Missed a week there, because Stuart was away at a tournament for junior girls. This week we focused on drop shots and lobs.
- Keep wrist cocked back, and bent backwards. Wrist shouldn't move very much through forehand swing. Remember the bartending analogy: at the top of the backswing, the wrist should be bent backwards, as though I'm carrying a tray of tasty drinks. Like beer, or maybe some martinis. Or a combination of those items.
- Remember to use lots of high shots. Keep them soft and aim them to hit high on the front wall and arc back into the corner.
- Lobs shots should take wall at a severely obtuse angle
- Get RIGHT under the ball
- Keep swing smooth, and use wrist to bring the racquet up to strike the ball
- Don't follow the ball's path with head - keep your head down
- Left foot in front for forehand shots.
Aha! This seems to be the problem with my swing. I've put some time into making sure I'm keeping my wrist in the bent back and cocked position mentioned above, and what do you know, no pain! That's a relief!
Recurring theme here, but these shots are so good that it's worth mentioning them again.
The ceiling is pretty high on a squash court, and there's lots of room to play around with. The ideal lob shot hits the very back upper triangle of the squash court's rear corner, bounces off it, and dies in the back corner. This makes it difficult for your opponent to volley, difficult for your opponent to hit the ball, and difficult for your opponent to not lose.
Seriously, like RIGHT under it. The best way to think about the positioning of yourself is with this exercise: Throw the ball directly up. Let it bounce once, then, using your racquet, hit it directly up again, trying to hit the ceiling. The swing and position for this exercise is essentially the same for a lob. Damn, this is so hard - it's really weird. It seems like it should be really easy.
There's a bit of wrist flick involved in this motion, but don't make it a jerky flick, the flick should be part of the swing, and should only be used to give it a little more power.
Stuart summed this up by telling me that sometimes, to prevent people from doing this over and over, he'd tie a rope connecting their nose and testicles. I silently made an oath to myself never to sign any waivers that Stuart puts in front of me.
Yet another recurring theme here. This will make it a lot easier to follow through correctly, and avoid my tendency to hug my arms in for a forearm shot.
Holy cow the lob shots are difficult for me to wrap my head around. I guess that really, last year when I first decided I wanted to improve, I was basically using the exact same swing and positioning for each shot I made. Squash basically has four main shots:
- Drive/Rail shot
- Boast shot
- Drop shot
- Lob shot
This, as Stuart, and many other pros put it, is the bread and butter of squash. The shot is simple - shoot the ball so that it comes back really close and parallel to the side wall. The closer the better. Avoid the ball coming off the side wall and towards the center of the court. Drive shots come in all flavours - hard and low, soft and high.
If you can't make this shot work, you should go back and practice it until you can before you try moving on to any other shot. If you can reliably put the ball in the back corner, your opponent is going to have a tough time returning good shots, and moving you out of position.
This shot can be used either defensively or offensively. As I described in a previous journal entry, a boast shot is any shot that hits one of the other three walls before travelling forwards and hitting the front wall.
When used defensively, this shot is typically made from a back corner, because it allows the player to make a greater swing (digging the ball out of the back corners is really tough).
When used offensively, this shot is used by fooling the opponent into thinking you're going to make a drive shot, then suddenly he finds that the ball is in fact in the front corner opposite to where he's heading. If your opponent anticipates a low hard drive, he'll typically start heading back in that direction, or at least start shifting his weight. By boasting the ball low and hard into the wall along which you'd normally be driving the ball parallel to, the ball will smack into that wall, and come to land in the opposite front corner. Hitting the ball into the side wall will take away a lot of the ball's momentum, so typically the opponent will have very little time to return the ball before it hits the ground twice.
Stuart feels that boasting is not a very good shot, and I think he's probably right. The reasons I can think of it being a poor shot are that you have a slightly less accurate shot (you've got an extra ball/wall interaction to worry about, so it's more comlicated, and thus more error prone), and most of the time a well placed drop shot or lob shot will have the same effect. In squash, simple seems to be better - that's evidenced by the drive shot being the best shot.
The drop shot is a soft shot that hits the wall a couple of inches above the tin, then dies on the ground. These shots have the obvious benefit of making the opponent run like hell to get to the ball before it dies. Though Stuart hasn't mentioned it in our lessons yet, I believe that the drop shot is typically undercut by the racquet, so as to impart the ball with bottom spin, and have it die faster, and stick closer to the wall after it has bounced.
Making a drop shot requires thought. Where are you positioned relative to your opponent? The first rule should be that you should not put the ball close to the front wall if your opponent is closer to it than you are. This is the reason that the defensive boast shot is a pretty weak shot - you're going to be putting the ball in the front corner, where your opponent will be able to run up and drop it there for you. Try running the diagonal of the court three times in a row and see how good you're feeling.
According to Stuart, the worst thing you can do when you're returning a drop shot is to make another drop shot. I think this is probably because your opponent is usually going to be back on the T, see the drop, and just run up and belt a low hard drive to the back corner. Shots like these usually require that you be behind them in order to make a return on them, and good luck outpacing the ball on your way to the back of the court.
The drop shot is tricky, but I feel better about my drop shots than I did last year. I put some time into getting the shots accurate, and can drop fairly reliably up near the front of the wall. I still have problems though - I need to prepare for both my drop shots and my lobs the same way, so that my opponent is unable to determine beforehand which shot I'll make. I don't impart any spin to the ball, so my drops bounce a little higher, but I think that's a more complex aspect of the drop, and something I should ignore for now.
This shot is good. Really good. Why? Because, if your opponent isn't very good at volleying, this shot can be equivalent to a guaranteed point every time you make it. That's only partially the reason that this shot is used, since most players that are semi-decent are able to volley. The lob shot is used from the front of the court (typically) and gives you time to get yourself back to the T before the opponent can make a return. In addition to giving you time, a good lob shot will end up in the back court, forcing your opponent to move off of the T, and putting the ball in a position that is difficult for him to return from.
Okay, so back to my original point - last year, I was making each of these shots the same way: I'd use the same backswing, prepare my racquet the same way, and strike my ball with the same swing, and same amount of openness on the racquet face.
Given that, it's not too much of a surprise that I wasn't having any luck getting my lobs down. I wasn't using any wrist flick, and really, until Stuart had me trying to hit the ball directly upwards and into the ceiling, I had no notion of the motion that was required, and how much space I had to play around with. My attempts at lob shots were basically just slow drives slighty above head height. My high and soft drives were still hitting the wall too hard, and were basically just drives that came off the back wall and ended up towards the center of the court. And my drop shots were bouncing their way back out towards the T.
All of this information has really solidified in my head why lessons are so important. I had gone on loads of websites and read about squash strokes, and even watched video clips showing how to make the shots. I own several books about squash, and have read through them a bunch, and I was practicing regularly. The amount of progress I made over the last year is probably less in total than what I feel I have made in the past month and a half since I joined Victoria Squash Club.
Until you truly understand what you're doing wrong, and why what you're doing is in fact wrong, it is very difficult to progress.
I don't have another lesson until the week after the 9th of January, as Stuart is going away (Alas!), but hopefully I'll get some good games in, and some drill sessions with some friends, and that will give me something to write about.
That reminds me - if anyone from Victoria is reading this and would like someone to do drills with, please e-mail me, or post a comment - I don't mind sitting there repeating the same motion over and over, and the more drill partners I have, the better.
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