I had my early morning pickleball game, which I am always thrilled about when I get invited to those. I like playing early. I like playing with those players. I am extremely challenged by them and today I left feeling pretty good.
We played 2.5 hours and in terms of wins and losses, I lost more than I won. But in my mind, 2 of the games were “extras” and I was running on empty. So I’m not going to beat myself up over that performance. I was 2-2 with each boy and when it was girls against boys I was happy we scored as many points as we did. I think we got 8 and 6, which is a lot against high-level men. Plus, we came up with a game plan, followed it and saw success from it. Not enough success to win, but enough for us to notice our plan was working.
Typically when I play there in the early morning the place is empty. We can switch courts if the sun shines in, we can play music, we can sort of do whatever we want. Today, the place was packed causing the potential for a lot of distractions. In these games, which are intense, fast, powerful games, I couldn’t afford to be distracted. Fortunately, I wasn’t. I knew people were all around, I knew some of them and I knew they were playing but I kept my focus and didn’t let them affect my game at all.
I did switch paddles this morning. I’m still using an Icon of course. My favorite Icon is white but it stains so badly from the ball. I always feel guilty when I use it because it has a giant yellow stain in the middle of it. This one is fairly new so the color isn’t too bright. Now that Selkirk is putting out white paddles with designs on them I figure maybe people won’t pay as close attention to my paddle being white with a potential distraction on it from the stain.
After Thursday I felt like I was too slow. I know my paddle was dropping and that was part of the problem but I also thought a lighter paddle might help. All my paddles except 1 weigh the same. I used the non-weighted one on Friday and felt like it was too light. Today I took all the weight off the top and some off the bottom of the white one and gave it a try. I had a couple of shots that popped off in a way I didn’t expect but for the most part it seemed to work out just fine.
It was so good today. There was so much dinking, people lobbed, people drove the ball, poached the ball, did ATPs, it was really good. The one dude can serve really hard, like almost impossible to return hard, and he didn’t really pull that out of his back pocket much today. Maybe he didn’t need to. But everyone was playing smart, working for the right shot, fighting battles to get back to the kitchen and playing to win.
My thought process going into today was to have kind of loopy, slow returns and deep, deep serves. I also wanted to make sure I didn’t speed it up because they are so much faster than me. I wanted my returns and serves to be slow so they didn’t have a fast ball to return fast. I was happy with how I did with both, I didn’t feel incredibly overpowered on the return and I did pretty much put them in a position where their best shot was to do a drop.
A lot of times when I play there they will absolutely hammer my backhand. Today they hit to it, but not so much that I felt like I couldn’t drive home from reaching for a backhand shot so often. I did miss probably 5 backhand put aways so I’ve still got a lot of work to figure out how to undo whatever it is I’ve started doing with that. I tried to do a topspin roll down the middle more times than I should have – I just don’t have the pace for that to work yet. I had a couple of lobs, something I don’t do much, and I had one topspin shot that resembled a lob. My opponent was hanging out in the transition zone, I rolled it over his head – everyone thought it was going out – and it just shot straight down for a winner. It was wild.
In the last 2 games I was pretty tired. I think everyone was getting tired but I was definitely tired and was getting caught with my paddle down. I had done pretty well most of the day but I started to notice they were beating me because my paddle was dragging. So I went full beginner mode and forced myself to put my right hand on my paddle in order to keep it up and follow the ball. I don’t know that I was super successful with that but I’m happy I was aware enough to make some changes.
I couldn’t be more grateful that I got such solid play. I didn’t have anything lined up for today so I’m super happy that I got such good games and a nice hard, hard workout.
