Table of Contents for Getting Started

1. What HECS Balls are and how to take care of them.
2. How to get started with hitting them against the wall.
3. Measuring Racket Skills with your HECS Score.
4. Using HECS Balls to boost your game and practice sessions with the HECS Training Log.
5. Learning new skills at home.
6. Improving reflexes and racket control.
7. HECS Baller Mastery Program
8. Your pathway forward, next steps.

What HECS Balls are and how to take care of them.

What are they? Patented balls made from special yarn, handmade in Canada, designed to be the perfect wall-practice training tool for racket sports. They're simple and unique, with a whole world of hidden potential for us to explore.

What's HECS?

Hand - Your connection to your racket

As we learn about what we can control and improve, there's nothing more simple than the Hand. After all, it's your direct connection to your racket.

How hard do you squeeze your grip? Do you use all your fingers? Can you move the racket easily? Can you smoothly change to the optimal grip?

With HECS Balls, this connection will get stronger, smoother, more relaxed.

Eye - How you gather information

Your eyes are critical to reflexes, judgment, tracking moving targets, and so much more.

To use your vision effectively, we can train specific qualities, like how your head is turned to make use of your dominant eye, track fast shots with more efficiency, and trusting your vision to inform your brain and muscles to move you. Skills can become effortless.

With HECS Balls, your eyes will be tested in various ways, training the small muscles of the eye, but also how fast your brain makes sense of the game.

Though your Eye abilities are subtle, racket sports rely on vision, which makes this attribute incredibly powerful.

Coordination - The harmony of your movement

Whether you think you’re coordinated or not, we’ll be able to do incredible things with HECS Balls.

In racket sports, we must strike a balance between giving our best effort and being relaxed enough to move around smoothly. Better coordination means being efficient with your energy, but also generating maximum power.

With HECS Balls, we can practice navigating tension levels with every shot. We can practice as intensely or as casually as we want, giving us the freedom to focus on details that are usually lost in the pressure of games and lessons.

When you build harmony between the two extremes of energy, skills easily transfer to the court for the next game session.

Skill - The acts of proficiency for your sport

We can’t all be professional athletes, but that’s okay. It takes an unrealistic amount of time, money, focus, and energy to perfect your skills to achieve such a level. With HECS Balls, this changes entirely.

Your skills can improve beyond the time you spend on the court. With 5 minutes per day and a consistent focus on small details, you won't even have to break a sweat to make real positive changes to your game. You can even learn something from a coach and practice it 1000 times immediately against a door if necessary.

You have potential for training skills, refining your best shots, and learning new ones. Even ‘bad habits’ you’ve had for years can be changed with a few minutes per day.  There’s no downside to trying and exploring your limits. 

Maintenance and Care

As with most things, if you take care of them, they'll take care of you! Here are some quick tips and reminders to keep your HECS Balls in good shape.

• Avoid hitting your HECS Balls against very rough surfaces that can snag the strings and pull at them.

• Keep them away from potential hazards, like certain pets.

• If a ball is squished flat from shipping or some other reason, roll it around in your palms for a few seconds to restore its shape.

• If a string is sticking out like the picture below, immediately snip it with some sharp scissors. 

DO NOT PULL on the strands. Your HECS Balls will last a VERY long time if they keep all of their material intact.

If they happen to be in need of a good clean, they can be washed by hand with some soapy water. If you accidentally let them wash and dry in a washing machine/dryer, they’ll be fine, but sometimes grab lint from clothes!

Up Next: How to get started with hitting them against the wall.