Consistency City

Group Lesson With R. at Pharr (10 of 10):

My Mojo: Calm and Consistent

Not many people showed up tonight. There were only six people there, so we got to do a lot of moving around, which we do more of when there are only a few people. I was hitting the ball pretty consistently, and not really trying a lot for winner shots (though I did hit a few every once in a while). I felt pretty confident in most of the drills we did. I felt like since I've had a lot of practice lately with different opponents, it has helped me with the drills in the lessons. We played some games where we rotated two against one in singles drop feeding to seven points, and either I or the pair I was in won all of the games.

Afterwards, I stayed to hit with C. Usually the people who stay after to hit are some real sizzlers who like to hit the ball really hard and deep and play a little risky to try to get winners a lot, but C. doesn't hit like that. Tonight, I was trying to continue with my consistency theme. First I just was hitting all of the balls back consistently, tossing in just a few winners and drop shots for variety. Then I tried to return everything into the center of the court at the same spot deep close to the baseline. Then I tried to return everything to the deuce court corner. Then, toward the end, I was trying to alternate shots between the deuce and add court corners. And in the last five minutes or so, I just went back to hitting normally again, but I tried to throw in more winners. I was keeping at each of these themes fairly consistently no matter where in the court C. hit her shots to me. She got a few admirable shots against me too.

I wish that I had tried to arrange a match tonight before the lesson. I didn't try because the weather forecast for days had predicted rain for today and tonight, and I thought that it would be too wet to play. There was not a drop all day, though the clouds did move in, creating a contrast to yesterday's blue sky. I didn't even think the lesson would take place until I saw the evening forecast about an hour and a half before the lesson was due to start; it was the first time I hadn't seen rain in the forecast for tonight. Darn weather forecasters--the weather is all their fault. ;-)