Minding the Middle

I scheduled some Saturday play with my buddies and it was great to get together and work on some new shots. One of the stronger players up north joined us and all of the games were pretty wild and fun. I was working on my serve, deep returns and a 2-hand backhand drive. I also was trying to heavily play the middle, snipping returns where I could.

My 2-hand backhand was all over the place. When it worked it was about 50% the way I expected. Not a lot of power but a ridiculous top spin, so much that it practically shot down to the ground. When it didn’t work it was either dramatically in the net (or not even to the net) or just a loopy, deep return.

Trusting myself to play so much of the middle was really challenging to do. I was leaving really big, and I mean really big, gaps on my side of the court. But I kept doing it to see what would happen. For the most part, I was able to get back to the shots and block them. A few times the court was so open, so juicy, that my opponents hit it out. I think the benefits did outweigh the risk, I had a lot of successful shots, a lot of shots that resulted in nothing more than a block that I could put away, and a few shots I missed but I think I can get the timing down with more practice. I’m not sure how my teammates felt about me playing that way. My thought process in doing so is to become comfortable cutting off the return when/if I’m being isolated. When I did do it today the end result was me hitting a winner or hitting a whole bunch of shots. My partner didn’t really know where to go (I didn’t even know where she was) and more than once I felt like a big old ball hog. For practice, the repetition was great for me. I can’t imagine doing that so much in a must-win situation.