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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.
[00:00:05.040] - Tony Roig
Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement with a focus on the mind. I'm your host of this weekly podcast, Tony Roig. It's, as always, a pleasure to be with you during this episode. We're getting pretty close to episode 300 of the regular episodes. Special episodes are already well past 300, but not 300 on the regular episode, so we'll let you know when we get there. But it's been a pleasure to be with you all this time. Today, we're going to do a little bit different. I'm going to share with you a personal story. I'm going to have to play in a tournament this week, and I'll fill you in more on it and tell you about my journey. I am a pickleball player just like you, meaning I have a lot of the same thoughts, a lot of the same ebbs and flows in my game, a lot of the same things that happen on court. I'm going to share with you some stuff. I'm going to get vulnerable with you, share with you about a hook call against some friends of mine and things like that.
[00:00:58.040] - Tony Roig
I think you'll enjoy this week's podcast. As we dive into the podcast, I'm going to read... Appreciate everybody leaving those reviews. We have about almost 50 reviews on the book on Amazon, so really appreciate everybody taking their time on that. What I figured I'd do this time is maybe read the AI summer a story of it. I think it's helpful to hear. Customers find the book informative with one noting how it takes lessons to a deeper level. Moreover, they appreciate how it increases their enjoyment of the game and helps with the mental focus. Additionally, the book receives positive feedback for its readability with one customer describing it as a must read for all levels. They also value its emotional content with one mentioning how it helps feel positive towards teammates. I'm glad that the book has had a positive impact on you guys out there. If you've read the book and haven't had a chance to read up, leave a review yet, appreciate you doing that. As I always mentioned, it helps us reach other players. It's the algorithmic world. So if you can leave a review, really appreciate you doing that. And then also wanted to let you know that we've opened up some additional camps.
[00:01:59.470] - Tony Roig
If If you've been interested in a camp, you can check out one of our camps. We have a super camp March ninth through the 12th here in Tampa. We still have some spots left. That's designed for intermediate and advanced players, primarily. Basically, players who already have a solid foundation on their mechanics, some strategy, they want to go deeper. Then we have our Better Pickable Camps, which are really our pickleball system camps. Those are the ones that teach you the three pillars, give you mechanical work, give you strategic work, really get you going in the right direction. Then our grad camp, once you've come to camp. So if you want to check those out, go to betterpickable. Com, and you'll find the TPS camps on there. If you want a different camp, you can send us an email, camps@betterpickleball. Com. All right, so here's how it went down. And I do have a RIF. We're talking about Bigfoot in the RIF. I think you like that. So we're going to work through this. I have some notes here, but I don't have it all mapped out, so we're going to play through it. So what happened was on Saturday, I was at my grandkids' birthday in Orlando, and a friend reached out, their partner for to this event here in Tampa, was stuck in Kentucky in a snowstorm, so I needed a partner.
[00:03:05.740] - Tony Roig
He was scrambling, asking several folks. By the time I got back to him, he'd already asked a couple of other players, but I said, Well, let me see how that works out, and then let me know. The other players couldn't make it. So I was like, All right, let me check the calendar. Let me check everything. Reached out to the tournament director, David. Appreciate him letting me do this. And I basically said, All right, well, I haven't really been I haven't been playing too much. I haven't been drilling, but if you want to give it a go, I'll give it a go. So I signed up, showed up that morning. It was actually a really a very high-level tournament in our world, in the senior pro world. I would say there's some new senior pros. I don't know their names. I don't know everybody who's at the top, but I can tell you that there was at least five out of the top 10, maybe six of the top 10 players. Tommy Ho, who used to be a professional tennis player, Jimey on the scenes from Brazil, who was a Davis Cup player. Youssef, I don't know, I remember his last name, was an amazing player.
