Playing with Injuries...

 I'm fighting some arm trouble with both wrist and elbow and everything between.  From some observations and a private message or two, it seems I'm not the only one having problems.

So, what to do?  I've been told by the resident informal pickleball medical staff that rest is the only cure!  Well, that can't be right!   The arm is not getting better in any discernable degree and I've had some periods where I've not played at all.  So I'm not holding out any hope that a short or reasonable rest will clear this aching arm.  Of course there is also the possibility that if the arm was to heal and then I started to recover my vaunted backhand roll that I would immediately be back in pain.

I've tried a couple of things.  I converted to left handed a bit, and while I could dink pretty well, any long or difficult shots were problematic.  

I can play right handed and basically not hit any backhands, but that's no way to play and I also do not remember to not use the backhand and I'll make some play that really hurts.

I've added some tape to make the grip thicker, which ought to promote a lighter grip pressure.  But I have a pretty light grip already and so there was not much of a difference there.  I may still add more girth to the grip for some added effect.

With all of the above, I've basically decided to just play.  I'm trying not to play three games straight without a rest.  And I'm only playing a couple of hours instead of three and I also look for games where there will be a lot of dinking instead of drives and power pickleball.  

But basically, it's a situation that might move me back to golf for a while and not pickle at all.  I really don't want to do that as the golf is about an hour and a half at most, while the PB is multiple hours and then followed by golf.  Then also, the golf is a bit solitary and I do enjoy the people and social aspects of PB.

I have no answer at this point.  I don't enjoy not being able to play well.  The losing doesn't bother me, but I feel I'm letting down partners and while "there is no sorry in pickleball," there kind of is...

Cambria Part III

 I volunteered to help with the beginners' class this morning.  They do it every Friday and dedicate one of the six courts to the class.

They don't get a lot of turnout, today there were 6.

The usual instructor is out with health issues for a while and the players volunteer to help out.  There was only one guy and so my help was useful.

I also talked to one of the founding members.  The courts were built in 2015 with money from the players and a couple of donors kicked in about 2/3rds of the cash.

The club is reponsible for maintenance and repair and landscaping, etc.  The club dues are currently $75 per year or $10 per month or $3 for a drop in fee.  But wait, there is more...  The courts are reserved from 8 to noon for the members and drop in guests who pay, and after noon, the courts are open to all with no cost.  I'm told it gets windy and hot in the afternoons here.  The sheds are locked up in the afternoon and you've got the bring your own stuff.

The club provides all the balls.  As I mentioned in a prior post, there are nice stainless ball holders for each court.

They have two sheds, one for maintenance stuff, blowers and squeegees, and the other for an "office" for paperwork and some spare paddles and a lost and found with hangers for jackets -- which I thought was a very useful touch.

Rich, the member, mentioned that the building of the courts was challenging as the guy who did it, didn't get the surface quite right.  Had to do that again, then didn't have enough for a new color coating.  The upshot is that the current top layer is a single coat and it probably ought to be thicker.  Any chips or wear will reveal incorrectly colors.

They also have a large insurance policy and pay for the portapotties in the parking lot.

Ok, now for some pictures.  First is the squeegee, about $200 came with extra blades.  Rich was very happy with them.  They have two.

Here is a commercial training board.  Looks pretty good and useful.  This is also their deck with shades that can be lowered to block morning sun.

This is the office shed with a desk and other administrative aids.

The club is pretty much on their own.  If they want to make changes, they just do it.  There are some boundaries, but not much.  They are in partnership with the local school district, who gave them the property to build on and share the parking lot. 

I didn't talk to a lot of members, though a number of them said hi and were friendly.  

The play I saw today was mostly banging.  I mentioned it to Rich and he agreed with my assessment.  He confessed that he was known to bang rather than dink.

The quality of the play was down a step from Sunday morning.  It seems that Sunday is the day for the heavy weights to come out.  

The class lasted from 9 to 11, I got my group playing pretty quckly, they had had some racquet experience and that helped.  By 11 four of the courts were in play, all doubles.  A couple of folks came by and practiced a bit.  Mostly hitting top spin drives from mid court.

It's a very nice facility and the folks are friendly.  If you get down this way, you might want to check it out.

