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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.
Hello, and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your Pickleball improvement. My name is Tony Roig. I am your host of this weekly podcast, as well as a master teaching professional and a senior professional Pickleball player. Each week we try and bring you content that will help you navigate the mental hurdles or the mental minefield that Pickleball can present to us.
This week, we are going to switch gears a little bit. We've been talking about a little bit about perspective and improvement, understanding how the, the best way to approach the game is from a big picture standpoint. Today we're gonna go a little bit more into the micro, into the weeds, and we're gonna look at play. We're gonna look at the play aspect of Pickleball,
and we're gonna talk more specifically about how to navigate a game. We're gonna give you some ideas on how to navigate a Pickleball game that'll help you stay focused while you're playing, as well as keep a level head while you're out there and you navigate the sometimes turbulent waters that can be a Pickleball game. Before we jump into the podcast, I wanna let you know that our Pickleball Academy has several courses available for you.
Now, one of those that's available that I wanna highlight, because we're talking about navigating a game, is called Partner Play. And in the Partner Play course, you will learn how to better work with your partner when you're playing. We have some concepts in there that you can use no matter where you're playing, whether it's competitive or playing in rec play situations,
open play situations, having a better understanding of how to work your partner is key to playing your best Pickleball doubles because after all, Pickleball doubles is a team sport. So check that one out. I put a link down in the show notes, so you can check that out. All right, let's jump into navigating a game. I mean, you think about navigating a Pickleball game,
it's, you know, you think about it like navigating a ship through, through waters, right? Sometimes the waters are nice and calm, and we sail super easy with the wind at our back and no problems. But oftentimes in a Pickleball game, we'll find that the wind has shifted and all of a sudden, you know, we have to attack in a different direction.
Or the waters have gotten a little rough, you know, we'll choppy out there, and we're having to navigate through some difficult, more difficult waters out there. And so, wanted to talk about five different areas that I wanted to focus on in terms of ways to think about navigating the game. The first one I wanna talk about is the natural ebb and flow of a game.
And you know, what I wanna talk about here is how the, you know, a game has, its, its peaks and its valleys, if you will, tr tr troughs, I think is the term for tr troughs or troughs, I can't remember, but for a wave. But basically, you have the tops and the bottoms, right? You have the high and the low when you're playing,
and that includes all aspects of the game. That can mean your focus as a player, right? Sometimes you're locked in, dialed in, and you're just seeing everything clearly. And three rallies later, you're, I don't know, you got distracted by something or you're thinking about, you know, a phone call you have to make or whatever. You get distracted.
So there's a natural ebb And flow that happens in a game and also in ourselves as players, it's important to understand that's natural, that's gonna happen. And what we want to do is be aware of it so that when it's happening, particularly at critical junctures of a game, so, you know, it's like 9, 9 2 or something like that, that we take a moment there to really focus and really hunker down on what it is that we're trying to do on the Pickleball Court.
I give you a tip that I use whenever I'm returning serve at a critical moment in the game, what I'll do is I'll get down a little bit lower in my stance, right? That really focuses me, you know, it's a different stance for me. So it brings everything into, into more crisp alertness for me. You can also use your paddle as a tool,
put it out in front of you, and really focus on that paddle being out in front and ready for the next shot. So it it, it's tiring for you to do that. That's why you don't do it all the time. If it was easy to do, you know, keep your focus, raise a sharp all of the time, you would just do that.
But it's tiring. You know, it requires some energy and, and, and dedicated focus. So, you know, in those critical moments, you know, you can use techniques like that to hunker down, but just be aware of the fact that it's perfectly natural to have ebb and flow. It'll happen on your side and happen on the other side of the court as well with your opponents.
So that's, that's one you can deal with. The second thing that's important to understand when you're playing is acknowledge that opponents will, in fact, score and will in fact play some really good rallies. Meaning, you know, you, you can't look at a game. You can't play a game and expect everything to go your way, right? You can't expect every to be like placid waters wind at your back.
I mean, that's not fun. The reason we play Pickleball is 'cause it challenges us, right? It creates, it creates puzzles to solve, hurdles to overcome. And so when you're playing and your opponents win that tough battle, so you had a really nice rally and, you know, hit it, you hit it into the net, or you hit it long,
or your opponents hit a win, or whatever it is, that's gonna happen, right? And you expect that to happen. And if you expect that to happen, right? Then you're not caught off guard by it. You're not sitting there going like, how'd that happen? Because you said to yourself before the game started, you're like, you know what?
These are good players. I expect them to, to, to do well. And if you're playing at level, which we're gonna, you're gonna, it's gonna be a constant theme today. And as a constant team, you should always think about if you're playing at level, then your opponents should be able to play at the same basic level that you're playing,
right? So, however good you are, they should be generally not everything exact, but you know, in the same ballpark. And so if you're able to hit nice shots and win nice rallies, then so can they. So second thing is to expect that your opponents will battle out there. They're gonna do their best and they're gonna score some points.
That's just part of the game. The third relates to the first two, which is navigating the ups and downs of the scoring. And what I mean by that is like, you know, you hear that, that Pickleball is a game of momentum. Most sports are, are games of momentum, meaning like, you know, momentum will shift between teams.
