The WPH is thrilled to continue The Coaching Center, hosted by world-renowned sports instructor Boak Ferris. Mr. Ferris has worked with elite athletes in amateur and professional sports, to include but not limited to handball, tennis, baseball, volleyball and water polo. Mr. Ferris not only addresses proper techniques, body mechanics and strategy, but also sports psychology, cognitive psychology, analytical skills, and lifestyle issues. Mr. Ferris will host a number of segments in The Coaching Center, explaining and exploring the complexities of handball and how handball connects with other sports. This week’s Coaching Center will explore what separates Paul Brady from his 21st century contemporaries.
What separates Paul Brady from the other players of the past 15 years?
Since The WPH has well noted Brady’s dominating low-power serve with reverse for achieving numerous setup opportunities, his reliable returns-of-serve to deny scoring opportunities, and his gets, which are all functions of his footwork and biomechanics, I will focus on magnifying those superior biomechanics along with discussing his shot-selections
Brady’s Biomechanics
Mr. Brady is a highly kinetic human being with an obsession for kinetic sports, and his apparent genetic-profile represents that of an elite athlete’s combination fast-twitch and power-muscle fibers. He is built to move, while being an introvert and a perfectionist. These characteristics required him to constantly improve, and drill, and study. I believe his biggest breakthroughs occurred as a number of discrete events occurring very close in time, between 2002-Mid 2005. He learned from studying American videos how to integrate the 3-step, American, sidearm motion with an Irish-Whip weight-shift, while seeing how the best American professionals constantly selected shots designed to help them dominate and win championships. He also noticed how all the best handball champions included a return-to-center-court as part of their shot-selections, intentions, and follow-through. Videos show his discipline to get to center right after he makes contact with the ball.
By close observation and study and drilling, he also developed a perfectionist’s modified pendulum motion, where the upper-arm drives down toward the floor, (not out toward the same-side wall), next to the body, in a combined unit-turn with the rear hip, rear thigh, and rear foot. As the hitting elbow snaps down and forward, the forearm, bent at the elbow, angles at an approximate parallel plane to the floor, (Brady had to experiment to find the best arm-angle and body-spacing from the ball). At hand-ball contact, with superior eye-discipline, he ensures he lifts up on the back of the ball and rolls it from the base of his palm below the little finger, across his palm, and accelerates it out through his index and middle fingers (why not “point” your fingers toward the target as you shoot?). As the ball leaves, he can turn his hand in either direction during a final, lagged, wrist snap, and follow-through. Also, he adds power by understanding the follow-through, by understanding how it allows an avenue for extended arm-acceleration, and so he exaggerates the hitting-arm follow-through high next to his opposite ear. While swinging he maintains the elevation and pre-swing of his front arm, to add torque to his shoulder turn, and maintain a level strike. The last part of his biomechanics necessitates finishing with light footwork to return to center. Thus, the follow-through and his motion into his return-to-center footwork together impart even more body-weight and energy into his shots.
He also discovered how to adapt Gaelic football-running hard-work and iron-attitude with running in handball, such that he developed the personal discipline to take a full three steps into the ball, whenever he had time to achieve a pre-shoot position and hit the ball. Since a good opponent can take away time to achieve a perfect pre-shoot position, Mr. Brady kept and then improved his defensive, short-step, Irish Whip and pendulum paddle-shots to regain control of rallies. And finally he discovered that by lifting both of his arms and elbows early, well before stepping forward and striking, he maintains an imaginary horizontal plane connecting his front and rear elbows above an imaginary horizontal plane passing through the oncoming ball. (Note that while he keeps both elbows up, his shoulders stay down, and stay relaxed. They do not rise toward his ears when he prepares his early arms-lift, which would result in a top-heavy posture.) These high elbows allow him to drive his hitting-side thumb with a sharp snap downward to generate extra great leverage and power from his lagged elbow-wrist snap, all from his relatively modest frame. He always tries to put his front foot down prior to striking the ball.
As a perfectionist, he exhibits the benefits of a lot of core work, which is required to maintain a low center of gravity, and to counter becoming top-heavy whereby hitters lose or scatter shots. Hitting primarily by rotating your hip girdle and staying low in the core keeps you balanced, and allows you quick freedom of movement in any direction, while staying relaxed. (Without a solid core, or with your weight up in your chest or shoulders, and without using the hip-girdle to generate rotation, you lose your feet, hit off-balance, hit open-stance, stagger, or stumble when you run, and are slow to return to center, are slow to get behind the next shot to take your full 1-2-3 steps, etc.)
