Duncan Prior Tennis

Six months on from my previous blog, I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made using a true continental grip on my serve. What started as a technical adjustment has turned into a wider journey of improving my overall game. Two moments in particular pushed me toward searching for a higher level of performance: • I lost a singles semi-final in March after leading 2–0. My opponent suddenly caught fire, winning five straight games. I held serve for 5–3, but then lost the final game to three aces and an unreturned serve. I played well, but felt completely overpowered. • In June, I began feeling strong instincts to return to a single‑handed topspin backhand (SH). Serve Development In March, I sent Tomaz Mencinger (Feel Tennis) a video of my serve. I originally bought his Serve Unlocked course back in 2015, and part of that purchase included video feedback. Tomaz identified one main limitation: a shallow drop in the throwing phase, linked to a low ball toss. He noted that correcting this might ...

There are two key areas to focus on when maintaining your tennis racquet: 1) Strings 2) Grip 1. Strings Artificial Intelligence (AI) and racquet‑science research consistently show that strings account for around 50–70% of how a racquet feels and performs. In other words, the stringbed matters more than the frame. Factory Strings vs. a Fresh Restring. Most racquets come pre‑strung with factory strings. While they’re fine for getting started, there are a few issues:  You don’t know how long they’ve been in the racquet You don’t know what string type was used You don’t know what tension they were strung at Getting your racquet restrung for the first time gives you a baseline — a consistent starting point for how your racquet should feel. Strings Lose Tension Over Time All strings lose tension, even if you don’t play often. To restore performance, they must be fully replaced. For context: most professional players restring their racquets every single day, sometimes multiple times per d...

Competitive tennis has always been vulnerable to cheating and gamesmanship. At most levels, matches are self‑umpired, and players are responsible for their own line calls and conduct. After attending the Tamworth Capital of Country Easter Open (TCCEO), I left feeling disappointed by the behaviour modelled by several experienced adult players. Two matches in particular highlighted a “win at all costs” attitude that seems increasingly common. Match 1: In a Men’s Tier 2 singles semi‑final, an experienced player in his late 30s repeatedly used gamesmanship against a 14‑year‑old junior. This included aggressive challenges to line calls, calling lets where none occurred, claiming he was not ready to return serve, and repeatedly questioning the score in a way that undermined the junior’s confidence. After the match, I verbally reported the behaviour to the referee. Match 2: In the Men’s Tier 1 singles final, a group of experienced coaches and players positioned themselves near a baseline and...

In 2022, I watched an online presentation by a company called Play Your Court (PYC) called 15mph in 5 Days Serve Challenge. My biggest take-away was that the version of the 'Continental Grip' as I had known it until that point in my life could be wrong, and that maybe I had been playing and coaching ineffectively for many years. The PYC tip was to move the heel pad of my hand round one bevel, which sounds simple but was a big change to undertake in my own game. I tried it and immediately felt a difference in power. Since then I have always taught the PYC grip and found it very effective. It is the main area I have worked on with my 8-year-old daughter Frankie over the last year and to my pleasant surprise she is dilegent in checking her grip when she serves (through stickers positioned on the grip), and tells me when the stickers have worn away and she needs new ones. In October 2025 I started to experience mild pain in the inside of my elbow, often know as golfer's elbow. ...

Introduction At the time of writing I am 47 years old, a full-time tennis coach for the Northwest Tennis Academy (Tamworth, Australia), play tennis competitively as a my main hobby, and have an eight-year-old daughter who plays competitive tennis. The mind aspect of sport has always been a fascination to me and what I focused on in both my undergraduate and postgraduate sports-based degrees. This post is an attempt to reflect on my key learnings by selecting five pivitol moments in my journey so far........ Pivitol Moment 1: The Inner Game In June 1997 (aged 18), I guaduated from Colchester Sixth Form College and took a gap year. I spent three months coaching at a residential camp in the Pocono Mountains, travelled in America and Canada, and then returned home to England. I then started building my hours as a coach and also focused on developing my own playing skills. For a number of years I had played my mate Dan who was a year younger than me and had come to tennis relatively l...

