Squash Journal #11 - April 5th, 2005

It's been a long time since my last squash journal entry, and that's for a number of reasons. I've been a bit stressed out at work lately because the fiscal year ends for the government on March 31st. This means that all projects need to be finished and billed to the government before then, as, if they don't spend the money in their budget for the fiscal year, they won't be eligible for the same size budget next year. Bureaucracy rules, obviously.

Anyhow, that's kept me pretty busy, and it's made it hard to play squash. I've squeezed games in where I can, and I have two more tournaments coming up - one next week, which is the club champs, and one a week or two later, which is the Pacific Rim championships, at which I will be smited verily.

Last time I wrote about squash, it was when I'd won my division at the city championships. I'd just had a breakthrough in my game, and was finally playing my forehand swing properly. That was probably the most orgasmic squash moment I've experienced yet - made doubly so because I'd thought that I'd solved the problem twice before.

The breakthrough has continued, and my game is still improving well. Now that I can swing properly on my forehand, my game has opened up a lot, and that's made a big difference - it's a lot harder for my opponents to know what I'm going to do, and they can't rely on a loose drive, or one that isn't hit to good length. I'm lucky because my backhand is the swing I learned properly in the first place, so I've got a reasonably reliable swing on both sides, which I think gives me an advantage over a lot of the other players at my level (don't get me wrong, I've got buckets of other flaws to work out, but I'm talking about the things I do well).

I've been playing my friends Jeff, Jeremy and Megan lately, and doing pretty well. The first time I played Jeremy, he destroyed me, and halfway through, started to give me tips to follow, and fed me the ball in specific places off of his serve so that I could work on what he'd told me. When I played him tonight, I won more games than I lost - that's a substantial improvement. All of those people, as well as my friends Bevan and Nate have really been a huge hand in my improvement - Each of them forces me to work on different aspects of my game, and every game I lose to them inspires me to do more drives and keep practicing.

There's a couple of things that I really need to work on right now:

• Boasts

My boasts suck ass. For those that don't know, and somehow still care, a boast is a shot that hits at least two walls before bouncing. Typically you hit the ball hard off the side wall, and it then hits the front wall, dying in the front corner. All of my boasts usually end up above the service line. A good boast should hit low on the front wall to pressure the opponent - although you don't want to use a defensive boast unless you have no other option (usually), you should at least be getting it as low as possible so that the opponent doesn't have a lot of options for their return.

• Back court lobs

Nate and I spent a bunch of time tonight doing this specific drill. Although I feel pretty good about my length for standard drives, I'm not happy with my lobs from the back court. I talk about this shot all the time, but I have so much more room to improve in it. When I make these shots, I'm putting too much power into them, and that means that they're coming off the backwall - this makes a big difference to the quality of the shot, and I'm never going to graduate from being the chaser to the person sitting on the T if I can't master this shot.

I'm also spending a lot of time working on drop shots and volleys - I need more practice with volleys, to try and get better accuracy and to better be able to make dying shots that don't rebound off the back wall when volleying to pressure the opponent.

My first game of the tournament this week is on Thursday at 6:00pm against a guy I've seen playing at the club that seems pretty decent. I suspect he should be able to beat me, so my goal is to take at least one game off of him, and to play good squash. More updates will follow later on in the week.