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The podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. We are here to help you achieve your pickleball goals, with a focus on the mental part of your game. Our mission is to share with you a positive and more healthy way of engaging with pickleball. Together let’s forge a stronger relationship with the sport we all love. With the added benefit of playing better pickleball too. No matter what you are trying to accomplish in your pickleball journey, Pickleball Therapy is here to encourage and support you.
[00:00:05.020] - Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. It's the podcast that focuses on your mind. My name is Tony Roig. I'm the host of the weekly podcast. It's a pleasure to be with you. I hope you're doing well. This is a special episode of the podcast where I want to talk about seeing the story or seeing the game as it unfolds. I think it's a really powerful concept, something we've been talking about for the last for a couple of years, but several students have given me feedback recently that made me think about this some more, and I thought it was a timely time to do a special episode because of that and also because of our upcoming clinic. I want to give you some of the feedback that I'm getting and then dive into the concepts about seeing the story and how powerful that can be. It's just a different way of engaging with the sport of pickleball, well beyond just hitting a pickleball. I know if you listen to this podcast, you're already somewhat down that path. It's rare to get a player who just wants to go out there and knock the ball around, who also have some listening to this podcast.
[00:01:06.600] - Speaker 1
If you do that, you're absolutely welcome, and I'm glad to have you as part of the audience, but it's just not very common. Here's some of the things that I've been hearing recently from our students. One was it's being more aware of mechanical flaws in others' play. Now, that's not a judgment a thing. It's not like the players judging other players. It's just noticing. It's this idea of recognizing what's happening mechanically in other players' play. That can be used both for your own growth as a player, because the better that you understand mechanics, in general, just pick up all mechanics as an observer of the game, the better you're able to see how others interact with the sport mechanically. But also you can use that in your game because you start to identify areas of where players are stronger and weaker in their mechanics. And then you can use that in your development of your strategies when you're playing. So that's very powerful. Another one is this idea of reading the room. That's the way I've been explaining it lately, reading the room. But one of the players responded that that was helping them basically anticipate better by being able to read the room.
[00:02:16.440] - Speaker 1
It's part of the story. It's just seeing what's happening on the court as it's happening on the court and being aware of what is likely to happen next because you're seeing this arc of the story generated as you're playing. And then the last one was understanding what they're doing both correctly and incorrectly. If you don't recognize, if you don't have recognition as part of your knowledge base or part of your skillset, it's very difficult to improve. Because if you don't recognize when you're doing well and not well, and also recognize the distinction, in other words, the distinction of what matters, because sometimes we'll recognize, Okay, I missed a shot. But is that really what happened? Is that really the key to the whole thing? Or not? If it's not, then you're going to be chasing the wrong, going on the wrong path. So recognition is so powerful. And being able to recognize both what you do correctly, I think you should give yourself a recognition of, Okay, I did good there. I did, even when you miss sometimes, I did the best I could, or I did the right shot. I just missed a little bit like this.
[00:03:19.760] - Speaker 1
But also knowing what you're doing stuff incorrectly, whether it's mechanically or strategically, is so powerful. Not just in the pragmatic sense, because there's a pragmatic benefit to it in terms of being able to adjust as you go on and improve as you go on, but also in a holistic sense, because when you recognize those pieces of it, you're more empowered to engage with the sport more fully. In other words, your relationship is deeper with the sport because you have a fuller understanding of what's happening out there, not just the little pieces of it. So that's really cool. And so what's common about those stories is that the players are starting to better see and understand the story that is pickleball. And let me make a statement here, okay? And I do not mean this to sound crass or critical. It's not anything like that. It's simply an observation made by myself as a long-time student of the game and now full-time professional coach, which is this: Most players have no idea what's happening on the pickleball court. Not in a real sense, not in a deep, real sense know what's happening on the pickleball court.
