Does size really matter?
What’s more, her game doesn’t seem to have any apparent weaknesses. The strength of her game will always be in her groundstrokes, the power, accuracy and the ability to change things up with different spins and directions. However her serve packs a mighty punch too, averaging over 105 mph on her first serve throughout Wimbledon – a statistic even the bigger girls could be satisfied with. Her mobility and athleticism have never been in question, nor has her net game. She has the heart, determination, grit and the fight to tough it out with the best of them. Where can she go wrong?
Justine Henin is headed for a bright future, if the present is not already satisfying enough. This year has been her breakthrough as she accumulated a 14 match winning streak at the beginning of the year, winning titles in Gold Coast and Canberra and reaching the fourth round of the Australian Open before losing a mighty three set thriller to Monica Seles. This year, she has taken the scalps of the two best players in the world this year, Venus Williams (at Berlin) and Jennifer Capriati (at Wimbledon). She reached her first Grand Slam semi final at Roland Garros and backed it up with an amazing run to the finals of Wimbledon just recently. All this adds up to a tidy ranking of #5 in the world, a mighty achievement considering that exactly one year ago, she was #87. The rise has been meteoric and the follow-on success will increase exponentially.
What can go wrong? Not much it seems. Justine has the ability to hang with the biggest of power hitters, despite her size, because of her technique. Technically, she is almost perfect as she throws as much of her bodyweight as is possible into every single shot she hits. Her forehand, backhand and her serve belie her size because she throws every single bit of her height and weight into those shots. Her ability to mix her game up with variety means that she has several back-up plans should her A-game fall apart (which, similarly to the typical power hitters, is to be aggressive with the groundstrokes and to overpower the opponent from the baseline). The only thing which could be seen as not up to par with the rest of her game is the mental aspect. That is not to say that she is mentally weak as
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