No subs were needed for our Tuesday night session and we had a lot of good play. We didn’t get to go around a full rotation but I think that’s because the games went long. The closer you are in level of play the longer the games seem to take. Our first game was a little bit lopsided but I think most of the other games were fairly close.
It blows my mind that I struggle to remember who won and who lost games within hours of finishing play. I guess that just isn’t my focus in rec play.
With this group, the toughest thing for me to figure out is where to hit the ball because they tend to play from the transition zone and are hugely successful with that. It’s a big adjustment I have to figure out.
I did at least recognize it in advance today and I tried some different stuff to see if it would work. It backfired. I was trying to dink ultra close to the net, forcing them to come up. I was able to do it a couple of times but the result was they ended up dinking super close and we couldn’t get it back over.
I think the key is just placement. I can still dink – I just have to dink outside the kitchen. I can hit the ball hard but with that much room, I need to place it at their feet. It’s doable, one of the gals is a big hitter and had no trouble putting it away at their feet. But for me, I’m still struggling with that shift of shots.
Our second set of games it was me and the other lefty and we were trying to help out the other team for a tournament they are doing in the near future. We got to mimic how we thought their opponents would play and holy crap it was fun. I got out my power paddle and I served it as hard as I could, returned every single ball as hard as I could, hit my third shots with a drive…it didn’t matter what shot it was, I hit it as hard as I could. Fortunately for me, my partner was a tennis player so she was able to actually give me tips in the moment as to what I was doing wrong if I missed. All of her suggestions that I tried worked. It was so much fun because my partner also was very good at the opportunities that came from those drives.
I would drive it right at them, they would pop it up and there was my partner doing her thing. One time I drove it to the person in front of my partner, she tried to hit it back to me and my partner came out of nowhere and poached that ball. A defensive attempt to hit it back to me and my partner poached again. A third attempt happened and, it was like ping pong, back and forth until my partner finally put it away.
It was awesome but also very weird because I don’t play like that. I don’t trust myself to play like that on a regular basis so it was really nice to have no pressure and just see what happens. It also was energy draining. The people who hit hard all the time have got to be in so much better shape than me. I managed, but I noticed that it took a lot of effort to maintain that pace.
I switched back to my Icon after 2 games and played my normal way. We had wild, entertaining shots (back-to-back overheads on out balls that each hit the top of the paddle), and – I can’t swear to it but it seemed like people were trying to hit me with body shots. Are they reading the journal and know to do that? I paid the price on one, taking a belly tag that left a mark and on another I literally closed my eyes but apparently got over the net because my partner was running up to get the next shot. I have no idea why they didn’t peg me after I got the ball back, I literally turned my back not knowing where my block went.
I didn’t have any ATPs but it was a lot of fun. They’re a good group.