Cambria II

 It seems liike we have been here for a week or so, though it's only been 4 days.  The day breaks with some fog and the house we are sitting is about 60 degrees in the morning.  The sun is starting to peak from over the hill and the upper windows are starting to catch the rays.

Yesterday we took off to a winery with a lot of scultures.  Had a bottle of wine on the grounds, there are three of us, so not too out of shape for the drive back.  The winery was in Paso Robles, about 40 minutes from here.

We are going to go back to Moon Stone beach today.  Lots of drift wood, small amounts of small stones and a boardwalk if you don't want to get down on the sand.

We talked to some locals the last time at the beach and we are going to join them at the art class on Thursday.  This is in the building in front of the PB courts, so I'll probably drop in on those again.  

I miss the exercise right now, there is too much sitting around.  I worry for my waistline.

Speaking of art, I wanted to do some pencil sketching on this trip.  I'm interested in shadow and perspective, as anyone would be.  And I wanted to take some time to look at the details involved and see what I could "see" for the first time.

Here is a view from the house:

There is a deck across this back of the house with 200 degrees of view or so.  All the houses are on hills looking over the lower houses and out to sea.

The arm is not getting much better, but it's not getting worse either.  I've got a hand weight that I'm using for exercize of the forearm muscles and connective parts.  I'm not the only player with some of these aches and pains.  There are a lot of advice on YouTube, some of it might even be of help.  It is not unusual, per those videos, that this kind of pain is lingering.  I may have to become a forehand specialist -- I guess I can live with that shame if I have to.  :-)

I think that's about it from here.  There are no cell phone services here, but I can see the Whatsapp, so I see that the normal things are happening at the various tri-valley parks.

Remember, when in doubt, dink!

Dinking Part 5

 I've discussed the way that pros dink and I've taught the beginners a couple of times and have noticed things recently that bear some discussion.

While watching the men's doubles at the recent Texas Open tournament, I finally noticed that all the good dinks land in the kitchen and usually well into the kitchen.  The idea of at the feet or at the NVZ line are usually the outer boundaries of what they do.

And why is that?  A dink that is close to the net is not easily sped up.  Also the opponent has to lift that dink to get it over the net.  If they lift too high, then a speed up occurs.  And a really short shot can't be vollied.

The games I played today had very few banging points, they were almost all dinking battles.  I like these kind of points from an aesthetics point of view and I find them more funner than fire fights at the net.  Some of the points were quite complex with resets and angled shots and some speed ups.  The points were longer and more thoughtful, if you would allow me that bit of anthropormising.

I saw a number of times where dinks and drops could not be returned when the more driven shots were returned.  There is nothing weak or soft about a good drop.

We are down in Cambria for a week and we stopped by the PB area here.  Six nice courts with fencing for every court.  $3 to play if you are not a member of the club.

The play was at a very high level.  Lots of banging and only a little dinking.  How sad...  There was a gal there who looked like Whitney, served with a bent elbow like Puneet and hit the ball harder than Jimmy.  They were playing mixed and won the two games we watched easily.  Third shot drops, you might ask.  Nope, they liked to hit the ball hard with lots of top spin.  Everyone.  Perhaps it's something in the water?  

I'm doing this on my phone and many years a go I tried to add pictures to a bog post on the phone and it just crashed the app.  I'll try it again.

Well that seemed to work!  Here are some shots of the play area.  In the last photo notice the sleeve for balls that is on every court.  I think the club  provides balls and a couple of balls stay with every court.

I'm taking some time off from playing, trying to settle down a forearm injury from a couple of weeks ago.  I found some hand weights and I've been doing exercises to strengthen the forearm.  We shall see.

PB Concepts

I was watching a podcast about PB.  Chris who runs pickleballstudio.com has a regular podcast with his buddy Will.  They both have YouTube channels and the content is pretty good, mostly doing paddle reviews.

Their latest cast was about an intense two day school with Jordan Briones.  I'm interested in lessons and classes and that drew me to listen to the podcast.

I've linked to the podcast below.  One of the interesting things that Jordan passes on to the students are various concepts of playing PB.  As the player level increases, the concepts change, or are added to the base concepts.  This take on instruction I found interesting.  I've taught a bunch of the PB 101 classes and I think about how to do that and what is effective for this instruction.  Let me discuss the concept of concepts.

