One Stroke Beyond : LeGrand Emphasizes Right-Brain Thinking at Tennis Camp Tailored to Improve Confidence as Well as Skill of Youngsters

Nathan LeGrand’s Adidas/UC Irvine youth tennis camp is like any other. Campers hit tennis balls, they tan, they tire.

LeGrand likes to end each day a little differently than with the usual movie and popcorn, however. LeGrand’s 8- to 18-year-old campers finger-paint, take part in skits and perform “trust exercises.”

At LeGrand’s camp, those activities are more than creative rest time; they are part of a series of drills that address aspects of the sport that traditional conditioning exercises and service drills overlook.

LeGrand, who teaches privately in Woodland Hills and Tarzana, believes tennis camps and coaches can do more than develop good serve-and-volley players. He stresses routine fundamental skills such as hitting drop shots and cross-court winners, but students also learn positive attitude training, “right-brain activity” and the benefits of losing.

“I’ve tried to get kids to open up to themselves,” he said. “That means getting away from the ego. I try to get the kids in their right brain as much as possible, the creative side.”

The split-brain theory holds that each side of a person’s brain specializes in certain functions and can be independently trained and developed. The left brain, according to the theory, is the logical half, responsible for verbal skills and the rational and analytical side of a person.

The right brain is the emotional hemisphere, responsible for a person’s creative and intuitive side.

This concept stems largely from research conducted in the 1960s by Caltech’s Roger Sperry who discovered, through experiments on epileptics, that the brain is “two separate selves.”

Some scientists disagree with what were then termed landmark discoveries.

Sally P. Springer, an associate professor of psychology at New York State University, Stony Brook, argued in last October’s issue of Educational Digest that developing each side of the brain is impossible.

“The claim that . . . we educate only one hemisphere is clearly wrong,” she wrote. “By all current measures, including the newest ones, both hemispheres are active and involved in any situation.”

But LeGrand has found that a player’s skill level and enjoyment can be increased through more “right-brain activity.”

Right-brain access affords players a better mental approach to the game, LeGrand said. With the correct approach, the losing player in a match benefits more than the winner.

“It’s OK to make a mistake, it’s OK to lose a match. Mistakes are not such a big deal,” LeGrand said. “Experience is the real thing. Winning or losing is just the result. What you remember are the experiences.”

LeGrand, 37, grew up in North Carolina and played tennis at the University of South Carolina. He launched a professional career but soon learned he had neither the right stuff nor the right brain for the pros.

LeGrand turned to writing and acting, activities that helped him learn about positive and creative thinking. At actors’ workshops he realized that the same techniques that improved his acting would improve his mental approach to tennis.

LeGrand was cast as a handcuffed man in the movie “Boy’s Life,” but he kept forgetting his lines.

“So I thought, ‘Hey, I’ll take my attention away from myself and my lines and put attention on something else,’ ” he said. “So I concentrated on my handcuffs and the scene worked beautifully. I was more aware of how it hurt my arms and I wasn’t thinking about how I was going to blow my lines.”

The same can be done in a tennis match. Instead of thinking about his opponent’s recent rally, LeGrand concentrates on the ball.

Getting youngsters to do the same, however, has not been easy. They don’t mind hitting 1,000 backhands each day, but ask them to finger-paint or do self-realization skits and they’ll ask for their parents’ money back.

“Not every kid is going to get it, but it will plant the seed,” LeGrand said.

Jennifer Kocek, a junior at Connelly High in Anaheim who has attended the camp three times, admitted she found LeGrand’s techniques strange.

“It was a weird experience but I liked it. Everything they teach you here you can use for the rest of your life,” she said.

The key to developing players, according to LeGrand, is getting them to “trust themselves and learn their craft.”

Eight of the nine camps advertised in the Southern California Tennis Assn. tournament schedule are tailored to teach tennis skills. LeGrand says his is the only one that focuses on trust.

Getting campers to trust themselves and be creative is difficult. That’s why they finger-paint and perform a “trust exercise” in which a camper, standing in the middle of a circle of fellow campers, falls back into their arms, entrusting his safety to his fellow campers.

After a player acclimates to this exercise, LeGrand said, his perspective changes. The person no longer thinks about the possibility of falling on his head during other trust exercises, he just does it.

And the player no longer thinks about the possibility of missing a backhand down the line, he just makes it. “The left brain is judging everything you’re doing,” LeGrand said. “It puts you in a thinking mode, you can’t react. If you start thinking, you’re one step behind reacting.”

Using the right brain, however, is like driving on a freeway, LeGrand said--instinctive. “You just do it automatically,” he said.

The LeGrand plan has gained supporters. “He certainly has a unique approach and some people are naturally skeptical,” said Jeff Rose, an instructor at LeGrand’s camp for six years. “But you’d be really surprised at how into it these kids get.”

Kocek said that her game suffered from excessive self-criticism before she attended the camp. She practiced what LeGrand preached in the Redlands Junior Satellite tournament in November.

“I was down, but the thing I remembered was to turn the energy from my anger into concentration. It turned me around completely,” she said after winning that tournament and the Desert Junior Tennis Classic at the PGA West later that month, her first tournament victories.

Tournament championships provide ample motivation. But players can improve, win or lose, LeGrand said. “When people understand that winning and losing is the same thing, they just broaden their understanding,” he said. “Once you understand that, you take a different approach to matches.

“You can learn so much from losing that will help you mature. You’ll end up becoming a winner.”