Their errors, My errors, Our Errors

Editor's note: I wrote the post below a week ago or so.  Then I had a couple of conversations today with my fellow players and some of these themes came up.  I'm not inspired to write anything else today, so I'll pass this post along.  It seems a bit disjointed as I read it over, but I'm too tired to punch it up a lot.  

 

"Are you going to write in your blog all the things we do wrong?" she asked with a grin.  

"yes, but not for the reason you think," I replied.

This pickleball is an interesting sport with its mixture of moderate speed, minimal strength, soft shots and hard, and all the timing to put it together.

I think that there are only a very few differences between the  very good and the intermediates.  I'll spell them out in a moment, but for the run of the mill point, the errors committed by both groups are basically the same.  If you watch pro matches, you will see that all points are ended due to an error.  And the errors are same as in your game, gentle reader.  A ball gets hit into the net, long, or wide, or there is a popup and a ball gets smacked away.

One could make the case that winning a fire fight at the net might be an exception to this, where someone gets surprised with a lobette or takes one to the body.  But mostly the dink battles end with someone getting too exuberant or too careful.

There are differences between us and the pros, of course.  The big one in my opinion is that the pros are always trying to get to a good position for the next shot.  There is no "stand and then react," it's "I hit it, it's going to come back over here, and I'm moving to head it off."

Once you are in the proper position, you have a lot of time to deal with the next shot.  You look like you have faster reflexes than you do, your partner will admire your nonchalance, your opponents will hate you for it. "That shot was for Bill!"  "Sorry, I was there and felt I should hit it."

The recognition of the proper position is derived from a number of things.  Most people at our level have shots that they are comfortable with.  They use them so often that they become recognizable patterns.  If you look for the patterns and trust them, you can be moving well before the opponent hits the ball. It's an easy game if you know where the ball is going to be.  

The pros are also much more consistent then we are.  Well, golly, they do it for a living, they had better be.  How good would we be if we did for eight hours a day?  

But they make the same mistakes we do.  I saw a video with Ben Johns, arguably the best player on the planet, miss two soft forehands in a row.  He was just caressing a soft ball and was trying to just dump over the net.  He netted them both.  I think I'm not alone, when I take some comfort in that.

 So the route to greatness, in my opinion, is to move early and correctly, keep the ball in play (be consistent) -- no hero shots, look for patterns.  It's a game of not making errors.  One more point is that making errors late in the game is very costly.  As the scores get tighter, try for a more conservative style, let the opponents make the mistakes.