Playing tennis in the sun

You toss for a serve you've hit a thousand times, look up, and the ball is gone. There's nothing up there but white. You swing at where it should be, catch the frame, and start the game with a fault.

The courts where we play run north-south, and on summer mornings the south end is always the disadvantage side for a righty. Serve from there and your toss climbs straight into the eastern sun. On the worst mornings the contact point and the sun line up exactly, and you're hitting the serve on muscle memory alone, hoping it works, avoiding a look at the ball at all costs. The lefties get the same treatment from the north end, and by late afternoon the two ends trade the pros and cons. There's no opting out outdoors, either. You change ends all match, so sooner or later the sun gets a service game against you.

We used to call a serve that went in from the bad side luck, mostly so we didn't have to blame ourselves for the ones that didn't. We knew better. Consistency into the sun comes from a plan, not a coin flip.

The sun only hurts you above the horizon

Think about where your eyes go during a point. Rally balls stay low. Fence, court, and your opponent sit behind every groundstroke, and the sun doesn't enter the picture until the shots that make you look up: the serve toss, the overhead, the lob, the high volley.

How many moments like that make you give up points just to avoid looking up? Here's the plan for the balls above the horizon.

Serves: move the toss

Locate the sun before it locates your toss. In the warmup, stand at both baselines, mime a toss, and see which service games are going to hurt.

Then move the toss out of the light. You don't have to serve from the same spot every game. Anywhere between the center mark and the sideline is legal, and a step along the baseline often takes the toss from the dead center of the glare to just beside it. So does turning your stance a few degrees, or tossing a touch more in front.

If a toss escapes into the white anyway, catch it, and retoss it. Spin helps too. A slice or kick toss sits in a different patch of sky than a flat toss, and the contact lets you keep your chin tucked instead of staring straight up into the light.

Adjust the serve rules

The social doubles crowd at our club went one further and rewrote the rules: every team serves from the end with the sun at their backs, with each team serving twice in a row around the switches except that the first serve team only serves once at the beginning.

It's probably not a thing you can change in a tournament match. However, you can absolutely suggest it at a social event.

Overheads: shield, shorten, or let it bounce

Point at the lob with your free hand. It marks the ball, keeps you sideways, and works as a sunshade your eyes can line up against. If the lob is short, take it as a swinging volley before it climbs into the worst of the glare. If it's deep and you have time, let it bounce. Off the bounce the ball comes down through air you can actually see, below the skyline, and a smash off the bounce wins the point just as well.

When you truly lose one in the light, don't guess-swing. Step back, play a high deep ball, reset the point, and smash the next one.

Use it on them

Everything the sun does to you, it does to your opponents. Lob the player who's facing it, and lob higher rather than deeper, because a higher ball hangs in the glare longer. In doubles, feed high loopy balls to the sun-side player and count how many overheads come back as friendly volleys.

The sun is a court condition, the same as wind. Using it isn't bad manners. It's tactics.

The gear half of the answer, hat, sunglasses, sunscreen, is already in playing in the heat.

The sun cheat sheet

• Find the sun in the warmup, from both ends.
• Move along the baseline or turn your stance until the toss clears the worst of the glare.
• Catch the toss you can't see. Retossing is free.
• Point your free hand at every lob. It's a sunshade.
• Short lob: swinging volley before the peak. Deep lob: let it bounce.
• Lob them into it. Tactics.

Next match, same sky. You toss, and the ball climbs, and it doesn't disappear into the white anymore, because you found the right toss spot in the warmup. The serve goes in.

Somewhere across the net, somebody is squinting at the lob you just put up. The sun is still undefeated. It's just on your side now.