One of the guys I played with on Saturday mentioned he would like to drill so I followed up and found a time we could practice together. We hit the court and spent a lot of time dinking, which is good for me because I don’t see it much in the games I play. We each focused on our backhands (which took care of our forehands as well) and we did some dinking straight on, giving me the chance to attempt an Erne. I still can’t do it. Even when I follow what should be the path to an Erne, I can’t do it. My timing is off and something about running one way and reaching the other way just doesn’t click for me. I blame being left handed. It’s like when I was in gymnastics and they taught cartwheels. It all made sense and looked easy but I just couldn’t figure it out. Gymnastics didn’t last long for me so maybe I should give up on Ernes as well.
I asked if we could do one of the drill/games that I did for the Wednesday night group and he agreed.
The drill is for one person to be at the kitchen and feed the person at the baseline a short, easy ball for them to drive. If the feeder thinks the drive is out and lets it go, they get 2 points. Otherwise you play the point out. We had some ladies playing behind us so we modified the drill so that we were only driving the ball towards the bubble wall but it still turned out to be a pretty good drill. The baseline person gets to work on drives, the feeder gets to test their court awareness and when anything goes after that you get to work on everything – drops, another attack, blocks, dinks, lobs.
My drives were surprisingly good, even when I tried to hit them out. It’s ironic, because in a game they are typically poo. I kept trying to attack the block, thinking he would pop it back to me but my drives weren’t that good. He had time to block it with direction, making me trip over my own feet and look foolish. When he did the drill he would drive, take a step, get in a ready position and drive again. I was driving, running, missing the next opportunity. It was real eye opener for me. I’ve started a bad habit I need to edit right away. That drill was also fairly energy draining, probably because I was running around like a dummy and trying to crank my drives as hard as I could.
Before we left he asked me to hit him some serves so he could work on returns. That worked for me since I’m doing some new stuff with my serve. He told me he wanted my “A” serve so I was doing everything I could to place it in tough areas and put a lot of power behind each attempt. He loves his backhand, which I often teed up nicely for him (normally a good thing) and I was quickly near exhaustion from trying to hit it so hard.
Both of us were sweating and seemed to get a good workout. I hope he wants to do drilling again in the future.
I got a day-of ask to play with 2 of my friends and a guy I didn’t know. One of the gals is a real power hitter. Her approach is power with a follow up of power and a finish of power. If she’s off you might be able to let the balls go out or in the net and maybe grab a win but if she’s dialed in it’s pretty tough to handle her.
I don’t usually face women that can hit the ball as hard as she does. Typically her partner will follow up the first dose of power with a poach finish but now she’s figuring out how to put away her own work, making it really tough to slow down the game into something I can dictate and attempt to control.
I didn’t know the guy who was playing and he admitted to me that he was pretty new to the sport. He’s really fit and could really hit the ball hard and so it was a whole bunch of hard hits all night.
Since I had already put in almost two hours today by the last hour my lower back hurt was starting to hurt and I was definitely tired. I didn’t drag too much, I just was hurting.
I think I won with everyone I played with at least once so that was good. I say all the time that my barometer of good play is whether or not I get unexpected shots. This was a different level of unexpected. I didn’t know where the ball was going to go and almost every ball was going what seemed like a hundred miles an hour. It was pretty scary at times because if you don’t have your paddle up you really can hurt. On one shot the dude was slow with his paddle and only caught a piece of the ball, it ricocheted off and into his face leaving a small cut near his eye.
Being a little afraid I wondered, what am I getting out of this? I know there are big hitters out there so it was a benefit but I can’t compete with the heat so I had to try to slow it down as much as possible. I could have worked on my serve but once I started getting tired I couldn’t really put any power into it. And it was big hitters so I didn’t want to serve a big hitter a big fastball.
I did try the angle serve but that thing backfired every single time I did it because they got it and the lane opened up but it I couldn’t do anything with it. So that was a bomb. I did have an ATP, it was a backhand ATP, and it was right at the feet so nothing could be done with it. I had one right-handed overhead that I murdered but otherwise it really was just a big power night and it wiped me out.
I stuck around for a little bit after because people were mingling and a friend who came in after me told me it wasn’t fun to drive in the wind still lingering from an earlier storm. The pickleball community in that part of town is really tight. One person told me she had known a guy who was playing since she was a kid (maybe 30 years?). One of the people I played with told me she knew the guy who played with us since he was a little guy (maybe 20 years?). We build friendships with this sport but up there, the friendships were already in place when the sport came around.
