Why you play worse in matches than in practice (and what to do about it)

In practice, everything works.

Your forehand has pace. Your serve lands where you want it. You leave the court thinking, this is going to be my day.

Then the match starts, and the same strokes feel like they belong to someone else.

In another article, I wrote about my own forehand on short balls. In matches, my fast swing would disappear, and I would close points with a slower, tighter stroke.

If you’ve played tennis for a while, you probably recognize some version of this. And you start asking yourself questions:

I feel like it’s rarely the stroke itself. Your technique did not change between the practice court and the match. What changed is what you do with your attention, and what your practice prepared you for.

Here are four reasons why.

1. Explicit monitoring: you start steering your swing

Baumeister (1984) proposed that pressure increases conscious attention to your own performance, and that this disrupts execution that had become automatic. In six experiments, more attention to one’s own performance led to worse results, and so did pressure situations such as an audience or a cash incentive.

Beilock and Carr (2001) tested this in golf putting. Skilled putting seems to be stored in a form that runs without step-by-step attention, which makes it vulnerable under pressure. In their experiments, putters choked, while a task that was not automatic (alphabet arithmetic) did not. The authors concluded that attending to well-learned skills can hurt performance.

Later work added a detail that matters for tennis. Experienced golfers putted more accurately when they were distracted than when they were told to focus on the steps of the putt. Experienced soccer players showed the same on their strong foot. On their weaker foot, and for novices, focusing on the steps helped (Beilock et al., 2002).

So paying close attention to a stroke can help when a skill is new, and hurt when it is well learned. A fast, free forehand is exactly that kind of skill. I’d argue that when you start guiding it (“keep it smooth, don’t miss”), it slows down. That is the tight, careful stroke from my own example.

2. Drill practice: it looks good, but it isn’t a match

Hitting the same ball from the same spot is what researchers call blocked practice. Schmidt and Bjork (1992) describe an experiment where people practiced three tasks either blocked (all trials of one task, then the next) or in random order. The blocked group performed better during practice. But on a retention test 10 days later, the random group did better, whether that test was blocked or random.

A match is random practice. Every ball is different, and you have to choose the shot as well as hit it. If most of your practice is blocked, the strokes look great in the drill and have less to hold on to in a rally.

3. No pressure in training: you meet it on match day

A meta-analysis of 14 studies found that practicing under simulated pressure improved performance under pressure, with a medium effect (g = 0.67 after removing one outlier). The authors suggest that coaches create pressurized training environments rather than relying on more training to prepare performers for pressure (Low et al., 2021).

Beilock and Carr (2001) found something similar in putting. Choking was not changed by training with a second task, but it was eliminated by training that made the putters self-conscious.

In plain words: more hours of calm practice don’t prepare you for a match. Practicing under match-like conditions does.

4. The scoreboard: every shot starts to weigh too much

The last one is outcome bias: judging a decision by how it turned out, instead of by whether it was a good decision at the time. In five studies, Baron and Hershey (1988) asked people to judge decisions made by others. They rated the thinking as better when the outcome was favorable than when it was not, even though they had the same information about the decision.

I’d argue that in a match, this shows up as judging every shot by whether you won the point. A good decision that misses feels like a mistake, so next time you play it safer. And safer, in tennis, often means slower and tighter.

Together, these four make a match feel heavier than practice. And that is a darn difficult game to play.