The recovery step never shows up in a highlight

The movement that decides most rallies happens after the shot, off camera, and almost nobody trains it deliberately.

Highlight reels are made of arrivals. The stretch forehand, the dive, the slide into the corner. What gets cut is the thing that happened immediately before, which is a player getting back to a position that made the arrival possible, and what gets cut after is the same movement again. Recovery is unwatchable and it is most of the job.

Here is the part that convinces me it is undercoached. Ask a decent club player where they should recover to after hitting a wide forehand cross court. Almost all of them say the middle of the baseline. That is wrong, and it has been known to be wrong for decades, because the correct position bisects the angle available to the opponent, which on a cross court ball from wide sits noticeably to the same side you just hit from. Recovering all the way to the middle leaves you exposed down the line and it costs you two metres of running you did not need to do.

The reason players get it wrong is that recovery is taught as a place rather than as a calculation. Middle of the baseline is a place. Bisecting the reply angle is a calculation, and it changes with every ball, which means it has to be trained as a habit of looking rather than a habit of going. The look happens while the ball is still travelling towards the opponent, which is exactly when most players are watching their own shot land.

I would go as far as saying that a player's shot quality is often a symptom of their recovery, not the other way round. If you are consistently late, you hit late, and hitting late produces short balls, and short balls produce the pressure that everyone then blames on the forehand. Fix the position and the forehand improves without a single change to the swing.

There is also the matter of the first step being a crossover or a shuffle, which coaches will argue about all evening. Both work. What does not work is standing.

Watch any long rally with your eyes off the ball, following one player instead. You will see a lot of small adjustments that never make the broadcast.

That is the match. The rest is decoration.