[00:04:06.140] - Tony Roig
David George, Darryl Watts. Just Mercham Moriaru. Just Scott Fliegelman, Patrick Coat. Just a tremendous slew of players. John Sperling was there, but his partner got injured. But anyway, just a lot of really good players in that event. And so look at the draw, and we're playing two local players, of ours, Tom and Phil, in the first round. So we went out to that match, and we played hard. We ended up on the losing side of the match. The score was, calling it from our standpoint, actually, I'll call it from the winner standpoint. It was 11: 13. We won the first game, 13: 11. So 11: 13, 11: 3, I think, and then 12: 10. I'll give you more detail about it as we go through that third game in particular was interesting because of the ebb and flow of focus levels and also them playing them upping their game. And then we were in the backdraw. I realized later, I thought we had a buy or something because it took forever for us to get a match, but the team that we were supposed to play was John's team because they had withdrawn. We basically got an automatic buy in the first round.
[00:05:16.740] - Tony Roig
Our first played match on the backdraw was against Scott Fliegelman and Patrick Coat, who I believe were the number four seeds in the tournament, and there were 24 teams. That tells you how good they are. And they smoked us. They absolutely smoked us. Yeah, I will tell you that we lost by the same score as the team that played them at the very end of the backdraw, basically for fifth place. That's how these tournaments work. The four teams that make it to the semifinals are buying for the top four, and everybody in the backdraw is playing for fifth. So they were the fifth. They came in fifth, Patrick and Scott, and they beat the team at the end by the same score they beat us, which was a bagel. So they were just an amazing team to play against and watch them. They're so thorough with their mechanics. They're so good with their mechanics. Their strategy is sound, their athleticism is next level, but a pleasure to be on the court with them. Let me work through a couple of different concepts with you that I think will help you with your play as well and tell you how I approach them.
[00:06:15.040] - Tony Roig
I will tell you that as I work through the day, I'm a human being, at least I think I am, a human being. So I still deal with a lot of the stuff. Same thing that happens to any player, to you and any player, in terms of having the the pluses and the minuses as we go through the day and dealing with stuff. But I will tell you, one of the things that I have noticed is I'm much more resilient now. And specifically, what I'm talking about here is I have an ability to feel the moment, experience the situation, and then pretty quickly move on from it in terms of being able to get out of the negativity or get out of the bad situation fairly quickly compared to how I used to. And I think that is in great part a result of this process, of this journey, this pick-able therapy journey for myself. So I will tell you that as you look at yourself, consider that as part of one of your metrics, if you want to think about it that way, in terms of how you're doing from the mental side. It's not...
[00:07:16.520] - Tony Roig
I mean, listen, hopefully one day I'm the Dalai Lama or something, where I'm just so chill that I'm above it all, and nothing bothers me. Maybe I'll work toward that. But in the meantime, I do notice that I am more resilient, and I am quicker to get out of the negative cycles. So I think that is positive and something that perhaps you could look at for yourself in terms of how you're dealing with things. But let me give you a couple of lessons, a couple of things, a couple of takeaways. One is, I think it's really important to set reasonable expectations. Now, I want to be really, really careful here to not... I don't want you to get confused with this, because it'd be easy to respond to what I'm going to say next and say, Stop making excuses. Don't make excuses. This is not an excuse for the level of performance yesterday, but it's going into the match with a reasonable set of expectations. And as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, I have not And I don't really drill that much. I spend most of my time coaching these days. That's what I love doing.
[00:08:20.460] - Tony Roig
So I don't drill. And if I don't drill my shots, then it's unrealistic for me to expect that I'm going to magically be able to hit a bunch of shots repeatedly throughout the course of a tournament at the highest level. And when you think about it, I've been playing around with this idea, too, with discipline, execution, and work, and things like that. But when you look at the best in any sport, and I've been using Kobe Bryant a lot, so I'll just keep leaning into that. When you look at Kobe Bryant, when he was at the height of his game, he was already league MVP, a champion, all that stuff. Kobe Bryant is still going out shooting 15-foot shots, right? Can he make a 15-foot shot? Of course he can. Is he very proficient? Of course he is. Has he made a million of them? Sure he has. Does that mean he's not doing them anymore? Absolutely not. He's still doing them. Why? Because he needs to keep the muscle memory. The reason to set this up is because oftentimes what happens is we expect a level of performance that is not commensurate with the amount of work that we've put in.