That's perfectly natural. Sometimes the momentum will be yours, meaning you'll be scoring some points, maybe you'll go on a four or five point, you know, run on a, on a side out, and then all of a sudden your opponents do the same, right? And what happens is, you know, we feel really good when we score those four or five points in a row,
but we feel perfectly awful when our opponents score four or five points in a row. Now, I'm not saying we should want our opponents to score four or five points in a row, however it does happen, it happens both in our favor and against us. And so we need to understand that those are natural pieces of the game. Natural, natural ebb and flow,
going back to the ebb and flow idea, right? But specific to the score that the score momentum and movement is natural. And so, you know, enjoy when you score 3, 4, 5 points in a row. But understand that sometimes your opponents are gonna do the same. And that's perfectly fine to have a bad rotation. In other words for you, right?
A rotation where your opponent scored 3, 4, 5 points. Not ideal, but it'll happen. And if you let it, if you let it bring you down too much, if you let it take you outta the game, that's gonna hurt you longer term than just that one rotation. So be ready for it and understand that when it comes, you just have to be able to weather those situations.
You have to be able to weather the storm, so to speak, in Pickleball. The next one I wanna talk about is that your opponents are allowed to win games. And again, this is not defeat us. I'm not saying, you know, hey, you know, let's play so that our opponents win all the games and you know, ladi don not like that.
But if you're playing at level again, then you need to accept the fact that your opponents will in fact win games. And if you're playing perfectly at level, right? So you know exactly at level, then it's 50 50 meaning 50%, right? So meaning you win one and they win one, you win one and they win one. So when you finish a session of say,
six to eight games and you've won three or four and lost three or four, perfectly fine because that is what you expect to happen during a session if you're playing at level. And then the last thing I want to give you is, you know, learn how to savor those really tough matches, those really tough games. And the key is this. 'cause I know you know how to savor it when you win,
I get that, but savor them when you lose. So savor your tough games, whether you win or lose them. And I'll give you a few examples. So one is overtime, overtimes should be easy to understand, right? So basically meaning, you know, we tied at 10 and we're gotta go to 12, or we tied it, you know,
we keep going and say we're playing two 11 and we end up one team winning 14, 12 or 15, 13. That's awesome. Doesn't matter whether you won or lost it. That in and of itself is a victory for both teams, right? To be able to go into overtime and to, to have that kind of grit and battle and fight in both sides is amazing and should be,
should be savored independent of the result of that game. Another example I wanna give you, or another scenario is let's say, you know, those times that you're up nine one, right? Kind of boring, right? Nine, one, you're up, nine one, and you know, again, there's nothing to do. You're just like, I might as well put your ship on autopilot and go downstairs and take a nap,
right? Because the waters are so calm, the wind's behind you, everything's fine. But then what happens? Your opponents battle back and they come back and they, and they, they, you know, claw out the game and beat you, right? That's a good game, right? That means that your opponents battled back and forced you and pushed you and were able to come back,
right? Sometimes you'll be the one, sometimes you'll be the nine, but celebrate it whenever it happens either way. And the other thing is, you know, when you're down one nine, right? And you still lose, but you lose 11 nine, that's awesome, right? You were down one nine and you came back and lost 11 nine. Celebrate that.
And I'll tell you a quick personal story here. Playing in with some friends the other day, and we had a really good first game. It went so long that the, our opponent, one of our opponent, we always switch after we play two, two outta three. And then we switch partners just to rotate throughout the day. And one of the players was like,
okay, we gotta rotate, right? And we were like, no, that was game, that was the first game. And he was like, I thought we played two games. It felt like two games because the, I think that one game lasted about 25 to 30 minutes, which is great. It's a, that means it's a good game.
And you, you know, you gotta learn how to celebrate those situations where whether even though we lost the game, right? We made, we played a fantastic game and so did our opponents. The fact that they just happened to have the arbitrary 11 before we got to the arbitrary 11 doesn't change anything that happened during that game. Same thing happened the next game where we were down the next game,
I remember more specifically, we were down either 6, 6 0 or six one. It was a bad start for us and we ended up losing that game as well. But we lost that game. It was either 14, 12 or 15, 13, I can't remember exactly. Actually, I'll tell you more about that game. We were, we were down ten five,
so we were down five, 10 and we had five, they had 10. So we were playing two 11 and we didn't give up. We kept going and we kept, they, we kept siding them out when they were serving and we scored a few and then we cited 'em out. We scored a few, we tied it at 10. We actually had game point on our paddle once or twice.
I know once for sure, it might've been twice, we could convert it. But you know, we went from a, you know, six, zero or six, one down 10, five down to a 14, 12, 15, 13 defeat. That's awesome. So learn to savor those tough games, win or lose. So hopefully these five kind of ways of thinking about Pickleball when you're navigating the game will help you as you're navigating these games because you're better prepared to experience the natural turbulence,
the natural struggles that will occur during a Pickleball game. If Pickleball was easy, if it was always calm, sailing, wind at your back, you probably wouldn't enjoy it as much. So the fact that we have these, these Challenges that are presented to us, these, these waves, we have to navigate this shifting in the wind and things like that is what makes Pickleball worth playing.
So as you get ready to play your next session, listen to this episode, consider bookmarking it. It's a really good episode to kind of keep yourself reminded of these things so that next time you play, you go out to the court equipped to better navigate your Pickleball game. And remember to savor those tough matches, win or lose. Speaking of savoring,
if you savored this week's podcast or any other episode of Pickleball Therapy, please share it with your friends. Remember, if you enjoy the podcast, they probably will too. I hope you enjoy your next set of games that you get to play Pickleball at and better equipped with this knowledge. And I hope to see you at our next podcast.