I got my last drill session in before I leave. It was an early one and we spent an hour and 15 minutes dinking. I don’t think either of us have a problem with that much dedication to one element of the game. I know for me, most of the games I play people don’t dink. They do drops, they do lobs, some people drive here and there and occasionally I’ll see a couple of dinks before people speed it up. I want to have the confidence that if someone wants to dink 5, 9, 14 times with me I can take it. So spending more than half of our drill session dinking is just fine with me.
I worked on drops which were really ugly. I mean really, really ugly. I hit 3 or 4 ok but then I’d hit 8 or 9 that we’re just awful. I’m not sure what I was doing there. I’m not too concerned about it. I know to hit the ball out front, keep my knees bent and not overthink it. But today I wish I could have maximized my time with the drop and landed all of them.
After I did drops he worked on them. He wanted his feed to be really hard which allowed me to work on my volleys, hitting them deep and hard. Then he wanted to work on lobs. With those I was curious if I was feeding him the way he wanted. I couldn’t really tell but he got to practice almost an entire bucket so I think I did alright.
We only had 6 minutes left after all of that so we decided to do skinny singles. Once we did that it became glaringly apparent that we do not work on serves and we do not work on returns. Both of us were all over the place, missing serves and returns.
When we finished we talked about how we prioritized dinking but it would be nice if we had time to work on serves and returns. But I think that is something technically we could do on our own. Anyway, it was a great day of drilling and I’m excited to get going.
I went to the ladies drill group and they said something about going to dinner afterwards. It wasn’t one of our scheduled dates but people still wanted to drill and play some. We hit some balls, played some games and played a little skinny singles. They all ended early and I thought, oh wow, everyone must be going to eat and must really be hungry.
Turns out they had everything sent to the house beside the barn. They had pizza and beer and cupcakes, balloons, cards and even bought me a gift. I can’t believe it, it is just unbelievable.
People talk a lot about how they meet wonderful people through pickleball and tonight was one of those moments for me.
They knew I was leaving Friday and that Friday is my birthday so they had a birthday celebration with me. This group is so generous and thoughtful it isn’t surprising that they did it, it’s just so overwhelming to be treated with such kindness. I don’t really know how to write how awesome it feels, how special I felt because of that little get together. I got a cool sweatshirt with my name on the back, ate too much pizza and chicken wings, told stories, heard stories and just had a great night.
