By Boak Ferris, WPH Certified Top-Flight Coach, USHA Level 4 Referee
With your permission, let’s get right to it. We’ll follow the David Chapman process, as I learned from him, and from his Coach, Lew Morales. To beat a better “player,” you must compete defensively. And, frankly, the defensive mindset requires, first and foremost, being fit. You want and need to stay toe-to-toe with your nemeses.
Step One: Get Fit
Today, we know that three days a week devoted to sprinting 20 minutes on the incline treadmill, alternating two-minute-sprints with one-minute walks, will move you to fitness, over an initial period of three to six weeks. As always, consult your doctor, and quit if dizzy or tired, or if you have an intuition that something is not right. You will find it easier to stay encouraged as you compete, while trying to solve the match, if you don’t ever feel tired.
Coach Lew said, “You’ve got to get fit. Percentage-wise, a player beats you, because the better player is fitter than you, and can relax and control rallies while you struggle and flail. Fitness begins the journey to winning matches and tourneys against superior competitors.”
Step Two: Actually Think and Hit Defensively on Every Rally, Serving or Receiving Serve
Basically, that means NEVER to gamble, and never to let the floor beat you. If you try to shorten rallies and shoot too low, you will add the floor as a second opponent. The opponent already has X number of free points more than you do, simply by being better. Why give the opponent the floor as a partner?
You can only beat a better player with defense. To do that, you must first recognize what the opponent likes to do most often to score, or to earn a side-out. With those constantly in your mind, you next execute defensive shot-making, which means not gambling on converting offensive shots, but rather playing only high-percentage shots, since you cannot afford to let a miss, or the floor, cause you a side-out or earn the opponent a free point, or allow the opponent to advance, with zero effort.
Next, you must commit to denying your opponent anything the opponent does well. Only the very top opponents have no holes in their games, while every opponent has one or more obvious holes. These holes, for lack of a better term, are of two types, horizontal and vertical, to be discussed.
So you have to be thinking, on every shot, focused on the moment: “This shot has to go to the opponent’s known holes at spots X or Y. The opponent cannot hurt me from there!” (Notice the defensive mindset.) You have to stop the opponent from scoring, and you have to stop the opponent from acing, and from holding service innings.
Thus, as part of evolving your defensive skills, you will need to learn to return serves to the deep court, away from the front-court server’s ideal location, which means you will need to get the ball to the roof over the server’s head, (the vertical hole) or loft it, if you have to, or move the server to the back wall and into the corners, across the opponent’s face, perhaps, (to a partly horizontal/partly vertical hole), whether you use a controlled fist-push to the roof, or an open-handed flip to the roof. (TGO could do both of these, even at a young age), or an open-handed flip-shot through the center of the court across the opponent’s forehead.
Step Three: Really Scout Your Opponent
Even though you think you know your opponent’s game, nonetheless, you must “officially” and objectively scout your opponent. Actively make a real list of what your opponent hates, and give the opponent nothing but those. You must also learn your opponent’s favorite speeds (foot-speed and shot-speeds), and learn your opponent’s favorite shots with the two hands. Some opponents have one or more unbeatable shots with their off-hand, such as Chapman’s front-court dump, or Brady’s sidewall-front-wall kill. Some opponents are great fast-ball hitters, so why give him those? Most players better than we are far superior to us hitting at waist-height, or at ankle-height, for example. Never send a waist-high shot to anywhere between the front court and the 36-foot line, to a better opponent.
Chapman when young complained to Coach Lew Morales about Bike’s power and irretrievable pass-kill up the left. David lost to Bike repeatedly.
