Welcome to the Zone

The "Zone" is considered by players and coaches alike to be the Holy Grail of tennis performance, but it is also the game's most mysterious and elusive experience, thought to occur only by chance and never by choice. Until now, Scott Ford's Welcome to the Zone is a step-by-step process that shows you exactly how to play tennis in the zone, by choice, not chance. Welcome to the Zone redefines the ultimate tennis experience in a way that both beginners and professionals can understand. It not only explores the subject of the zone, it also gives you an elegantly simple process for shifting out of your normal performance state and into your peak performance state. It's called the Parallel Mode Process. After a brief introduction, Welcome to the Zone is divided into three sections: Phase I: Getting In the Zone. Phase II: Maintaining the Zone. Phase III: Competing in the Zone. Each chapter introduces you to a new "Step" in the Parallel Mode Process, and each of these Steps takes you deeper into the experience of the zone. At the end of each chapter specific on-court drills are outlined with easy-to-understand instructions and feedback pages designed to measure your progress. The Steps in Phase I show you how to enter the zone using a simple concentrative task that shifts you out of a Serial Mode of operation and into a Parallel Mode of operation, and when you shift into this highly efficient mode of parallel operation, you simultaneously shift into your peak performance state. It happens immediately, and you don't have to be a skilled tennis player to make the shift into a Parallel Mode. You just have to be willing to try something radically different. Remember, this is not a book about playing tennis "in the norm." Rather, it's a book about playing tennis "in the zone," and to get into the zone, you have to do something very different from the norm. You have to change the way you focus your eyes on the court. Briefly, you have to stop focusing on the ball and start focusing on your contact zone. The Steps in Phase I teach you how to make this radical change in your visual and mental focus. The Steps in Phase II are designed to maintain and stabilize the zone by maintaining the zone's temporal dimension - the dimension of the present. Playing in the zone is playing in the present, and Phase II teaches you exactly how to connect to the present dimension of the game and then how to maintain and stabilize that temporal connection. Phase III is all about competing in the zone, the ultimate experience for any competitive tennis player, whether you're competing on the hallowed grass of Wimbledon or the crack-filled courts of the public park. Phase III defines how and why you come out of the zone during competition while the Steps show you how to reconnect to the present dimension and return to the zone. Ford has presented his unique approach to playing tennis in the zone at the prestigious USPTA World Conference on Tennis, the USTA's National Tennis Teachers Conference, the Canadian Tennis Teachers Conference, and in 2000, he traveled down under to present the Parallel Mode Process Model at the 2000 Pre-Olympic Congress of Sports Science and Health in Brisbane, Australia.