Firstly, what concepts are appropriate for the beginners?  What I see as the main struggle for beginners is getting used to the ball and how it bounces.  So the first concept would be, that you have to be very mobile to get to the ball, it doesn't bounce, it slows down quickly.  

Secondly, you don't have to swing wildly or hit the ball hard to hit a good shot.

And maybe that's about it.  If you can move to the ball and hit it softly, you can play the game pretty well.

So how about next level and this would probably apply to the people who take the Skills and Drills class?  In the last class, I found some drills that basically were dinking drills.  What I saw of the class, this worked quite well.  What are the important concepts for this group?

The dinking drills were teaching control.  The important concept is to keep the ball low as players at this level have learned to whack the ball.  Get serves in -- more control.  More movement, follow service returns to the kitchen line.  I also mentioned to my students that the ball has to be hit close to the sweet spot to get any consistency.  The take away for these students is another layer of control.

After a player can rally pretty well and, let's say, hold their own at a Down's level of play, what is the next level?  Usually they are getting good at banging the ball, and haven't paid much coin to the soft game.  Ah, so sad...  Better to smash and lob, than to dink.  It would make a bumper sticker that you'd only have on your car until you got better -- just kidding.  Concepts: hitting it hard will not work as well as it did, drop shots can be as effective as a hard shot, getting to the net as the main goal for the serving side is a reasonable way to play.

It's been my experience that at a certain level the short game becomes very important.  You'll not progress much if you don't start playing a mixture of a soft and hard game.  Robo told me once that at the 4.0 and up groups, all the points were typically soft.   Of course errors are dispatched with hard shots.  

Just hitting the ball hard is one dimensional and it does work for certain points, but unless you can switch from hard to soft when you need to, you're making it a more difficult game.  So another concept is, what kind of point are you playing?  Can you be aggressive or do you need to reset to get back to a neutral standing in the point, or are you in the neutral zone and can start making the game more difficult for your opponents.  This is the basic definition of shot selection.

This was talked about in the video.  Being aggressive was defined as hitting to the side lines or wings as they called.  Resetting was dinking back to the center.  What was obvious to me as I played today, that middle resets are fine, but they need to bounce in the kitchen.  I got burned by a bunch until I softened the shot.

By definition the servers are trying to get to neutral.  The opponents should be at the kitchen line to defend your third shot.  If you bang it, they block and try to keep you back.  If you drop, you can advance.  If you drop poorly, you may be in trouble.  The third drop is a reset.  If it's good, you get to the net and we have a soft battle.  That is a worthy goal for the serving side in a good game.  At that point you would expect to win half the points.  Before you were at the net, your expectation would be 40% or so.  

When you're at the net, the three conditions are still at play.  Can you attack?  Or should you reset, or can you try to dink aggressively?   The concept is to judge what is happening and how you should play the next shot -- speed up, dink to the middle, dink to the edges.

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I'm starting to write another book.  Here is the link to the video, it is a bit long and somewhat short on detail, but there are nuggets in there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjWImUU8QLI

How to Play if You're Better

 I've been watching a lot of bridge lately and there was one pro lesson that came up.  The experienced pro talked to the young pro about a very important issue, that being how to play against non-experts.

The lesson was not to do miracle things.  Do normal things and use your expertise to win by grinding down the other players a little here and little there.  A silly mistake can create a situation where the pro's abilities can't save them.   Basically don't try for hero moments.

This is useful advice for us PB players too.  You will beat all the teams you are up against if you make very few errors.  Sounds simple, but let's look at some common "miracle" shots that are a disaster if you don't get them correct.  

First of all, don't serve out, ever.  You will rarely win a point with a "big" serve and a missed serve loses an opportunity to score points.  Sometimes those opportunities are hard to come by...  Get the ball in and expect to out rally the opponents.

Hitting for a sideline is fraught with terror.  If you miss, the point is over.  If you like a line shot, keep it well within the lines.  It is a good shot to keep a poacher honest, but you don't need to paint a line, nor hit it really hard.  Just making a player lean over to his backhand is often enough to either win the point or create a situation where their odds of success diminish.  "In two shots, my partner will end the point!  Thanks for the setup, partner!"

