By Don Henthorne | Wednesday, June 24, 2015

In an era where players are most comfortable posing baseline questions, coach Mark Bey believes all-court tennis is the answer.

"I fundamentally believe in all court tennis, I truly feel that that is the best way," says the 46-year-old Chicago native.

Bey grew up as a tennis fanatic in the '80s dreaming of synthesizing the components of his favorite influences — "Arthur Ashe’s temperament, John McEnroe’s serve-and-volley game, Bjorn Borg’s baseline game, patience and anticipation and Jimmy Connors's intensity and tenacity" — into a pulsating all-court style.

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He's applied that expansive vision to coaching. The player who studied economics at DePaul University has grown into coach regarded as a valuable resource in Midwest tennis and beyond.

Bey is the CTA Coordinator at the Glenview Tennis Club in Glenview, Illinois, a member of the USTA's national junior competition committee, a contributor to the USPTA's instructional video series and a long-time coaching consultant to the Bryan brothers.

We caught up with Bey at the Glenview Tennis Club for this wide-ranging interview on player development, how to attract top American athletes to tennis and why he teaches the all-court game.

Tennis Now: What can the U.S. do to get the best young athletes to gravitate toward tennis?

Mark Bey: I think that it is something that is at the forefront of every meeting I go to. They are constantly trying to get better athletes into tennis, but more importantly retain them. What they are finding is that a child’s first experience going to a local tournament and losing 0 and 0 and getting killed is not great and you can lose people at that point or you can go into a class and there are six people standing in line and they are hitting one ball so yes, there has been a lot of discussion and consequently some reforms relative to the red, orange, green continuum, but that aside, my own personal opinion, the idea of a sports combine is important.

I think there needs to be partnerships with other sports – where you get 50 kids and they go to different stations, where you go to a basketball station, a tennis station and a soccer station and honestly you just beat out the other sports... You get 10 kids out there and play 5 on 5 basketball and then go play a bunch of tennis games or get a group to go play some soccer or a group playing flag football — use the other sport a bait and then make tennis the love.

TN: What do you think of the notion that by playing primarily hard-court tennis, Americans don't develop the point-construction skills that come with playing more on clay courts?

Mark Bey: It is just difficult with the size of our country and the weather in our country. There are parts of the country where you can have more clay-court tennis, but it is hard to have people train on it year round and have a lot of tournaments on it year round. But it should definitely be part of any player’s development that is looking to be a world-class player.

To the comment that the Europeans might have an advantage regarding working the point, you can still teach that to your kids on a hard court, so it is sort of a double-edged sword to say you have to be on a clay court to learn angles and drop shots, it may be accentuated by being on that surface, but a well-coached kid is a well-coached kid. So you can give everybody all the tools and all the game but the difference is that a child may sometimes take the quickest route to success and if that means I am going to hit a flat ball up the line without spin, keeping it low and possibly win with a direction change, I’m going to pursue that and that is where the hard court kid loses some of the point construction, so if they are really well taught, they can build points as well as execute.

And to be fair, our best American champions like Sampras, Chang, Courier and Agassi, those guys knew how to work a point and play. Chang grew up on hard courts in California and he won the French at 17, so I really think that the credence to that comment comes from the fact that here is a lot of clay court tournaments in Europe, including high level challengers and even more have been added to the calendar and there are fewer hard court tournaments that count for big points.

The U.S. Open and Miami are the only places that plays medium speed, Indian Wells is slow. Wimbledon has been slowed down to the point that it is not even grass anymore, so that can be a problem. What they have done is to try to engage the spectator by having a longer point but they have lost some of the significance of someone having a big serve or a good volley so they have lost some of the artistry of an Edberg or the power of a Becker or Goran Ivanisevic or Lendl so the game is still explosive but people are now hitting and neutralizing, hitting and neutralizing, more rallies, but there used to be someone like a Rafter, who could play from the baseline but also looked to serve and volley, there was a lot more permutations of game styles before. Now they are trained to rally from the baseline and maybe have a little bit of a volley finish.

TN: Do you teach players to volley?

Mark Bey: I’m an all-court teacher to the core. I fundamentally believe in all court tennis, I truly feel that that is the best way, so now with so much baseline tennis going on what you end up having is people looking to be — my phraseology is — an eventual all-court player, so they are only going to come in when they are comfortable after the right sequence of shots that makes sense for that player, everyone should have some sense of closure and conclusion, because at the highest level everyone is going to make you have to hit balls and there is a bit of an attrition situation that goes on at the end of a point

TN: Defense has changed so much, many great players now just need one shot to go from defense to offense. How have defensive and transitional skills changed the game?

Mark Bey: Well guys are playing with powerful racquets and polyester strings that have revolutionized tennis. It has changed the racquet head speed, the power, the return, the passing shots, it has also made it more challenging for someone to be a Stefan Edberg — I’m going to kick serve to your backhand, which gives me time to come in and hit a first volley and then the point starts, yeah, we don’t see that anymore. A 12- year-old can hit 80 MPH ground strokes now, the game has changed dramatically. I have 12-year-old players now that are hitting the ball as hard as John McEnroe was back in '84.

TN: Who were a couple of your tennis influences growing up?

Mark Bey: I would say I wanted a mixture of Arthur Ashe’s temperament, John McEnroe’s serve-and-volley game, Bjorn Borg’s baseline game, patience and anticipation and Jimmy Connors's intensity and tenacity. I started playing in '79 so those next four or five years were great years and an era for Borg, McEnroe and Connors with Ashe being a sort of a statesman. I just felt like that was the example I needed as a player cause I felt like groundstrokes were important and return was important but finishing at the net made sense and being able to manage yourself and your emotions was equally important, so I wasn’t going to show my cards so to speak, the way a McEnroe or Connors would, I would be more laid back like a Borg but still be in the person’s face in terms of finishing at the net like a McEnroe.

I think I tried to take the best from those guys I didn’t think it was fashionable for me to argue with a ref or flip someone off in the crowd but I can appreciate the intensity that a Connors or McEnroe would bring and the emotional platform that they played from, because that gave them their edge. But I worked as a ball boy for many years and got to watch them up close, both men and women, got to see Evert and Navratilova battles, and really understand the yin and the yang of staying back versus coming in.

TN: Is there anything from a pro tennis player’s game that the average person watching can incorporate into their own game?

Mark Bey: I think there is something one can learn from watching any touring pro out there, the problem is the game is so fast now and people are getting enamored by stylistic things and not looking at fundamentally what is important.

TN: So they are not noticing maybe the preparation going on before they even hit the shot or the footwork involved during a point?

Mark Bey: Yes, a return of serve at the highest level is very simple – split step, make a unit turn, hit an open stance off the outside leg, lunge, and hit the return up the middle. Now you watch juniors, you’ll see everything under the sun, they’ll go backwards, they will take a big swing, and try to step into every ball – make a lot of mistakes. So the simplicity at the upper level is a lot more important than people realize.