[00:09:24.080] - Tony Roig
Listen, that doesn't mean you don't go out there. I gave it what I could. I gave it my all. I competed it. I left it on the court, is what I believe, even on the focus thing that I'm going to talk about in a second. Could I have played better? Of course, I could have played better. So could have Tom, so could have Phil, so could have my partner, everybody. So could have Scott and Patrick got knocked out pretty early in the down, not now, but down pretty early in the tournament. Could they have played better? Absolutely. I watch games where the best team didn't necessarily win the game because of how they played in that particular moment. You could always perform better, but I think you need to be realistic with yourself. And let's say, for example, you're working on a volley, right? And you're early on in your process working on the volley and getting your reps in. And you go out to play and your volley fails. You're right, it doesn't work. Well, I mean, What do you expect to happen right there? You're going to magically hit this volley a certain way, or if you haven't practiced a certain shot a certain amount of time, you can't expect your body just to do it in the moment just because you are you and you should be able to do that.
[00:10:28.980] - Tony Roig
That's just not how things work. So I think it's important to set reasonable expectations for yourself. And I want to repeat a little bit here. I don't go into these events when I play them thinking, Oh, my God, there's no way I can win a game or a few games or a few matches or even win the tournament. There's no reason I can't do that. But I need to have reasonable expectations for myself. And it's not just having a reasonable expectations for myself, it's also being respectful of my opponents. And what I mean by that is I know that Tom and Phil work hard at the game, and it shows in their play. They played really well. They weathered the storm in game three. They came back after... We came back in game one and took two game one. They decisively came out in game two. They didn't fold. They got game two. Credit to them. We made a run in game three, as I'll explain to you when we talk about focus, they were able to weather that storm and prevail. So I'm not going to take it away from them by making it all about, Oh, I should have done this.
[00:11:23.740] - Tony Roig
Oh, I could have done that. So it's not about that, right? But it is about understanding the dynamic on the court and understanding that for me, I need to set reasonable expectations about what I expect of myself. Now, even if I had the reasonable expectation that I would have hit three shots better than I did or not miss a couple of shots that I missed or whatever, that doesn't mean that I'm going to necessarily think I need to win that game. So the reasonable expectation has to do with how I expect to perform, given the amount of work that I've put in. And I think that's really important for you as you play. And it's not an excuse, guys. It's simply living in the real world so that you have realistic expectations about what you expect. And if you're familiar with the 'oops bucket' idea that we talked about a few episodes ago, that 'oops bucket' idea, there's a number that go in the Yey bucket, a number that you expect to go in the 'oops bucket'. That number will adjust based on how much you work on that shot. So take in the volley again.
[00:12:21.220] - Tony Roig
If it's brand new to you, your Oops bucket out of 100, it might be 30 or 40 out of 100 that you're going to go in the Oops bucket because it's new. Eventually, maybe you get it to 30, the 20, the 10. Never going to be less than some number. I mean, I'm going to let you set the number because I don't want to get bogged down in that. But that's how you come at any, especially any competitive situation. League, you're moving up in level, right? So you've been playing You're going to play a 3-0, you're going to play a 3-5 League. Give yourself some grace. Some students I work with, we have this conversation, right, where they're improving, but now they're playing more advanced opponents or opponents that don't make as many mistakes as the one they're used to playing against. So now they feel that they're not playing as well because they feel like they've backslid, but they haven't backslid because their trend is up and they're moving up, but their opponents are not better. So yes, compared to their opponents, they're going to feel like not as good as they did against their old opponents because they've improved, but so have their opponents.
