I did some drilling today and it was good workout. There’s not a whole lot to report on the days that I drill because it is a bunch of rinse and repeat. We love to dink. We do it straight on and cross court. We put a lot of time on dinking and working to earn a put away.
Today we were both kind of struggling with our shots. I was a little tight to start. We don’t do much warm up, we just go get after it. The guy I drill with may get there early and do some kind of dynamic warm up that I don’t know about, but I do not. I had just basically changed my shoes and we were playing so I was pretty tight and clumsy.
He was missing more shots than he wanted to so we decided to make a game and see if that would make it any difference. It actually did. We played a little game using rally scoring and that improved our focus and our shots got better.
We both did a couple of buckets of shots at the net, me mostly working on roll shots below the net and he was mixing between roll shots and volley lobs.
When he asked me what I wanted to work on I said drops. We made a little game out of that, rally scoring, he fed me a ball, I did a drop and tried to come in and win the point (skinny). Boy oh boy did I get a wakeup call when we did that. Probably the first 5 shots I hit I thought were pretty good drops and he just murdered them back at me. I was kinda dumbfounded. At one point I asked him if my drops were bad (dumb question) and he apologized for hitting it back hard.
I didn’t mind that he hit it back hard, I just didn’t know my drops were so awful. I’m so glad we did that drill because I immediately changed the height of my drops. I don’t know if he wasn’t able to turn on them or just stopped doing so because I questioned it before, but it was good for me to have that experience. He killed me in that game and I was a little down but then we switched sides and I’m pretty sure I knocked him around more than he or I expected.
It was another great workout and I am so happy he is willing to do that with me each week. I get the impression the tennis facility isn’t a fan of us doing it because every week I have to reserve the court a different way and I have to be put on hold so someone can ask someone else if what I’m doing is acceptable. The courts are basically empty when we are there so hopefully they will keep letting us drill.