Hitting the ball too long.  Dumping the ball deepish into the court is great.  Trying for the baseline, is silly.  You want to let the opponents make the mistakes, so hit it in.  Pro tip: the middle is a great place to allow both opponents to fight over the ball.  If it's slow enough that they both can easily reach it, it's a bonus situation.  They may collide and they don't have a angle to hit back to you.  They also have too much time to think about it, rather than just hitting the ball.

The longer the rally, the better that is for the better team.  Cutting the point shot with a "winning" shot that is not 90% to make is a losing shot.  Keep the ball in play and expect to keep the ball lower and deeper than your opponents.  Grind them down and beat them slowly.

The definition of a good pickleball player is consistency and not a killer serve or a great smash.  It's moving efficiently around the court, it's being in the right place at the right time.  Use those skills to make the opponents work for every point and stretch for every ball.  Don't be generous!  Don't beat yourself!

Drills for Players

Hi all,

The following drills were used with the Skills and Drills class the TVPBC put on last Saturday.   These seemed to work quite well with the group we had.  They all seemed to have played some and could easily use the drills with little supervision.  I was in charge of two courts and I could start one, then leave them to start the other.  When it was time to go back to the first, I would introduce a variation or move on to the next drill.

I pass this information on, as it might be useful to improve your own game and maybe you will be bringing a friend up to speed.

Rich

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These came out of a video on YouTube, by High Five Pickleball, link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMTFnE-u1y8

1) Dink, dink, Play; dink twice being friendly, then play to win.  Speed ups allowed.  Try to hit unattackable dinks.  I had them dink straight back and forth for a bit, then cross court.  The goal was to hit the dinks into the kitchen.  After some drilling, this was morphed into a dink game with the kitchen boundaries being the outer bounds.  The idea to keep the ball bouncing in the kitchen was to provide a goal.  I wasn't thinking that it was very applicable to a game.  But later I watched the men's doubles of the recent Texas open and all of their dinks were in the kitchen.  Note that this was not true for the ladies, who play a more aggressive game.

2) Cooperative Volleys; at the kitchen line or closer, volley back and forth.  Try to make controlled volleys that can easily be volleyed back.  Useful for blocking and resets.  This caused balls to be flying everywhere.  A lot of the shots were hit from a very high location, e.g., over the head.  But the part about being "friendly" was useful as the need to soften a high shot was constant.

3) Dink, dink, speed up; somewhat like the first drill, but with an emphasis on a speed up when available.  Practice the speed up and the blocks and resets.  My groups basically skipped this one.  I had them do number 4 next.

4) Beat the Feet; one player at the kitchen line, other inside the baseline.  Starts with a friendly hit from the KL, then transition player wants to hit shots to get to the KL.  Helps with fielding the awkward shot heading for a foot.  This was harder to get started.  Lots of shots were missed as this is a much tougher skill.  Note that missed shots means more ball chasing and less drilling.  Having plenty of balls on hand is helpful.  I had them do two reps and then change roles.  The drills were conducted with a single person on each side of the net, so there was parallel action.  

5) Serve, return, drop, defend; A deep serve, a deep return, a drop shot and then play out the point as a skinny singles point.  We did a little of this, but I quickly just had them do some serves.  I wanted to emphasis getting them.  Some of the players needed some serving techniques.  I stressed some body and weight shifts when serving, which I think are important for consistency.

As soon as they had that down, then I had them play some full games.  It seemed that they had had enough new skills and any more would be over doing it.  So they played a couple of games, then we were out of time.  Almost everyone kept playing, which seems to be a good reflection on how the classes went.

A final thought -- as an instructor you want to be very flexible in what you teach and what pace.  A homogeneously skilled group is obviously easier to work with.

I imparted some technical stroke stuff, but not too much.  They were all very reasonable for beginner plus players.  I changed one person's grip, I noticed she was struggling a bit with the dinks.  Grip checks are important in my opinion as getting it wrong, makes some strokes much harder than they have to be.  It makes others easier, so I wouldn't rule then out.  An informed student is a happy student!  Besides if you change a grip, it will probably be back to what it was in a couple of minutes.  :-)