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Tamworth (Australia). I hope you have had a fun year and excited about the possibilities in 2026. I finished 2024 in England, arriving on the afternoon of New Years Eve! It was my first trip back since we emigrated in 2018. Katherine and Frankie stayed in Australia and the trip was mainly focused on spending time with my mum and brother. I stayed for nearly a month and it was great to reconnect with my roots. It was an emotional moment visiting my dad's grave for the first time. He has a lovely spot outside Lawford Church. I also enjoyed a walking trip to the beautiful Lake District, a visit to Kent, playing Padel Tennis for the first time, and watching Only Fools & Horses on stage in Ipswich.  I arrived back in Australia in late January and it was a shock to the system to be back into the heat of the summer and straight into a new term of tennis coaching. It has been an exciting time, as the Tennis Centre and Restaur...

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Tamworth (Australia). I hope you have had a great year and excited about the possibilities for 2025.  We have had a fun year since I wrote my last annual blog. We spent Christmas 2023 with my aunt and her family in Canberra. We then went to Brisbane for New Years with Katherine's family, including a trip to see Rafael Nadal play in his penultimate match in Australia. It was then on to the highlight of my year with my first visit to the Australian Open tennis in Melbourne. It made it the spectator Grand Slam for me, to add to my previous visits to New York, Paris and Wimbledon.  Frankie entered her seventh year and is enjoying life. She changed schools early in the year and now goes to Calrossy Anglician School . She is really thriving in lots of areas at her new school and I really enjoyed going to her Book Week Parade where she dressed up as Sophie from The BFG . For Frankie's 7th birthday we took her to Sydney, wher...

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Tamworth (Australia). I hope this message finds you in good health and having had a fun and rewarding 2023. We have had a fun year as a family and enjoyed trips to Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. We started the started the year in Brisbane, where we brought in the New Year with Katherine’s family. We also went to watch the United Cup (team tennis event), where we saw Poland beat Italy in a deciding doubles rubber. We had great fun in Canberra celebrating the Chinese New Year with Katherine’s wider family. In our trip to Sydney at Easter, my highlight was going to Taronga Zoo. In our second trip to Brisbane we spent four great days at the Tangalooma Island Resort with Katherine's immediate family and enjoyed feeding the wild dolphins and whale watching. It is great place to take children and we could not get Frankie out of the sea! Frankie had her first year at school and has really thrived. She is a keen learner and loves dr...

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year from Australia. I hope this message finds you in good health and having a seasonal break with less challenges than the last few years. Australia and the state of New South Wales where we live has had the challenges of high rainfall and flooding over the last few months. We have not been directly affected yet, but the Peel River through Tamworth has flooded a few times. Thoughts with anyone who has been affected by the flooding.  2022 has been a fun year, with our highlight as a family being the trip, we took to Kangaroo Island (near Adelaide). I was given an 'Australian Bucket List' book a few years ago and Frankie studies it furiously, and has pick-out a few favourites she wants to visit, including Kangaroo Island! It is the third largest Australian island, and well worth a visit. The afternoon we spent at Seal Bay was very special and unique opportunity to get close to the Sealions in their natural habitat. Another highl...

In the European summer of 2004, I was in my mid-20s, and had taken the decision to return to full-time tennis coaching. I had been unable to play competitive tennis for two years and had cut back considerably on my tennis coaching hours, as I was struggling with chronic foot pain, often known as plantar fasciitis. I took a job for Mark Warner Holidays working on the island of Kos, in Greece. I had very little belief in my body to be able to hold up to doing 6 days of tennis coaching a week, but I was excited to be in this amazing location for the next four months. Two months into my adventure, one of the other coaches in the team insisted I talked to one of the guests called Rob, who he said could help me with my injuries.  It turned out that Rob was a holistic dentist, not something I had heard of before! The fundamental of his work is that he believes that the alignment of the jaw has a major impact of the functionality of the overall body. Rob said the first time he saw me he ho...

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I can imagine 2021 has been another challenging year for most people and I hope you have found a way to make some sense of it all. At the start of the year we sadly lost my dad to cancer. I wrote a blog about my dad and did a video recording for his memorial service. It has been powerful for me to revisit what I wrote and said and continue to take inspiration from dad. My heart goes out to anyone who has not been able to connect in person with a loved one in the final stages of their life as I can see that is one of the hardest parts of living through a pandemic. We are now into our fourth year of living in Australia and are enjoying and embracing our life in Tamworth. It is my first time being in Australia for an Australian Ashes and the banter is high! I am writing this just after the second test and a bit deflated by the England performance but fingers crossed we can up our game in the third test. Australia is very much...

