Last night I was the A player on table 1 and went 3-1, losing the last match to the B player 2-3 after having a 2-0 lead.  So again, not a bad night, but not exactly dominating table 1.  One of the wins went to the 5th set and I think the other two were 3-1.

Notes:

Backhand remains reliable.  I am now winning more points with bh loops than with fh loops.

On serve trying to snap wrist more.  One thing I noticed is that I tend not to use the full range of motion which is available with the standard sh, Waldner style service grip.  As that is in fact, as far as I understand it, the whole point of that grip, then well it's kind of silly isn't it?  You're not using the grip for what it's intended for.  By not using the full range of motion what I mean is that I tend to stop the motion well before the racket handle reaches my wrist area, not to mention overlaps it.  Difficult to describe in words but if you use this grip you know what I mean: when your wrist is fully snapped the butt end of the handle crosses your forearm just below your wrist.  When not it ends up more or less parallel to your forearm.  This is something that I thought I was doing but when I consciously paid attention to it the feeling was far different than my normal serve, which obviously means my normal service motion is not doing this.

Again during the RR last night I tried to use my wrist more, this time a bit more successfully than last week.  Still not very much control over the spin on the ball when I do this but at least I didn't outright miss as many.

As far as the fh goes, well I'll save that for another post...

I have a whole bunch of professional matches on DVDs and I really look forward to those quiet afternoons when my special lady friend is out shopping and I can sit down and watch them at leisure.

One thing I've noticed though is that when watching a match on DVD your eye instinctively follows the ball.  From a technical/learning/student of the game point of view however, the flight of the ball is the least interesting thing on the screen.  Try this: stop watching the ball and just focus on one player.  Or better yet, one part of one player, feet for instance.  You'll have a radically different experience of the match.

Still wandering through the swamplands of forehandland looking for signs of civilization.  An outpost, a fire, a light in the distance, a faint whisper of a voice carried on the wind.  Turning waist/shoulders on the backswing is something tangible for sure but there seem to be other locks without keys. 

Last night during the lesson with Steve he pointed out to me that I tend to back up too much and hit the ball off my back foot.  This is for sure a learned habit from my early days when my footwork was really poor and I felt rushed all the time.  I instinctively learned to back up to buy myself just that little bit of extra time.  The result is that my weight is often going backwards as I hit the ball, the opposite of what it should be doing.  He said that I need to transfer my weight forward during the stroke, in my case from my back (right) foot to my front foot (talking about forehand here, for bh it's the opposite).  I tried that for a bit and it felt just totally and completely unnatural, which is a sure sign that he is right and my weight is indeed going backwards.

Changing this will be complex and difficult because it involves so many habits and parts of the stroke.  To have your weight transfer forward during the stroke means that your feet have to be in the right place, right foot back, left foot forward.  To have your feet in the right place means you have to move your feet.  So you have to have time to move your feet which means your recovery from the previous shot has to be good and quick and integrated with the rest of your stroke.

So a lot of work to do there but what I have now is not going anywhere so just have to get on with it, bite the bullet and try to change my habits.  Fortunately the bh is feeling better and better and Steve rarely has anything to say about it which really is the ultimate compliment coming from a 2500+ player. 

Match results are suffering because of all the serve and fh retooling going on.  Last night at the India CC U1000 league I went 1-1 (two no shows on table 1), losing to the E player.  Don't think I hit a decent fh loop all night and missed baskets of serves. 

I played with the Pronte on my fh for several sessions and wasn't super impressed with it.  The top sheet is thin, which gives it a high throw and a soft feeling.  It wasn't super fast or bouncy as I remember the soft sponge version being (but that was a long time ago).  I guess I felt like it wasn't as controllable as the versions of H3 I had been using.  So I took it off and put the original H3 provincial sheet that I had revived with tear mender back on.

The sheet of pronte was firmly attached but came off pretty easily and while the glue layer on the sponge didn't come off in one go it was easy to get it all off the sponge.  So overall the tear mender experience has been a good one: it's cheap, does the job of keeping rubber on blade, and most of all, is easy to remove from the sponge so rubbers are not destroyed once used.  When I put the H3 back on I used the same method (tear mender on blade then into press, lightly screwed down) but this time used maybe a little more glue.  The result was only that more glue was squeezed out by the press onto the edge of the racket.  Some of it even leaked onto the topsheet (it came off easily though so not a problem).  This time I didn't attempt to pull the dried glue blobs off the edge of the racket, I just left them there as additional edge protection!

Hopefully that will be the last equipment experimentation for the next several months as I want to get dialed in to my racket for the nationals, which is about eight weeks away.

Last night during the lesson with Steve I asked him if we could work on serving a bit since this is a real weak point of my game.  As mentioned previously, on a basic level I really don't have a serve, it's just a motion I go through: there's no there there, as someone famous would have said.

So I asked Steve to show me his serve and I stood to his right at his end of the table and just watched it carefully as he served a variety of spins.  One thing I immediately noticed, which is not obvious from the receivers perspective, was just how extreme his wrist motion was.  He uses the standard pendulum grip and his racket whips through a full 180 degrees just before contact with the ball.  He really snaps it hard.  The second thing was: that's all he does!  There was no real motion in other parts of his body, not in the forearm or shoulder or waist.  These things are all moving of course but really only slightly compared to what his racket hand is doing.

Then I stood at the receivers end and we did the same thing.  The wrist snap is so hard and so short that it effectively totally disguises what spin he's putting on the ball.  He could serve underspin, side, and top and I could not tell from his service motion what was happening.  And these were not subtle variations of side spin: the top spin serve was probably 80-90% actual topspin with just a little side.  At first I couldn't believe this was possible so I just stuck my racket out perpendicular to the table to receive the ball and sure enough they popped up and just a little to my right.  (I got the idea of doing that from the Seemiller DVD, by the way.)

Then just to add to the confusion he showed me the same thing but with a fake follow through (see Wiggy coaching blog entry).  After that we had to take a break to mop my brain off the floor since it had melted completely and leaked out through my ears and nose.  Quite a mess!

My serve in comparison is weak and easy to read.  Why?  The lame amount of spin is coming primarily from forearm movement and not wrist.  The reason for that is that it's easier to time the contact with the ball if you don't snap your wrist.  It's safer in other words.  But this leads to both less spin and a longer follow through, and the latter is a dead giveaway as to the spin on the ball.  The problem of course, is that snapping your wrist that hard is well, it's just damn hard!  When I tried it I missed the ball completely half the time and the other half I didn't graze the ball enough so the serves were too fast and long.  And I had no control over the spin, it was all I could do to just to make contact with the ball.

Later in the India CC league I tried to snap my wrist more when serving and the result was of course the same: a lot of missed serves, long serves, and serves that I myself had no idea what spin was on them: quite a few times I thought I put top on them but the returns were pushed into the net!

So the plan is this: I'm just going to try to move my wrist more when serving.  Not hard, not fast, just more.  Hopefully the feeling for this, for the timing of it, will build up to the point where I'm comfortable doing it faster and snappier.   Perhaps that will take a year or two.  Or three?  Doesn't matter!