Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy,
the podcast dedicated to your pickle improvement.
I am your host, Tony Roig.
I hope you're having a great week.
I am on location here in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
We are doing our camps for our inclined village camps right now.
So I'm recording this up here in Tahoe.
That's why the sound will be a little bit different than usual.
This podcast, as you probably already know by now, is part of the betterpickleball.
Com Network of Resources, designed to
provide you everything you need to play an amazing pickleball game.
This week's podcast, I'm going to cover two topics.
I'm first going to talk about setting
reasonable expectations when you're out there playing with a partner.
Then in the RIF, I'm going to talk a
little bit about the way that we frame out wins and losses based on the results of
the semifinal match between Yannick Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz at the French Open.
I had the pleasure of listening to Yannick
Sinner's postgame interview, and I thought his words...
He's a young man, but his words were very
mature and will help us as we think about dealing with the plusses and minuses,
which are natural when you're playing pickleball.
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All right, let's talk about setting reasonable expectations in partner play.
What I'm talking about here is I'm talking
about When you play pickleball, most of you listening, and most pickleball
players, the pickleball players behind me here at the courts, are playing doubles.
That's how we play most of pickleball.
When you play doubles, you're playing a team sport.
There's no ifs, thens, or buts about it.
It's you and another human being playing together, competing together with the same
objective in mind, trying to be the victor in that match.
It's, again, a team event.
It's really important to understand that
there are two players on the and that it's not just setting expectations
for ourselves as players, it's setting regional expectations for our partner.
I was reminded of this recently, playing
in a group where we're basically switching partners back and forth.
I've been at this game for a long time,
and I have certain expectations about how to play the game and how I see the game.
But there are situations where it is unfair for me to impart those expectations
onto a partner who has not not yet traveled the road that I have traveled and
developed the view of the game that I have currently in the game.
What it can happen is if you allow yourself to set unrealistic expectations
for a partner, is that then you create potential disappointment in terms of your
view and also your reaction to what's happening on the court.
That will manifest itself in your mind.
It also manifest itself in your partner.
Because whether you want to or not, you're
going to react in a way that will be evident.
Nonverbal communication, the studies for
Alvarez, I think it's 70% of our communication is actually nonverbal.
We get a lot of nonverbal cues.
We're programmed to receive those
nonverbal cues from outside source from other humans.
In this case, you imagine a situation where you have set an expectation for your
partner of X, and that expectation is just unreasonable for whatever reason, whether
it's shots or understanding of the game or whatever.
You have X in your mind.
Partner invariably does not meet X, and
the partner is at a different place in the game.
So your face will show We have X, you did not meet X.
That'll be evident.
Again, as much as you're trying to disguise it, it's going to be evident.
First of all, your mind is going to be
cloudy because you're thinking, well, you're supposed to do X.
And I don't mean respect the X, I just mean X as a variable.
You're supposed to do this thing.
You didn't do the thing, right?
Now, I don't feel good about our situation.
You don't feel good because of how I reacted and/or my nonverbal communication,
even though I don't have for shoulder or anything like that.
Then the third thing is energy.
What will happen is your energy as a player will go down.
Partner play, a lot of it is energy, right?
You better your energy together, the more better you're going to perform.
It doesn't mean you're going to win, but you're going to perform better.
The more negative your energy, the more obstacles in your energy, then the least
favorable you're going to be able to perform as a team.
What I'm suggesting here is when you go
out to play, have whatever expectations you want for yourself, and that's fine.
You expect that you're going to hit your return or serve to a certain spot, you're
going to have an additional intentionality, you're going to hit balls
to a certain spot, say to the moving player if you're a system member.
Concepts that you're in there.
You're going to apply those when you play.
That's great.
But be careful about extending those expectations to a partner.
Particularly, think about it like an open play and rec play in situations like that.
The situation I was in was a form of open play.
It was a group, but we were moving around partner to partner.