Former world number one, Andy Murray did an under-arm serve for the first time in his career at Indian Wells in 2021 in his match against Carols Alcaraz ( click here for clip & post match interview) . Murray has become a bit of a ‘go to’ for many people on key issues in tennis as he has not only been a very successful player but also someone who seems to have a great sense of ‘right and wrong’. He has been very forthright on the topics of gender equality and also recently on players use of bathroom breaks/injury timeouts. I have been moving towards a personal position of the under-arm serving been a ‘fair tactic’ for a year or so now. I am 42 years old and throughout my time in tennis the message on under-arm serving has been pretty standard, in that it is an ‘unsporting’ shot to play. A great example being when Martina Hingis did one to save a championship point at 5-2 in the 1999 French Open. Hingis won the point but the crowd then booed her relentlessly for the remainder of the ...

Setting the Scene I realised the other day it was going to be twenty years since the terrorist attacks in New York on 11th September 2001. It was not something I had thought much about in recent years. It was though an event that has had a big impact on my life, and I have been reliving my memories a lot over the last few days. 2001 was a big year for me. I was twenty-two years old and I had graduated from University in June and was planning to be away from home for at least a year, travelling and working in the United States, Canada, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia and Thailand. I started my trip in late June flying into New York and taking a bus out to Lake Greeley Camp in Pennsylvania. I had done two previous summers (1997 & 2000) at the same camp and it was a place of real magic for me. It was my second summer as the Tennis Director and we had five brand new courts to use. I had two friends, John and Rob, from my University also at the same camp. My girlfriend at the time also wor...

Its a massive two weeks for tennis, as the 2021 US Open brings about the opportunity for Novak Djokovic to claim two records if he wins the title. He could be he first player since Steffi Graf in 1988 to complete a calendar Grand Slam (the last male was Rod Laver in 1969). He could also hold the outright record for male grand slam singles titles. Djokovic is currently level with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal on twenty Grand Slams each (both Federer & Nadal are active players but not playing the US Open due to injury). The next best is Pete Sampras who won fourteen, retiring in 2002. 'The Big Three' (Djokovic, Federer & Nadal) have achieved unprecedented success and there has much debate as to why they have been able to achieve such a sustained level of dominance. A big part of the debate often centres around why the younger generation of players have not been able to step up at the grand slams more. In episode 50 of his podcast, Simon Mundie puts forward the theory th...

Three blogs about leaving the UK and travelling in Canada & the US in 2018 that I originally posted on Facebook notes.... Goodbye Canterbury (September) After nearly 40 years as a resident of the UK I am emigrating to Australia. My predominant feeling is one of excitement, as I am looking forward to the challenges ahead. I am also feeling sad to be moving so far away from my family and friends. The last 8 years of working and living in Canterbury have been a fantastic time in my life and somewhere I have felt truly happy, valued and content. It is the place where I met my wonderful wife Katherine and our beautiful daughter Frankie was born and will always hold so many treasured memories. As a tennis coach of over 20 years I have worked in lots of different places and in several different teams. Polo Farm Sports Club has proved the most innovative and community centred place I have worked at. It is amazing to think how much the facilities and the tennis programme have evolved in the...

A couple of Christmas blogs I originally posted on Facebook notes.... Christmas blog 2018: Festive Greetings from Brisbane  I have now been an Australian resident for seven weeks, and experiencing a very different festive build-up to what I am use to in the UK! 39 degrees Celsius yesterday! I feel for the Aussie department store Santa’s!! Katherine’s parents are kindly hosting us in Brisbane as we search for work. Frankie is now 21 months and really enjoying having so many family to entertain her. She has been: charging around the house and garden with her 3 year old cousin Winter; ‘helping’ her Po Po (granny) in the kitchen; spending lots of time in the garden with her Gung Gung (grandad); and learning the Auntie Carol ‘happy birthday’ hand washing technique! Most of my time has been spent getting my personal and work paperwork in place. I was most amused when my new bank card came through and they had me down as Miss D. Prior!!! I have been working through a process to convert my...