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
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