Another Bit of Tony Wisdom

 I've talked a bit before about what to do when things don't go well.  It's easy to feel discouraged when you don't win much on the day.  Tony had a couple of comments on this.  I think he was talking to Brandon and I was near by, eavesdropping...

There were three things that come into play with this.  One is how good the opponents are - in other words you might have played well, but you still got beat badly.  The contrapositive to this is if you were the better or best player in the game, it's easy to feel good about what happens.  You don't get punished for all your mistakes and you might not get a lot of balls hit to you, so you had less chance for error.

The final point is you might be having an off hour or day and reacting to that.  I think the :first game warmup" theory is well founded.  You need to warm your body and get your head in the game.  Don't judge the day by that first game.  I think the first game I played with Tony last year, I had three quick errors.  I said, "Don't worry, it will get better."  And it did and if I recall it properly, it was a pretty good game.

But back to playing poorly...  The game is one of mistakes and the difference between a good or great shot and an error is quite small.  The more you strive to hit a winner, the more likely you are going to err.  If you want to look like a great player, hit nothing but high percentage shots and don't pop anything up!  All easier said than done, of course.  Proper shot selection is the path to greatness.

I wanted to pass along what Tony said about this situation, and that was "you have to play through the tough patch."  Never give up and expect the next shot to be better.  One of the problems is that we humans see patterns in everything and if we have a series of mistakes, assume that more will follow.  What we want to do is to think of each shot attempt to be an independent event.  Don't let bad shots create more bad shots.  Some compensation of technique is unavoidable, but over compensation is equally bad.  Better to be loose, relaxed, and optimistic.  Not always easy to do.    

I played a point recently and my partner hit a bad shot.  Then he hit one more or was just looking pensive and remarked, "I was thinking about the last point."  A chill went up my spine, the sky clouded over a bit, the sun dimmed, the earth shook, and my vision blurred.  I was scared and stammered out a reply along the lines, we'll get the next one!  Hopefully in an upbeat manner.

And thinking about the last shot got in the way of playing the next point.  It's best to go with the goldfish model of memory retention - only save the last eight seconds or so.  In pickleball that might be a lot of shots, and it seems that eight second stuff was wrong actually, but only think about the next shot, never the last.  

This is why great players have trouble remembering the score and who is serving -- that's my story and I'm sticking to it!