Lew told him, 1) “Why are you giving him anything to his left hand?” 2) “Power hitters use a lot of energy, so you have to moderate your shot speeds and pass-heights, and let him wear himself out.” 3) “John is good to the ceiling with both hands, but he prefers not to hit those, and it frustrates him over time that he can’t set up and shoot, and that frustration will make him miss a kill opportunity when he gets one. So give him lots of ceilings anyway.” 4) “If you’re losing to Bike, that means you are letting him get in front of you. Hit to the holes, and keep him in the back. On offense and defense.” [I.e., when serving and receiving serve.] 5) “When you’re serving, work for your 100% shot, the back wall, and kill it or bounce-pass it with spin near the walls, or at his feet.”
Step Four: Set Aside Time to Practice Defensive Shot-Making
You will wish to devote time on the court to groove in serve-returns, best done with an ace-serving partner, or by developing a front wall throw that simulates different-height serves on which you can practice returns, and practice neutralizing aces.
You will also want to practice hitting to your specific opponent’s visualized horizontal and vertical weakest court-domains, while on the move, so please don’t stand and practice these visualized shots, but throw the ball out, chase it down, and then hit the visualized shot to the imagined opponent’s weak spots. Always glide to center-court after hitting.
Step Five: At the Same Time, Develop Two Shots, a 100 % Scoring Shot and a Can-Opener
And during your service innings, you will need to own at least one moneymaker shot, that you can execute 8.5 times out of ten to score a point against anybody. David Chapman had the backwall setup, the easiest shot to develop into a moneymaker. Paul Brady has the right-handed mid-court setup, parking his butt on or toward the left wall, so that he can blast the ball up the wall or shoot low, or zap a straight up the line, floor-to-wall bounce-pass, through the front center, with his powerful right hand, as most opponents cannot consistently cover both these options.
Admittedly, David and Paul were superior elite competitors, but even lower competitors, who work to beat better opponents, need a reliable moneymaker, so they can get the most out of their higher-percentage shots, when these arise, to earn an opportunity to make points and cause side-outs. To beat a better player, you will be earning, through preparation, scouting, a specific-game-plan, solid thinking on court during each shot, owing a moneymaker, and denying the opponent the opponent’s strengths.
You will also need a reliable can-opener, a neutral shot that you can hit from ANYWHERE on the court, with either hand, to neutralize or reset a rally, and to send the ball to a place where the opponent cannot kill it. The best two shots for can-opener development are the up-the-line bounce passes with either hand, that do not come around the back wall, or the ceiling controlled-speed punches.
Chapman often used the controlled-fist-punch to the ceiling, or the overhand to the ceiling, or fist-bounce-passes to neutralize rallies until he earned his back wall moneymaker. Brady uses powerful sidearm bounce-passes up the walls to both sides, to move the opponent onto the back feet, to earn a weak set-up to kill or to kill-pass.
Step Six: Learn to See, to Think, and to Use Your Memory
In my first open tourney, I ran into an opponent I felt I should beat, and lost to him in two lopsided games. I asked Coach Lew, who observed, and he said, “You never used your memory. He missed the two ceiling balls you gave him, and you never noticed. You should have put him on a ceiling-diet! He struggled with the few bounce-passes you hit to the left, and returned you setups, but you never ever noticed. You just hit no-brain shots to whichever side you desired, though he clearly had no left hand. All you had to do was hit shots to find his left hand. But your brain was turned off. He had a vertical hole addressing the left-hand overhand ball near his shoulder; and he had a horizontal hole at waist-height, off his left hip.”
Even David Chapman tells us on his videos and in his interviews that winning is easy: “When in doubt, hit it to his off-hand.”
What are some focus and thoughts that may help against a better opponent? “You will hit one more ball from where you most hate to hit it. You will get zero setups from me today.”
Step Seven: Understanding the Opponent’s “Holes” and Sending the Ball There
Chapman didn’t “use” “shots” particularly, but rather selected ball speeds to send the ball to the holes. (These are the areas the opponent leaves unattended, unpracticed, or recently departed, or can’t reach with a foot-speed that Chapman has long-ago measured and memorized.)
He used the entire court against his opponent, including the fifth wall, the ceiling, because the holes in the court to him did not involve just a horizontal space, but a vertical one as well, relative to the opponent’s weakest shots.