[00:13:14.940] - Tony Roig
Anyway, setting expectations is really important to avoid disappointment. The second lesson here has to do with focus, right? And understanding that your focus will ebb and flow during a match. In hindsight, I wish I had done some stuff differently in game two and earlier in game three. Again, I'm not trying to take anything for everyone. I'm just talking through my experience and what I like doing like one of those postmortems on my play and what I could have done. And so what happened was in game two, I feel like, again, studying it in hindsight, I feel that I switched gears some. So game one, we were down, we came back, we went 13 to 11. So that's one of those back and forth, back and forth exciting, different strategy. I was lobbying some more in game one at the end, and that was making Phil and Tom a little bit uncomfortable. So I started game two with the lob. The lob wasn't working as well because I wasn't hitting it as well. Frankly, I was either hitting it, I had a few deep, and then I hit some short, so I wasn't really dialed in on it.
[00:14:14.220] - Tony Roig
And then I ten cupped it. If you haven't seen that movie, there's a whole section of it where, I think it's Kevin Costner. He's basically trying to hit a... He's trying to use a seven iron to do this one shot, and he ends up with, I don't know, 16 over par or something crazy like that because he just gets stubborn. I got stubborn with that shot in game two. And I also feel like I wasn't quite as dialed in in game two, and also at the beginning of game three. I missed a couple of shots that I understand we can miss shots, but I missed them in a row. And that tells me, okay, you're not really dialed in right now. And then I'll tell you what happened at the end of game three, so you understand the difference. So in game three, we were down 3: 10 serving, 3: 10, one or 3: 10, two, I don't remember. I don't know. I was like, Okay, I guess let's dial it in. And we went, we just started going. We started performing. We started doing our stuff. And next thing you know, it's 10: 10.
[00:15:13.960] - Tony Roig
Tom and Phil We directly called the time out at 7: 10 when we got the 7: 00. So that was good for us because I told my partner, bless him. I was like, Hey, we got him to call a time out. So that's some respect for us. We could have lost 11: 03, so good for us. And then we got it to 10: 10. And then I hit a drive to Tom. Blessing crashed. That was our strategy. Tom countered it correctly. Tom got it away from Blessing, so Blessing couldn't do a one, two, shake and bake idea. So he got it away from Blessing. I don't remember exactly what happened. A couple more shots, maybe, and then they won that one, and then they were able to serve it out and win 12-10. And so, again, credit to them for not crumbling, because it's easy to crumble when you're up big, all of a sudden, things get a little tight, and then you start making some mistakes. Credit to Tom and Phil for pushing through that. But in terms of myself, going back to me, in my performance, I think there's a different level of concentration and focus that goes into competitive play that I, again, haven't done these for a minute.
[00:16:14.200] - Tony Roig
So not making excuses, just making observations about how things happen. And so since I'm not dialed in with that, the ebb and flow was a little bit broader than I wanted it to be. And it's going to happen to you when you play, too. The key is to be able to find ways to pick the moments when you can refocus yourself in the match. And an example here was, I mentioned earlier, one of the top players is a gentleman named Youssef. I got to watch Youssef and Tommy play David and Darryl in the finals of our bracket of the 50 plus senior pro bracket. I tell you, to watch, particularly all of them play, but Youssef in particular, you can see how before every single rally, every rally, he has a little conversation with Tommy about, what are we doing this rally? I can't hear what they're saying, but I can tell he's there mapping out the very next rally and then mapping out the next rally. And then if something happens, having a conversation about how to fix whatever just happened. Super engaged in what's happening, super focused on every detail of what's going on on the on the court, I think that's a different way of focusing and obviously performing at the highest level in the game.
[00:17:22.340] - Tony Roig
And I think that's credit to that type of training, right? Training, getting those reps in competitive situations, and then knowing that you have a process in place to make sure that you're focused on every rally. I was thinking about what would I do differently in the future? I probably would spend a little moment longer before I serve, thinking through the rally a little bit like a chess player where you go like, Okay, I'm going to serve this way, and then I'm going to look for this, and then I'm going to do this other thing. Tell blessing, Okay, I'm going to go here so you can do that, or if it gets you, you go here and I So that we have clarity in terms of strategic clarity, I think that helps also with focus. So that's something that I will be looking at in the future if I'm going to play more competitive matches, but something you can do, too, in your games. And then two other pieces of this that I want to share with you. One is against my friends Tom and Phil. We had two calls that they didn't like. They were at or close to the line.
