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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.
[00:00:05.420] - Tony Roig
Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. I hope you're having a great week. I'm your host of this weekly podcast, Tony Roig. It's a pleasure to be with you. We are in our new space inside our studio. We've dedicated this part of the studio to the podcast. Shout out to Kylene for helping us deck it out with all this awesome stuff behind us, including this great bowl of ice cream as a constant reminder of what is probably our most significant contribution to the sport of pickleball, the idea of having a bowl of ice cream every time that you play. This week, I'm going to be talking about chasing fairies. And by chasing fairies, you'll see it's basically chasing concepts or ideas that don't really pan out at the end of the day. And so maybe taking a different approach that will be more productive for you as you move forward. Before we do that, a couple of housekeeping ones as a shout-out, and then the other one, I want to give you an update on a course that's coming up. So first of all, the shout-out this week is going to be to our YouTube community.
[00:01:09.080] - Tony Roig
I appreciate you all checking us out on YouTube. If you haven't checked it out on YouTube, take a look at it on there. It's pickleball Therapy on YouTube, just the same name as this. You get to check out the studio upgrades and let me know in the comments what you think about the studio and how you like the bowl of ice cream and everything behind us here. Alan, always appreciate your comments. Alan is basically consistent. Alan, not basically, is consistent. Every week, he has a comment, and we have these conversations in the community here on the YouTube channel. It's really a great way of keeping the fire alive, if you will, in terms of what we're trying to do here. Appreciate Craig for coming in and commenting from time to time. Thank you, Craig. Shaq, welcome to the podcast. New listener. We have Larry, again, another new listener. Welcome to the podcast. I appreciate you commenting and sharing. Greg has been with us for a while, too, and Greg is usually pretty consistent about commenting as well. Thank you, Greg, for sharing your journey. A lot of times, I would submit to you that when you share of yourself, when you're vulnerable and you share what's going on, the good and also the not-so-good.
[00:02:17.500] - Tony Roig
Not-so-good, not so good. Not so good in a negative sense, just in we'd rather it be otherwise. It's good in general because it helps other players who may feel alone in that situation. It may feel like they're the only ones who are going through whatever that is to not feel so alone. So I really appreciate you sharing that information. I saw a couple other new listeners in here. I wanted to... Hello, Michelle. Welcome to the podcast. Kevin, thank you. Welcome to the podcast. Actually, I don't know if Kevin is welcome to the podcast. I think Kevin, you've been around for a while, so let me know in the comments. I think you've been with us for a minute or two. Matt, thank you very much for the comment. It looks like Daran. Daran is, I think, fairly new to the podcast as well. If you haven't checked it on YouTube, check it out. If you haven't subscribed to it, as always, please consider subscribing. It really helps us reach other players with this content. This content is not the sexiest, and actually the content we're going to talk about in this podcast is the sexiest.
[00:03:19.010] - Tony Roig
So one more bit of housekeeping is every month we have a live online training. Think of it like a clinic, an online clinic, if you will. It's live. We come into the Strategy Lab studio here. We have a state-of-the-art studio. It's without equal in our sport. We come in here, we break down some game tape, we look at different concepts, we answer some questions. It's just a really good way of learning pickleball. And when you think about learning pickleball, the most efficient use of my time with you as a player is for me to transfer knowledge to you. I think as players, sometimes we get lost in the idea of hitting balls, which is nothing wrong with that, right? Being on court, you need to be on court to learn pickleball. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it's been really nice to see some other coaches chime in on this recently out there in the social media ecosystem, talking about how our job as coaches is to transmit knowledge to you. We've been doing this for a long time, transmitting knowledge through words. Sometimes we'll get pushback by players who are saying, You're talking too much.
