February 1
I’ve been a bit overwhelmed with my sub-par performances lately so I opted out of my playing group today just to get a break and regroup. I went to the drill session with mostly the same drills, implementing a couple of new things.
Sometimes I leave the drill group and think, man, did I give them enough things to do? But then I remember, I can burn an hour drilling on dinks. I’m giving them plenty to practice.
So of course we did a bunch of dinking drills, including cross court, and we went heavy on drops again. Real heavy. I had them do cross court drops, 30-60-90, 10 consecutive baseline drops and drops with a center target.
We ended with the net zero game. I asked them to try to do their normal shots, instead of lobbing shots to avoid the net, and they did pretty well with it. They did more drives than drops, which is probably them not trusting their drops to not go in the net (despite them being able to hit targets and connect on 10 in a row). At one point I said if they successfully let a ball go out (the drives were out balls) they would get a bonus point but none of them were able to capitalize on that. They did try to negotiate letting a lob go out into a bonus point which is just another indication of how intensely competitive these ladies are when they play.
I think the group is doing well and getting a lot out of the drills and I really enjoy watching their progress.
February 2
I scheduled a drilling session for the day and got some good work out of it. We dinked for a good while, straight ahead and cross court. I’m doing something weird with my topspin forehands and I think I’m standing up when I go for a backhand smack because it’s going in the net far too often. We both teed each other up for some ATP practice and I got to work on a backhand slice volley dink which is really tricky to do.
We did the drive drill and I did much better with it, at least in the sense of not running past the block. I tried to purposely hit a few balls out to give him some practice at letting them go but I believe it was blatantly obvious and probably not a lot of help. After the drive the drill is essentially skinny singles and that’s always fun. A little scary at times, he likes to lob me and a couple of times I didn’t know if I should turn or backpedal and opted on the backpedal. Both times I thought I was going to fall and got a little disoriented (and lost the point) but I guess it’s good to keep practicing.
The last few minutes I asked him to play a few singles points, just to see what it was like. I’m doing an MLP style event in a few weeks and in the event of a dreambreaker I’d like to at least have an idea of where to hit the ball in singles. Apparently, I need to watch a lot of video on singles. I wanted to hit it really hard and he was able to capitalize on that with ease. I was not able to get to balls I thought I could get to and I also do not exactly have a lot of strength with passing shots. Man I wish the snap serve was still legal.
