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.