And Chapman partitioned parts of the court away from his opponent by his knowledge of where the best holes were, blocking the other parts of the court with his body, as he sent the ball to make the opponent run. Unlike common advice, you might receive, like ‘never hit straight-in shots’, Chapman hit a lot of straight-in shots, after he worked over his opponent’s body and mind. One of his best was letting the ball cross in front of his body from left to right, when he could next loft a soft kill up the right wall, straight in, or as a low bounce pass, (Chapman was not aiming at one inch up, but rather at six inches up, since he knew by this point in the rally that the opponent wouldn’t reach it); the opponent could only wave at it.
(Chapman hit the ball into the floor fewer than three times a match, as I recall, except when he really got out of shape.) He could loft this straight-in “softie” with his butt parked all the way over on the left wall! I think every top player needs to learn this shot with both hands.
Step Eight: Find a Coach You Can Trust to Talk Handball and Who Can See You With Objective Eyes
‘Nuff said?
In Short, the Recap:
So, you need fitness, scouting, a 100% shot you can count on when serving, defense, likely a controlled-punch to the roof to return the opponent’s serves, a can-opener, and a brain with memory to recall how the opponent scores and misses, and to benchmark how you score and earn side-outs. This latter mind-“power” stays “active” all the time. As a matter of fact, I hope it’s on right now! Because, here, what you are doing, throughout, is really respecting the better opponent, big-time! Most top opponents really want to be challenged, so they can practice, improve, repair their flaws, and get even better. So, by beating them, you are teaching them.
As An Emergency Last-Gasp Measure:
Focus on hitting just one type of shot, whether it be a ceiling ball, a two-wall bounce-pass to the weaker side, or a hop through the center, whatever type of shot that will not leave a setup or a rally-controlling shot to the opponent. Concentrate to recall which one of your shots, so far, has given the opponent the most trouble, and just hit this one shot all game long! As a result, a positive mood and feeling of confidence may return. Get stubborn. Get Defensive.
Boak Ferris Bio
When Boak grew up overseas, Boak’s dad insisted he learn martial arts while attending boarding schools, and so Boak studied Boxing (his dad’s sport), Aikido, and a bit of Kendo over a period of twelve years. He also competed at tennis, golf, soccer, swimming, and handball between elementary school, and then in High School competed at Handball and Track. During College, Boak competed at the hurdles and long jump with the track team, and took handball courses. Moving forward in time, in 1989, Boak first befriended David Chapman, without involvement in any coaching. In 1991, Boak was recruited as a faculty mentor into CSULB’s TEAMWIN project to help university athletes excel in sports and academics. Among his university clients, he coached various members of the university’s tennis, water-polo, and volleyball teams, as the university directed to him, about 16 in all, including James Cotton in basketball and Jered Weaver in baseball—both of whom enrolled in Boak’s courses. Among his topics of engagement, he included sports psychology, cognitive psychology, analytical skills, and lifestyle issues. The TEAMWIN project, though successful, lapsed as a result of a loss of funding, about 1995. Around 1991, Boak also engaged in contributing coaching tips to Steffi Graf’s team and agency, while also becoming a persistent friend and spectator at David Chapman’s matches. Starting in 1994, Boak began his own handball career, independently traveling to 8 venues (dates and locations available on request) where David competed in national championships, and spectating at David’s matches until about the year 2000. By 1994, David began including Boak as a “sounding-board,” one of the very small duties a coach may have when supporting one of the world’s most elite athletes. By about 2000, however, David’s travel schedule became too hectic for Boak, who had since been promoted to Coordinator of Graduate-Required Testing and Evaluation of CSULB students. He last supported David at the 2009 USHA Nationals in Austin Texas. Today, Boak is a number-two ranked handball competitor in the USHA Veteran Super Masters Division, and has six handball clients, ranging from 16 up to 70 years of age.