Today I played on Team Purple in an all-women’s MLP-style event at GoWest in Indianapolis. I was drafted second overall, even though I didn’t know hardly any of the people playing, and my team was estimated to place third, based on our combined DUPR rating. The team did well, finishing second, but I didn’t have a great day.
I came in to the event thinking I was going to make sure my drops were good, make sure I hit the angles, make sure I covered the middle and when I do a block I block it to the edges, not the middle. I wanted to pay attention to my serves – not teeing up tennis players with hard serves and returns, instead try to serve them short and make them move on returns. If they stay in the transition zone, hit their feet, don’t hit to the middle.
Even though I went in with that mindset, I still made a lot of those mistakes.
We played with rally scoring and the first game was just ridiculous because no one knows how to do rally scoring. It was easy to lose focus. I played tight and we lost. The next game we played we had another situation with the scoring where I thought we had more points than our opponents stated. I’m honestly not sure if I was right or not but we got the point I thought we should have. Then we won the game. It was awkward because they thought we were stealing points, I thought they were taking away points. So no matter who would have won, someone would have felt screwed over.
I can’t even say how many times that line calls were bad. It was really bad, a lot of the games.
Regardless of the calls, no matter what they were related to, I just never really seem to get loose and on top of that, it was very challenging to get in any kind of rhythm with rally scoring.
I hit a lot of shots out, I hit the back wall with one shot, my backhand was absolutely punished all day and at one point, I wrote in my after-game notebook that I was too scared to trust my game. I tried bad shots at bad times, I tried shots that are normally solid winners for me and missed them. If I could do it wrong, it seems like I did.
I want to be able to say it was fun because I looked so forward to playing in the event but I didn’t have a great time. I want to say I learned a lot but what I learned was I need to play more tennis players instead of pickleball players.
I had situations where my partner got in a dink battle and I messed up the finish. Sadly, I messed up the finish way too often but usually not off a dink battle. Most of my opportunities came from balls that accidentally came my way and then I’d mess it up. I kind of think that the reason I was drafted was an unrealistic expectation that I am this “finish” player and that’s not really what I do. Sometimes I can, but I don’t think of myself as the alpha when I play.
To give an idea of the type of play: 1 game is to 21 points. In those 21 points there might have been 1 complete pickleball, strategy, dink to set up a shot, play. Otherwise it was drive and bang. I can think of 2 games that dinking to set up a point happened more than once. All the other games there might have been 1 point with a pickleball presence.
We went into 2 dreambreakers and I scored 2 points in the first 1 and lost 4 in the second 1. I really think both points in the first 1 were pure luck.
My big takeaways are I have to be able to block with direction. I cannot miss my angle shots. I have to have confidence to put something on my serve (less or more). If I’m in a situation where I have to do singles, I’ve got to figure that out and I have to work on my backhand defense.
It was truly a rough day. With as much as I need to work on to improve my game, I’m not sure I’d get invited to another event like that one but if I did, I’m not sure whether or not I would. I might if I played with people I know but playing with people I don’t know would be a much bigger decision.
End of Week Numbers
- Pickleball play
- 6 sessions
- $48.25 court time
- $90.36 gas
- $86.00 dog boarding
- Drilling
- 2 sessions
- Weight: 0
- ATPs: 2
- Injuries: 1
- Hit in chest
