LEWISTON – Alex Chicoine crouched low at the net, his gaze focused intently ahead of him while his opponent rocked back and forth. With one hand he held his racket. With the other, he flashed numbers behind his back to playing partner Eric Hall.

“No. No. No. Yep.”

Hall, rocked back, tossed the ball and fired a serve out wide. Chicoine slid to his right, Hall diagonally to his left and forward.

The ball came back cross-court, right to the 6-foot, 3-inch Chicoine as he moved across the front court. He pounded the ball into the blue paint, narrowly missing his opponent at net, and sent it flying over the fence on a bounce to earn a point for his Lewiston Blue Devils.

Seconds later, they were back it.

“No. No. Yep. No.”

Such is the life of a doubles tennis player. It’s a game of communication. Unlike in singles, where everything rests on one player’s ability to be better than another, doubles tennis will ultimately discover which team is better, not necessarily which team has the better players.

“You don’t have to have the best skills,” Chicoine said. “You have to have the best strategy. Some of the best doubles players don’t always have the best skill set.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find any coaches who disagree.

“Doubles are the foundation of a good tennis team,” Lewiston girls’ coach Anita Murphy said. “You can have a good No. 1 or No. 2, but you need that third point, and most of the time, that big point will come from the doubles.”

Strategies abound

The great thing about doubles – perhaps also its most infuriating characteristic – is the many ways there are to play the game of tennis with two players on each side of the net.

Every coach will preach something a bit different, and none of them are necessarily wrong. The ability to figure out which style of doubles, which method of playing the game, suits a team best is often the biggest challenge.

The most basic concept is perhaps the easiest: Each player takes a side of the court, one playing net, and the other back. Anything to the side or over the head of the net player is the responsibility of the back player. Sometimes, depending on the opposing players’ shot, the players will switch sides.

But where would the fun be in every team playing the same way?

There is the chip-and-charge, which is most often used by skilled players on faster surfaces. The speed and trajectory of a first serve will likely determine how well the ball is returned. A good serve out wide with some pace is generally tougher to handle, and the ball will come back with less speed, giving the server ample time to approach the net and establish position beside his or her playing partner. This can fluster an opponent and force them to play a well-placed lob, which is a tough shot.

“You need to be able to take the net,” Lewiston boys’ coach Ron Chicoine said. “You need to have a good volley and a good overhead. Playing the net is about good positioning, covering your half of the court, and communicating.”

The basic poach is another method. A solid offensive tennis team can anticipate cross-court returns. After the serve, the player on the serving side at net will shift quickly to the opposite side of the court, ostensibly to cut off a cross-court return. This play relies on solid communication, as the server must move quickly to cover the side of the court behind the poaching net player.

“It’s all about where you and your partner need to be on the court,” Alex Chicoine said. “It’s about communication. You can’t play doubles well without good communication.”

The Australian doubles set looks strange to most, but it can be very effective if played properly. Australian doubles forces the receiver, who is used to returning cross-court, to return down-the-line instead. This change from the familiar draws return errors. But the geometry of the situation is even more important, because the net is higher and the court is shorter down the line. Since you’re playing for a return error, and even though power serving is generally not a big help in doubles, it goes great with Australian doubles. It not only forces errors and weak, poachable returns, it keeps the receiver from lobbing the service return so you can’t poach it.

“I like to play Australian because it throws off the other team,” Alex Chicoine said. “Most teams don’t see it a lot and they don’t necessarily know what to do against it.”

For many beginners, playing up at the net can be uncomfortable. The ball comes back quickly – more quickly than normal, anyway – and excellent hand-eye coordination with proper form are a must. When starting out playing doubles, if one player is not comfortable playing at the net, you may see teams play both players back a bit. This gives players a more familiar feel to the game, as in singles play you generally spend much less time at the net than in doubles.

Important points

Strategies aside, the importance of playing doubles at all often gets lost. There’s more personal glory in taking the court as one of the top three tennis players at a high school, and with three positions open, the competition is usually tough.

But doubles teams are often looked at as a team’s backbone, and a display of its depth.

“Sometimes the doubles teams get slighted a little bit,” Murphy said, “but you can’t win the big matches without good doubles.”

Often, there are schools with a No. 4 singles player, one who finished a preseason ladder tournament just out of the singles positions, who doesn’t even crack the varsity doubles rotation.

“I’ve had a No. 8 or No. 9 (on the singles ladder) play doubles for me, because they just couldn’t play singles well, but in doubles, they were the best doubles player I had.”

It’s hard to overlook the success of the tennis teams at Lewiston, and each season begins with both Murphy and Chicoine worrying more about the four players who will play for two points than the three who will play for three points in singles.

And with 11 Class A championship wins between the Lewiston boys and girls in the last eight years, it’s hard to argue with their methods.