Be careful about projecting your expectations about how the sport is played
and the optimal way of playing onto your partner.
Because, again, you're going to suffer
from mental negativity yourself, potential negativity transmitted to your
partner, which is very hard to avoid, and then lastly, impacting the energy.
Rather than that, rather than projecting
your expectations, accept your partner as they are.
Now, there's an exception to this, which I'll talk about in a second, when you're
working to improve as a team and you play together all the time.
But if you're playing open play, you're
playing in a rotational setting, just enjoy the game.
Just accept the game as it comes.
Accept the results as they come, not just of the whole game, but of the rallies.
Your partner hits it to a place that is not ideal.
Okay, move on.
Set the expectations for yourself and your play and what you can control and
understand that in those situations, you cannot control your partner.
And setting expectations that are
unrealistic for your partner is going to be counterproductive.
Now, the exception that I note is if
you're working together with a partner, so someone you play with regularly, you're
trying to improve together, you're playing tournaments with a player, husbands and
wives or partners who play together, things like that.
In those situations, then Having productive conversations is fine.
You can have a productive conversation with your partner.
Again, if you're working together with
them and you notice something, you can have a conversation about, well, maybe
consider doing this a different way another time.
But in most of our games, when we're in open play and rec play, It's like these
games that are going on behind me, again, projecting your expectations on
your partner is going to be counterproductive.
Before you go into the game, be aware of
that and try and avoid projecting the expectation before you start playing.
In the minute, I'm going to talk in the rift about the French Open.
Before we do, however, I want to remind
you that we have our good friends at Total PickleBall, have a code that they've
provided to us that allows on products that are eligible for this, allows for a
camera, it was a discount or some a benefit, right?
But I can tell you this, it doesn't affect your price negatively,
and it helps support this podcast as well as all the other content that we try and
provide for free to thepickleball community to help grow it.
If you'd be so kind as if you're looking for something and Total Pickleball has it
and you're good with the price, use the code.
You may get a benefit, but no matter what,
it will help support our podcast, and I'll put that down in the show notes here.
Now we're going to dive into the Rift, and
the Rift is, as you may know, the Rift is basically where I get to talk about
whatever I want to talk about that I just came across recently from time to time.
In this case, Yannick Center is playing
Carlos O'Croise in the semifinals of the French Open.
It was a five-setter back and forth, two
young, great players, number two and number three in the world, battling at the
French Open in what some would consider to be the actual finals, right?
Even those are semifinals.
But nonetheless, there was a great match.
And Center had the lead early. Alcaraz tied.
Sinner took the lead again. Alcaraz tied.
And in the end, Alcaraz ends up winning in five sets.
And so during the interview, Sinner was
very humble, very mature about his responses to it.
He was disappointed, which is Perfectly natural.
As a human being, he expressed disappointment.
But what I really like that he said that I
think we can take with us is he said that basically,
he recognized, first of all, there's two players on the court, him and Carlos.
He says he looks forward to a lot more of these matches.
Basically, the result of any of the matches between them, and they've played
nine times, and I believe Carlos has won five and Center four.
I could be wrong in terms of the order, but they're basically tied except for one.
Basically, the idea is this.
He said, One of us, me or Carlos, is going
to be the winner and can celebrate, and that's great.
The other one is going to have something
to learn, is going to be able to grow as a player.
You see how the Both sides win in that framing.
You have the winner who gets to celebrate,
and you have the loser who now has the opportunity to progress in the community
to challenge himself in this context, because they're both men,
but to challenge themselves in order to then next time, hopefully, try and win.
That competition is what drives each one of them to improve.
Having that more mature perspective will
help us because if you're playing pickleball at a level,
It's supposed to be a 50/50 proposition over the long term.
You're supposed to win as much as you lose.
Having a better framing for those times that you lose will help you feel not as
bad as maybe you would if you didn't have that positive framing.
That's this week's podcast.
I hope you enjoy the podcast.
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Have a great week, and I'll see you next time from the studio.