Valentine’s pickleball happened to fall on ladies night and only 1 gal cancelled. I guess the majority of our group prefers a plastic ball over a fancy dinner and chocolate. We had a sub that I don’t play against very often and one of the girls warned me that she lobs a lot. Me being an old lady, she also told me she would get them. Fine with me but the problem was, the lobs were freaking perfect so no one really could get them. I didn’t notice her doing them what I would consider a lot but when she did do them they absolutely worked. So when we played together I asked her to use them often.
Most of the games were pretty close. The sub and I got smoked in our first game but I think some of that was me trying to figure out the comfort level of playing with someone I don’t play with regularly. It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did for us to gel, I had just played against her multiple games, but I couldn’t figure out what I needed to do to help her and what shot she was doing that I might be able to take advantage of. I spent too much time in a swirl of overthinking and they spanked us.
In our second game together the sub had an ATP and the look on her face was amazing when she landed it. She had to chase the ball down on her backhand side. She smacked it behind the opponent in the back of the court and after she caught herself in the divider net she lit up with a huge smile, rightfully so. It was awesome.
I think most of my shots were pretty good today, I probably did more bang-bang than I should have. I could have tried to take advantage of my opportunities to dink but I didn’t connect with my purpose of the day before playing and just went for shots I thought would win points. This group is good to dink and I could have worked on that a lot more. I probably would have lost the points if I would have got in a dink battle with any of them, but it was a missed opportunity on my part to not practice dinking.
I actually did a couple of lobs tonight. One I believe worked and the other was a trip. I lobbed it over the left shoulder of the girl in front of me, but it didn’t go deep. Her partner came over to get it and instead of doing an overhead she did a volley lob. Not something I see often, a person backpedaling to retrieve a lob and then jumping to do another lob. It worked, we did not expect a lob and got caught on our heels, but it was a wild shot.
Once again it was a fun day of play. I’m glad I got to spend my day with my Valentine, pickleball.