[00:18:25.220] - Tony Roig
They hit them. These guys hit really hard. So I'm blessing-called one. The way he I called the one the way I saw it in front of me. After the match, I asked some of the guys who were off. I was like, because they were really pissed off. But in tournament play, in particular, I'm not. It's the call. If the ref can't overrule it, I'm sticking with my call. I see it out, I'm going to call it. After the match, they were so adamant. I said, Well, let me talk to my friends who were off the court a little bit. And they were like, I think that might have been in. So what did I do? I went to Tom. We're friends. We're having lunch together, me, Phil and Tom. And I was like, Hey, guys, I apologize for the hook in the match. Nothing intended. And they were super cool about it. They were like, Yeah, I get it. Stuff happens in games. You call it the way you see it. The ball is hit super hard right next to the line. We all shrugged our shoulders and moved on. I thought it was really positive interaction, positive exchange.
[00:19:15.220] - Tony Roig
I don't feel bad about any part of that. In other words, I made the call the way I saw it in the moment. I have to. We were talking to each other a little bit during the match because Tom said something to me, and I was like, If you don't want to create doubt, then don't Don't make my job so difficult on these calls. Meaning, hit it three inches in or four inches in, there's no problem. Anyway, we had a nice conversation afterwards. I thought it was a positive way of interacting with it, where in the moment I make the call, I'm a human being. I made a mistake. They were like, No, that probably was in. So I go up to my friends and I say, Hey, sorry for the call. And then we move past it and everything's fine. So I wanted to share that with you. And then the last thing I want to share with you, I'm blessed Tell me I could share this. Here's the thing, guys. Do I want to win pick-up all matches? Sure, I want to win pick-up all matches. Of course, I want to win pick-up all matches.
[00:20:08.300] - Tony Roig
We all do. But sometimes there's things that happen in pick-up all matches that, I don't know, transcend the game. I make it more interesting than even a win. And so, bless and we were down in game 2, very difficult for us to come back in game 2. Obviously, we came back. We were able to mount a come back from 3: 10 in game 3, so it's not impossible. But we were down 10: 3 and Things like that. And we were still battling, right? But Game Point, they're serving, obviously, in game point, blessing gets called for a footfall, right? So okay, footfall on the game point. We tap battles whenever we go to game three. In game three, they're serving at 11: 10: 1, I think. And then Blessing gets called for a footfall on game point again. So he got called for two footfalls during the entire match, and they were both on game points, which is just a great story, right? I mean, it's more memorable than we won this game or that game. And he told me, I can share this with you, too. So our friend, Ren, was there watching and supporting Blesson.
[00:21:11.120] - Tony Roig
And so Blesson said that Ren is now referring to Blesson. Blesson's new nickname is Bigfoot. So there you go. So now we played the tournament, we got knocked out, but he got a nickname. So I think that's awesome. So anyway, I just wanted to share with you some of my personal experiences as a pickleball player, some of the stuff that I go through, the highs, the lows. And when I say lows, they don't have to be lows like in the doldrums. They're just not as high as the highs, I guess. They're like, okays, the okays and the highs. Let's do that. The highs and the okays of playing in a tournament and how I navigate that. And big picture, how this process, the book, this podcast, things like that, has helped me see things more clearly, more broadly, and also be more resilient as a pickleball player. Anyway, that's this week's podcast. I hope you enjoyed this different approach this week about some sharing. If you get a minute to rate and review the podcast, really appreciate you doing so. And as always, share with your friends, particularly if you have a friend who's just played in a competitive setting and maybe is working through some of those things.
[00:22:20.940] - Tony Roig
You can share how myself as a senior pro playing at the senior pro level at a major tournament with a lot of really good players, navigate it, his. So I hope you have a great week, and I'll see you next time on Pickleball Therapy. Be well.