[00:04:26.760] - Tony Roig
Folks, I don't know. This is how we're designed to communicate other than non-verbally. But words are important because they allow me to communicate with you. Anyway, the online clinic is a really interesting way to learn more about pickleball. It's a very comfortable environment to learn. And also because when you're off-court, you get to really focus on the thing. When you're on-court, you're worried about doing the thing. Those are two different things going on, three different mindsets. Anyway, I'll put a link in the show notes and you can check out one of the One of the online trainings you go on to, the next one, the one in June, is going to be about dinks. We're going to go deep in dinks. All right, so let's talk about this idea of chasing fairies and what we're talking about here. When you're young, You have this idea of the tooth fairy and Santa Claus and things like that, and that's perfectly fine to be young and think about those things. But as we get older, I think we still have a little bit carry-over with that. And what happens, And it's very specific to pickleball, is we start chasing these ideas that are deemed to be sacrosanct or deemed to be the way we're supposed to do stuff without understanding the why.
[00:05:41.480] - Tony Roig
And then if we don't understand the why, then First of all, I would submit to you, it's not as fulfilling for you as a player, because the more you understand the why, the more you're in the no, and the more you're making decisions for yourself. And the other thing is, oftentimes, if you don't know the why, you end up chasing a fairy that's not there. A pot of gold at the end of a rainbow doesn't exist. It appears to be a thing. It's not a thing. And a couple of examples that come to mind are, one is, I heard this from a good friend and player here locally who She's got the pulse on what's going on out there with pickleball and what players are doing and hearing and all that. And we were just talking about the game. I was talking about the same thing I mentioned about the dinks. I was telling her that what I was seeing is we've advocated flat dinking forever, basically. Not saying you can spin your dinks. I spend some time to spin my dinks. It's fine. But flat dinking is a great way of dinking if you don't have consistency with your dinks, and you can do a lot of lifting with flat dinks.
[00:06:48.710] - Tony Roig
And what we've been seeing is the pros have migrated in that direction. You're seeing more flat dinks from the pros because the pros are realizing that they don't need to add the extra chance of error from spinning the ball, oftentimes in their dinks. They can just flat dink it into a spot. What's called sometimes a neutral dink, sometimes called a dead dink. They will hit those all the time. Anyway, so we were talking about that, and then my friend said, Yeah, because all the players want to spin it. And then she said, Top spin, under spin. And then she threw in side spin. I was like, Side spin? So I had to stop her. I'm like, Did I hear you correctly? Side spinning dinks now is a thing? And that's a fairy, folks. I can't Think of a reason why you'd want to sidespin a dink. And not even the pros sidespin their dinks because there's no advantage to it. But I will tell you this, that spin will definitely increase your error rate for no gain. So that's an example of a ferry. It's something that we hear about and we chase. Another example of a ferry is a forehand in the middle.
[00:07:50.030] - Tony Roig
Forehand in the middle, it doesn't work. I'll give you one quick takeaway here. If you want to see the full breakdown, it's on the In2Pickle channel on YouTube. Just type in In2Pickle, I am the number 2 pickle. Forehand in the middle. You should come across the video. But the easiest way of showing the flaw in a four-hand in the middle is, I am a left-handed player. Let's say you're a right-handed player, and I'm on the right, you're on the left. Four-hands are in the middle. Who takes the ball? Me or you? They're both four-hands. That doesn't answer the question. Our concept, respect the X, you should still look at it because you need to understand the Y, but we'll explain to you why. When we talk about respect the X, we explain to you, Here's why it works. Because of this, this is, here's how you break it, here, here, and here. We have a whole course coming out inside our academy that's going to basically break it down into all of its subparts. But respect the X works. And it works because it can pass the black box test, whereas Four in the middle can't.