A number of the modern American pros carry their body-weights too high, around the middle of their chest, or as high as the shoulders. This obvious, high-weight instability is a common gestural artifact of being male: to project the chest up and out as a learned-sign of masculine dominance. Unfortunately, top-heavy posturing fails in martial arts, combat-skills, and in most, if not all, kinetic sports. You’ve got to stay low. Otherwise, you are too easy to topple. Basketball players and martial artists, boxers, fencers, as do dancers, have to learn techniques to lower the center of gravity, if they wish to advance to professional. Brady and Carroll both maintain constant low centers of gravity. Carroll actually sucks his stomach in or sometimes hunches in order to do so. It may look odd, but he wins. Chapman, Allan Garner, Vince Munoz, Tati Silveyra, Jim Jacobs, Fred Lewis, and Naty Sr. also habituated low centers of gravity. For women, according to biomechanics and kinetic studies, it’s usually easier, as the wider hips and gender-specific sensorimotor system require a lower center of gravity as a human locomotor habit.)
To do all the above, Mr. Brady uses great footwork to achieve pre-shoot position early, and he commits himself so he can finish all three steps with his rear foot turning over and lifting from the ground onto the toe, (“squashing the bug”) to fully rotate his torso, hips, and shoulders through the ball. (Just as in golf or baseball-hitting.) So, in short, Brady has developed the best footwork perhaps ever seen in the game of handball. I’d like to see Martin Mulkerrins lower his center of gravity and also commit to making the three steps forward prior to hitting every shot.
Brady’s Shot Selections
Furthermore, I award Brady superhuman credit for developing, what I call, a dominating can-opener shot, a perfect two-way shot, based on his unique DNA and practices. His signature shot opens up the whole court for myriad scoring opportunities, sidesout, court-control, and for maneuvering his opponents around while he racks up points. From anywhere on the court, even with his butt on the left wall, he can hit the same low kill-pass (also with reverse) up the right wall that never reaches the back wall. (Fred Lewis calls it “the best shot in handball.”) From anywhere on the court, with his right hand, he can direct the ball to contact the front wall about 20 inches left of the right-front corner, at about six inches to a foot up from the floor. The opponent has to wait for Brady to finish his biomechanics and follow-through, before chasing that shot over to the right wall, while Brady lightly skips to center. And now the Court is Open! For Business! That’s why it is a “Can”-Opener Shot! With the opponent now struggling to return to center from a retrieve way over on the right, and with Brady already in center blocking part of the opponent’s run to center, Brady can next hit the ball almost anywhere he likes for a point or sideout. Since he has already well drilled his second option of his two-way shot, a consistent, right-sidewall-front-wall kill that angles sharply toward the left side wall, what can the opponent do? The opponent cannot reach that dig, and also reach a second kill-pass up the right wall, if Brady opts for that, during his next shot. Amazing and entirely Professional. Brady is the true handball-pro. Mix in that Brady has developed a unique, dominating, two-way can-opener for his left hand as well, and you may be watching the GOAT. With his trained, and early-prepared, good left arm, he can hit a straight-in kill—or kill-pass—back up the left wall, or opt to hit a HUGE, POWER bounce-pass over toward the right wall near the floor—and sometimes a left-sidewall-front-wall kill shot. The opponent cannot keep on guessing or chasing these three distant options very long, without succumbing.
Where Brady can be vulnerable is to lobs and ceilings to his weak hand, but so few pros today prefer to play the lob or ceiling game, Brady hasn’t really needed to develop that shot. When Brady faced Chapman in 2009 and 2010, he came prepared to return overhand lefts. Against Carroll in 2016 and 2017, he had not really prepared habitual defensive replies to those shots, though he has them. So, like most of us, he needs to drill the lesser-preferred shots, in order to seal the possible weakness. Opponents may occasionally find they can exploit his tempo and preferences not to want to hit balls from over there.
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. 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 joining David Chapman’s team as a bona-fide coach. He traveled on and off with David’s team until about the year 2000, at which point 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. Today, he 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.