some footage to share with you guys. Thanks as always for watching this video, I look forward to seeing you next week, take care.