[00:08:45.910] - Tony Roig
Four in the middle ends up being a ferry. And the same thing I heard recently about this conversation about third shot drop, sorry, third shot drive, fifth shot drop. And the conversation basically went something like this. So what happened was, back in the day, it was third shot drop. You dropped the third. That's why it has the name third shot drop, right? That was the strategy. And then, pros started doing a third shot drive, fifth shot drop. Now, there's a reason why they did that. I'll explain in a second. But that became a strategy that the pros started using. But what happened was when the pros started doing it, amateurs started saying, Okay, I need to third shot drive, fifth shot drop. Now, they were doing that oftentimes without considering the reason to do a third shot drive, fifth shot drop. They were just doing it. Doing it like that is just a fairy, basically, because it doesn't have any substance to it. It's just following a thing. I don't know why I'm doing it, but I'm doing it because that's what I heard. And then the folks that I heard talking about this, we're talking about then the game's evolving to now they're driving on the seventh, driving on the ninth, what's going on?
[00:09:56.750] - Tony Roig
And so it becomes very confusing because As soon as the pros do something, then the amateur ranks are going, Wait a minute, they're doing that. I don't understand why they're doing that. So I guess I got to start doing that. Everybody starts chasing it. And what happens is, going back to the third shot, drive, fifth shot, drop, is Let's assume that you were a player at the time who had a great third shot drop, and you could still third shot drop very well, and it was working for you. But all of a sudden it becomes third shot, drive, fifth shot, drop. Players migrated from their approach, which was working. And I'm not saying don't grow as a player, but this particular strategy wasn't necessary for them because they were able to drop the third. The reason the pros started driving the third and dropping the fifth was because they were having, at the time, difficulty dropping those thirds because the returners had gotten better at hitting returns that were difficult to drop. The best example I can give you is there was a hard slice, low slice that started getting developed. I actually played against one of the players who started with that.
[00:11:04.980] - Tony Roig
Abby is her name, really good player back in the day. And she had this slice, low, hard return to serve, very difficult to hit a third from because it had so much action. It was so hard. It was coming in so much pace that you couldn't really drop it. So the way you dealt with that was you drove that one. Now, the drive wasn't intended to do anything other than just keep the ball alive, obviously. So the drive itself was just keep the ball alive. And then when you got the volley back, the volley wouldn't have as much action because it would just be like a punch volley and it wouldn't have as much spin on it. That's why you could then drop the fifth better than you could have dropped that third in that situation. But it was very situational. It wasn't like something that you should apply all the time. It wasn't a fairy that you... Or it was a fairy. It wasn't like a thing that you just did. But players started doing it, and they started just saying, Okay, third shot, drive, fifth shot, drop. It was a thing you did all the time, which, again, doesn't make any sense if you understand the purpose of the third shot drive, fifth shot drop technique.
[00:12:05.820] - Tony Roig
And so this idea of chasing these concepts, chasing these fairies, if you will, what happens is you end up lost. You end up like, you'll We'll hear about the side spin on the dink, and all of a sudden it's like, Hey, I guess I got a side spin on the dink, because that's the ferry, that's the current thing, whatever we're hearing. And what I would suggest to you is when you are presented with this type of information, pause and ask yourself, Why am I doing this? And the better you understand the framework of pickleball, and that's the framework of pickleball is how the game is constructed, the non-volley zone, the two bounce rule, how they interplay, advantage, disadvantage, your objectives, all that comes under framework. And it's how we teach everything inside everything we do at Better pickleball. And the academy and our TPS, everything is built around this idea of framework first, and then under that, you have objectives and strategies and shots. If you can understand framework, then you're able to say, Okay, what is it again you want me to do? You want me to sidespin my dinks? Okay, why do you want me to sidespin my dinks?
[00:13:12.580] - Tony Roig
What does that do for me? And then, Okay, cool. All right, so it's going to put some side action on the ball and potentially make it a little bit more difficult, tiny bit more difficult for my opponent to react to the ball because of the sidespin on it. How much sidespin can I realistically put on it before I start floating the ball? Okay. And then the next question I would ask is, what do you think my percentage of errors will be when I started doing that? So let's say I currently dink at a... I'm just going to use round numbers. I dink at a 15 % error rate with my current dinking. And so you think when I add side spend, I'll go from 15 % to what? Because I guarantee you it's not going to be 15 to 15. It'll probably be 15 to 20 or 25, and the advantage of it is going to be nominal. And how often am I going to use that? How long does it take me to learn it? So you start asking these questions, and then you start saying... Then you conclude, No, I don't want to do that right now, or ever, probably.