[00:04:32.760] - Speaker 1
And again, I'm not criticizing anybody here. I'm not trying to be a jerk about it. But I think that that statement is important because if you, in fact, want to go deeper with the sport, we need to start from the premise that maybe there's more to the sport than we're seeing right now. And in the regular episode, I'm going to dive into this a little more in-depth. But pickleball is a very complex sport, has a ton of to it. It's okay that we don't necessarily see them all or understand them all right now. But I think it's helpful to know that there is a lot more out there for us to learn if that's our choice. We say this every time we talk about this topic, there's no judgment on anybody. If your choice is to play at a, let's say, on a scale of one to 10, you want to stop at a three, and not level of play, but just three out of 10 in terms of knowledge, that's perfectly fine. But what I, as a coach, hope is that you understand that there are more layers to it if you should choose to go deeper.
[00:05:38.200] - Speaker 1
Not you have to go deeper, just know that they're there and that they're available to you. You can go deeper in the game if you so choose? But it's a decision that you would need to make for yourself. So I came up with this analogy/metaphore that I think will help explain the difference between understanding what's going on or simply engaging with the sport in a more perhaps superficial manner. Again, I'm not using these terms in any negative connotation to them, just using the terms as they're defined in the dictionary. I'm going to use the vehicle you drive to drive, Maybe there's a joke there. I don't know. Drive the point home. So think of your car. Your car is made of numerous parts, but your car is more than just the sum of these parts. Your car is a story composed of the parts working together to propel you to your next destination. Now, imagine being a car mechanic who knew all the parts, but not how they work together. A car mechanic who did not understand the whole story of the car, but just about this pile of parts. It's a way of thinking about the car differently.
[00:06:47.880] - Speaker 1
One way of thinking about it is just like, well, it's just a bunch of things. It's an alternator and a transmission and an engine block and belts and things like that, or axles and stuff, and that's it. Or it's That car is an interrelationship of all of these different pieces in a way that allows the vehicle and then you inside of it to move to different places in the universe. If you're a mechanic that just understood the parts, You could be not particularly effective. You would know some basics, and maybe you know these basics. You know how to top off the water in your radiator. That's fine. I have radios apart, and the radiator needs water. Or you might know, Okay, maybe my battery is going. I need to a battery, maybe it's not something you can do. But you don't really understand how the whole car works together and would not, in that situation, be able to diagnose an example of misfiring or perhaps figuring out why the car doesn't start beyond just a battery change, because there's other reasons a car might not start. And this would be because you're not understanding the full car story.
[00:07:52.600] - Speaker 1
Now, fortunately for us, the mechanics in real life do understand how a car works. They understand how all the the pieces work together and how they interrelate with each other and how the whole of these parts work together to carry out the car's functions. And that is what you can think of as the story of the car. In other words, how the car does its thing. Now, you can think of a pickleball the exact same way. A pickle is not just a collection of shots and strategies, just like with the car, you had transmission and other pieces. In a pickle, we have a third shot. We have footwork, we have resets, we have transition zone, we have return to serve, we have punch volley, we have roll volley, we have all these different pieces, and we have strategies. But Picaball is not just those things piled them in a corner or neatly arranged on a shelf, depending on your level of organizational OCD. Picaball is a story. It's a collection of these shots and strategies and their inner relationship between them within the rules and construct of the game that we play. That's the story of pickleball.
[00:08:53.100] - Speaker 1
Now, if you don't see the whole story, then you're stuck knowing only about the battery that fails or the water that might be needed to top off the radiator. You're unable to differentiate the dance between fuel exploding in a cylinder of a car, that energy getting down the piston into the crankshaft and then into the differential or CB joints are called and into your wheels. You do not appreciate the insane timing of the dance between the camshaft and the crankshaft to make sure that the valves at the top of your cylinders allow inflow and outflow of gasses in tune with the way the crankshaft is turning. Not to mention all the other processes that happen in your vehicle, electric break systems, etc. Now, whether that quick hit list of how a car works makes sense to you or not. The point is that when you press a button or put a key in your car and it goes and you can move, it's more complex than that. And so, like, pick a ball is the same thing. You can engage with pickleball just like I get into it, and I turn the key, and it turns on, and I can drive, and everything's fine, or maybe I know the battery, and that's fine, or maybe I know the radiator, that's fine, too, right?
