Reflex is a story we tell about good anticipation

Human reaction time is far too slow for the volleys we describe as reflexes, which means something else is doing the work.

A ball hit hard from the baseline reaches the net in roughly the time it takes to blink deliberately. Simple reaction time to a visual cue, for an athlete, sits around two tenths of a second, and that is before any movement has begun. Add the time to actually get a racket into position and the arithmetic stops working. The volleys we call reflexes should not be physically possible.

They happen anyway, which tells you the racket started moving before the ball was struck. Not consciously. The net player has been reading the opponent's shoulder line, the racket face at takeback, the position of the front foot, and has assigned probabilities to a small set of outcomes. The hand goes to the most likely one early and adjusts. When the read is right it looks superhuman. When it is wrong it looks like a player standing still watching a ball go past, and we call that being beaten, which is the same skill failing.

This is why I get irritated by reaction ball training, the little rubber things that bounce unpredictably. Unpredictable is precisely the wrong input. It trains a general alertness that has no transfer, because the actual competence is recognising specific patterns from a specific opponent in a specific position. You cannot practise reading a shoulder by dodging a random bounce.

What does transfer is occlusion work, and it is much duller. Show a player video of an approach shot and cut it at the moment of contact, then ask which way. Do it a few hundred times. The improvement is real and it is boring and almost nobody does it because it does not look like tennis.

There is a limit to all of this, and it is honest to name it. Against a good disguiser, the read is genuinely unavailable and the net player is reduced to covering the higher percentage side and living with the rest. That is not a failure. It is a bet, taken knowingly, and the good ones take the same bet every time so at least the losses are cheap.

The players who look quickest at the net are rarely the quickest athletes on the tour.

They are the ones who have watched you before.