[00:14:09.320] - Tony Roig
I don't want to do it. So basically, that's the better way to do it. And same thing with these very dogmatic statements like, Four hand in the middle. It sounds great. Good sound bite. Sounds fantastic. Four words, easy to remember. And it said with such confidence that you're like, Okay, that must be the rule. Why? Why Why is it four hand in the middle? Now, I will tell you this. Sometimes the answer is the four hand in the middle is the best shot. But that's like saying, a lob off my back hand is the best shot. Not always, but sometimes when I'm in trouble I'll pull wide and I have a good lob, I'm going to hit that, right? But it's not like all of a sudden the rule becomes like lob off the back hand because it happens to be the right shot there. Or you could take any shot you see and then make it into a rule and call it that, right? A rule should be a rule only when it can be used prospectively, meaning you can use it at the beginning to make a decision as to what to do, not retroactively to, Oh, the forehand was a good shot there.
[00:15:14.140] - Tony Roig
Let me... Then four hand in the middle makes sense, right? That's retroactively. We can get it in that 20, 20 hindsight. So whenever you're presented with these things, even respect the X, right? I'm not telling you to hear the three words, not four. Respect the X, and then Okay, that's what I'm going to do because I heard it and the other players said it. No. You hear about it and you say, Oh, respect the X. Sounds interesting. Let me think about it. Let me look into it. Let me study it. Let me learn about it. As you work on that, you'll improve your understanding of a pickleball, of the framework of pickleball. You'll go deeper in the sport of pickleball. And as you go deeper in the sport of pickleball, your overall knowledge base will improve. As your overall knowledge base improves, it basically feeds on itself, right? So when you hear about a cool rule like respect the X or forehand in the middle, when it's proposed to you that you should sidespin your dings or do something like that, when it's said to you that you should drive your third and drop your fifth, always ask why.
[00:16:17.130] - Tony Roig
What's the reason for that? Why do I want to do that? What's the advantage of doing that versus something else? And also consider the potential downsides of adopting that into your game. And one last note on this that I'll leave you with is you have to ask yourself, how important is that thing, whatever it is, relative to anything else that you're currently focused on? Because that's another potential trap that we fall into, which is always changing the thing we're working on, never actually improving in any of them because we keep on replacing with something else. That's a podcast for another day. I believe we already did an episode on that, but I'll hit it another day because it's such an important concept to just sticking to whatever it is that is your highest priority at the time and not just chasing the latest side spin thing that you hear on TikTok or YouTube or wherever it is that you're getting this information from. Anyway, so that's this week's podcast. I hope you enjoyed the idea of being mindful of your journey of asking questions about things that sound too simple to be true. And the better you understand those, the better you continue to grow, the easier it'll become to filter out this information in the future.
[00:17:31.480] - Tony Roig
If you're interested in checking out our online clinic, whether it's this month, next month, whenever works for you, please join us for one of these online clinics. I think you'll really enjoy it. We have sometimes between 40 and 100 players come into these, and they all have a good time. We let you all have some time to work through some problems together. It's a really interesting experience and a great way to learn the sport of pickleball and meet other players who, like you, are keenly interested in their pickleball and improvement and in continuing to grow in this wonderful sport that we all love. If you have a minute to rate and review the podcast, really appreciate that on whatever platform you're listening to. If you're on YouTube, make sure you like and subscribe if you can. And as always, please consider sharing this podcast with your friends, because if you enjoy the podcast, they probably will, too. If any of your friends tells you, SideSpan your Dinks, send them a copy, send them a link to this podcast so they can hear maybe why not to do that. I hope you have a great week, and I to seeing you on the next episode of Pickleball Therapy.
[00:18:33.330] - Tony Roig
You are.