[00:10:10.620] - Speaker 1
Or do you want to know more? Because there's a lot more going into the hood of pickleball than you may know right now. There's a whole story of those interrelated shots and strategies, preparatory, execution movements, techniques, concepts that when you put them all together, make up the story quality of the sport that you play. Now, here's the question that I think is a reasonable question for you to ask yourself. It's, how much do you want to know about what's going on under the hood of pickleball? How much do you want to understand how all these things work together? If you're okay with the battery level depth of knowledge, no judgment. Again, as I said earlier, that's fine. But if that's the case, if you want to stop at the battery, then don't be upset when you can't diagnose the weird sound that your engine is making or why it start even though you changed the battery. In other words, set your expectation level. That makes sense, given the amount of knowledge that you're gaining about the whole pickleball story. Now, if you want to know more, you can, in fact, learn it. And I alluded to this earlier.
[00:11:20.660] - Speaker 1
There is a possibility that you can learn it. It's not beyond you. Just as with a car, you're not going to learn everything in one moment. You're not going to to get everything in one moment or watching a video about a shot or a strategy. That is not going to do it. And even 50 tips being piled up in a corner or arranged on the shelf are not going to tell you the story of a pickleball. If you want the story, it's going to take time, effort, and proper instruction. But basically, you need to understand how everything's put together. The framework is what we refer to it as. Three Pillars of a Pickable is one example of how that framework is organized to help you see how the pieces work together. Now, our coaching team, myself and our coaching team, We do not pretend to have a monopoly on providing proper instruction. We don't. But even though there are others, what we can guarantee you is that our instruction is guaranteed to be proper instruction. I can guarantee that to you. It'll get you from where you are now, whatever level you're at now, battery level or deeper.
[00:12:24.840] - Speaker 1
And it will show you the whole story that is the sport that you love and play, because that is what we do here. That is our job. Every day of every week of every year, this is where we spend our time, is putting together the story in a way that we can relate it to you so that you can then learn the story and know it yourself. Now, if you haven't had the chance to see how we coach, then join us for our upcoming clinic, the one I mentioned earlier. We're going to be dispelling three myths, giving you three realities, and talking about those three pillars of pickleball that I mentioned earlier, that started to give more structure in terms of making sense of the story. And if you have coaches before, join us for it as well, right? Because you're going to learn more and go deeper in the game. Even if you know some of these concepts, you won't know them all, and you won't know how they interrelate. We're always working on our game as coaches, and we are always working not only on our delivery and how we explain things, but also on the concepts that we explain, including in this clinic, we're going to be going deep on the third shot drop and why it's not necessarily going to be what you need right now, which is probably a different thing than you're out for yourself.
[00:13:31.400] - Speaker 1
And the clinic is free and online, so there's no cost. You can join from anywhere. There's really no reason not to come, except for a decision by you that you choose not to come, which is entirely your choice. If you're not part of our email list, go to betterpickaball. Com, join our email list. You'll get notified of the clinic and get an invite for the upcoming clinic, which starts on the 20th. Whatever you decide to do, understand that there's a lot more going on under the hood, just like you probably understand about your car, that there's a lot of pieces down there that you may not understand exactly how they all work together. And maybe cars aren't your thing, and I get that, right? But I know Pica ball is, if you listen to this podcast. And if Pica ball is your thing, you can learn what's going on under the hood if you so choose. Whether you choose to do that with us or do that on your own or do it with somebody else, that's entirely up to you. But if you are passionate about the sport and you want to go deeper, know that you can and know that you can eventually know more about the whole story of Pickleball, and when you do, you're going to feel a lot stronger about how you feel about the sport.
[00:14:35.800] - Speaker 1
I hope you enjoyed this special episode of Pickleball Therapy, and it helped give you some more framing in terms of engaging with this awesome sport of pickleball. I'll see you at the regular episode this Friday, and I hope to see some, if not all of you, at our upcoming clinic starting this Saturday, September 20th. Be well, and I'll see you then.