My Wednesday drill session was hard. I need to take a break and rest but I don’t have a chance to do so anytime soon. I guess I better drink a lot of water. I was pretty tired during our workout which was our usual stuff, a lot of dinking, cross-court and straight on, attack when we earned it.
We practiced some individual things where we fed each other balls. We decided that we would borrow one of the buckets from the facility and that was a nice addition to our routine. We didn’t have a ton of balls but having that little bucket made it possible for us to kind of tee each other up over and over.
I worked specifically on forehand rolls on shots coming at me below the net. I did a bucket of backhand rolls too. These are shots I’m missing when I play. I’ll work and work to dink someone until I get my opportunity for a put-away and then I hit it in the net. It is an attackable ball for me but I’m missing it too often.
I’m typically under the impression when I miss those it’s because I’ve stood straight up. I’m in the proper athletic position to do my dinking and then stand up to whale on it, undoing all my hard work.
The guy I’m drilling with thinks I’d have more opportunity if I would do the topspin roll so we put some effort into that. He did a bucket of those shots as well and then wanted to work on volley lobs.
We also did a drill where he fed me balls and I tried to do a drop and then we played the point out as if it were skinny singles. It was ugly, he just killed me on the skinny part of it. We eventually switched to cross-court in order to be a little bit more realistic because I don’t typically drop from that side of the court straight on.
When we switched to cross-court my drops were much better and I was able to get some repetition with my set-ups and put-aways. He thought I was being too predictable but I think it was a drill so I’m ok with it being a little bit of rinse and repeat. I’ll want to make sure I’m not being predictable in a game but I think I’m fairly good at not using the same shots over and over, especially if I’m not winning the point with them.
We moved on to a drill he had seen online and it was pretty fun to do. I don’t think he tried as hard as he could have with it because I think he was worried about wearing me out, which he likely would have if he had gone all out. Or I wouldn’t have been able to retrieve any of his shots which would have been a complete waste.
We did figure eight baseline shots. He hit all of his shots cross court, all of my shots were down the line. Both of us had to move a lot to get them and his accuracy was far superior to mine but it was a fun drill to do for a little bit.
We played some singles points, which was a little bit frustrating for me. He is so backhand heavy that hitting to his backhand is what he wants, and him hitting to my backhand is hitting to my weakness. I know to practice I should hit to backhands but against him it was a real smackdown.
I still made a lot of bad decisions about coming in. I would recognize I had started to come in and then stop because I knew I couldn’t win with that and by then he could just burn me whichever direction he wanted.
There were a couple points that were really fun. I was running around all over the place, hitting it right handed, hitting it left handed, but it was all just hoping for the best outcome and typically me losing the point. For me, singles is fun because of that – hitting it hard, running around practically diving for balls – but I know there is much more to it that I don’t know how to do.
If I’m in a dreambreaker situation this weekend I’ll be glad we practiced and really glad I only have to play four points. I don’t know that I could do very well in singles without a coach truly helping me figure out how to hit the shots and hit the right shots.
I thought we had a great workout, going a full 2 hours. I really appreciate getting the opportunity to drill and work on so many different things.
I worked with the ladies drill group and it was a wild one. The lady who asked me to help with the group knew in advance she was going to be out for a big chunk of the session and she thought she had someone who would come in and help when she left. There was a miscommunication with that so I had to work with both groups for an hour and half.
Doing that wasn’t a big deal, except that we only had 7 people. Which meant I had to come up with drills for 3 people instead of 4 for one of the groups.
I had the group of 4 go through all of the normal drills I have them do. I added a different dinking target drill just for a hint of variety. When those drills were done I had them do what they normally do when we switch groups and I think that worked. They got to work on serves and volleys and baseline shots, which is what the group of 3 had done.
For the group of 3 we added a lob drill, which was good for an odd number of people. Then I did as many of the drills I could with the group of 4. I participated in a few of them and for the last 20 minutes we played some games, switching half way through so people would play each game and against different people. I had to play in all of the games but kind of liked having a chance to point out where drills we had done were shots in the game.
Fortunately for me, after we finished I was able to eat some cupcakes leftover from a bake sale. I believe the bake sale was to raise money for an AED machine at the facility, making me super happy they are considering that addition for the safety of those who play. And the cupcakes were yummy.
