If you're playing the Novak Djokovic at your level, and he keeps hitting down the line backhand winners, here are two ways you can prevent that from happening.

So let's say when you're in a backhand rally with your opponent, your opponent keeps beating you down the line. So how do you prevent this from happening? So we'll start with the easiest solution and then move on to one that's a little bit more difficult, but very effective and allows you to go on offense. So the easiest thing to do is if your opponent hits the ball across court, you want to hit this ball basically straight through the middle of the court. And you want to ideally push them back. But from here you're just reducing the number of angles they can generate. And if you go middle, then your positioning point is here in the middle of the court. If they do go into the open court here, it'll be easier for you to get to. But if you hit this ball back cross court, then what's going to happen is you have to like stand here because your opponent could pull you off the court, they can generate an angle. You have to honor that. So by standing to the left, you've now opened up a bigger window for them to hit into down the line. So by going middle, you just shut off the angle there and you can cover this window much more easily. Now the more difficult shot to pull off, but this one will allow you to go on offense is if you are in a cross court rally, you want to aim your back hand literally like right there. And so what that is going to allow you to do. First of all, it's more difficult for them to go down the line when they're making contact here. If they hit this thing perfectly down the line, like good for them, hard to do. It tends to be easier to go down the line when someone is standing here or when they're standing there. And because this way, if they catch it late at both still in here, they can hit into the court. But if they're right by the single sideline, then it becomes a higher degree of difficulty. So this target, this little hash mark here is again, it's a smaller target, but if you can put it there, not only does it make it tougher to go down the line, but what it allows you to do, because it's more likely that this ball is going to come back cross court, you can now slide over and you can upgrade to a forehand. And now you're on offense because now you can not only go inside out, pull your opponent off the court, you can also more easily go down the line inside in. So you have more of the court, you can reasonably hit into. So the smaller target, higher level of difficulty but higher reward if you can pull it off.