Been a long time since I've written... very busy... blah blah blah.
Good, I've gotten the excuse for lack of updates out of the way. Let's get into the details of why, and what is currently sucking (and there's a lot) about my game on court.
Been a busy few weeks.. Bevan headed out for his new job in Vancouver, and I said goodbye to a good friend and a great training partner. Sucks that he had to go, but hey, what can you do (other than call him a lot at work and get him fired). He, Jarryd, and myself went out to send him off Friday evening two weeks back, and then Saturday I got up early to go and check out the Phantom of the Opera with Bay, my brother, his girlfriend, and my parents in Vancouver.
The opera was good, but I'd seen it once before and it seemed to lack a lot of the punch. I will always like the songs, but didn't feel moved the same way I did when I saw Les Miserables (people keep telling me that they are different kinds of shows, but that's irrelevant to me - I can be moved in any number of directions: humour, sadness, anger, etc., and I don't care which direction it is, but I want to feel something when I'm watching a show like this).
As anyone that's seen the photos knows, my ankle has been pretty messed up over the last few weeks. When I got back from the Jericho tournament, I went to the clinic and then went and got some x-rays. Nothing too severe, and no fractures - just a really well pulled tendon (or was it a ligament?). I got an appointment and went to go and see a physiotherapist the next day. I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing, and me wondering "Who the hell would be calling me at 7:05 ahhhhh shitter, I'm late for physio".
I rushed out the door and went to start doing excercises. The physiotherapist was cool, showed me what she figured I'd done with my ankle and got me started on some ultrasound, some electro-shock therapy, some excercises and a solid half hour session on the rack. She told me I'd probably be off the court for at least a few more weeks, so I should spend some time on a stationary bike and gave me some excercises to do at home.
I did the excercises, came back a week later, and Julie said that I would probably need another couple of weeks before I could get back on court. This is killing me. Oh well, better to play it safe than to risk another ankle injury.
Two weeks later, I went back in, she commented on the muscle loss in my calves (more stuff to build back up) and said that I was good to get back on court. Thank god. The euphoria I was experiencing while thinking about getting back on court and playing squash again lasted precisely up until I stepped on court and tried to hit the ball.
Did I really use to play this sport? Had I actually won a tournament in the past? Sure didn't seem like I had given how I was hitting the ball. Everything was off. I was hitting loose, my volleys were coming off the back wall on the full (that means they weren't even hitting the floor before hitting the back wall), I was hitting everything into the T, annnnnnnnnd there's more!
Tonight marked the fourth time I've been back on court. I've done two drill sessions, and played two games, and I'm just now starting to get back into the mindset where I'm ready to sit down and think about what I want to work on, and what I need to carry out to get my game back to where it was before I injured myself. So, what am I doing wrong?
- Patience
- Longer rallies
- Hit tight, deep shots
Stu's called me impetuous multiple times before, as I jump in front of a really tight ball along the side wall and try to hit a winner. Patience is one of the hallmark's of great squash players, and I currently have none of it. This makes sense if you think about it - I'm finally able to get back on court, and I all I want to do is play squash dog-gone it (I've been watching MacGuyver lately, so all of my cuss words have gotten super awesome). I don't want to play patiently and wait for the right time to kill, I just want to pounce on everything I can and put it away.
Turns out that trying to put every ball away is the perfect strategy to lose games 9-0 with when none of your shots are good. There's a snowball effect going on here. My shots are loose right now - I've been off court for over a month, and I need to gain back my edge. In order to compensate for the fact that it's harder for me to hit tight shots, I need to take more time to focus on the shot, and avoid sacrificing accuracy for power (shout outs to Danchez for that piece of advice). If I'm trying to pounce on balls and put them away, I'm not giving myself enough time to focus on making a good shot, and I end up hitting loose, fat balls straight to the center of the court, and my opponent puts down his martini just long enough to put way yet another point against me.
So, physically solving this problem is easy. I just need to make one simple rule for myself: Don't put away the ball. Easy right? By forcing myself to just hit drives, keeping the rally going, I'm giving myself a chance to focus on the core foundation of a good squash game. It also gives me extra practice getting my drives back to where they were, and lets me get into the right frame of mind - bury your opponent in the back of the corners. When they hit a loose shot, go ahead and do something with it, but otherwise, just keep hitting deep.
Mentally, this is tough - like I said, I want to play (and after watching MacGuyver, I have an urge to grow a sweet mullet too). Forcing myself to be patient is difficult. In both of the games that I've played lately, I've had to take a few seconds to think about this and then make it a focus. My game definitely improved while I was doing this, but after a few rallies I'd slip back into kill mode. Hopefully by writing this down and making it explicity it'll get easy to do. Ultimately, this is a valuable skill to have in squash, so by training myself to pick the moments where I attack, I'll be improving my game overall, not just getting back to where I was previously.
Okay, so I'm kind of cheating here - this is very similar to the above point, but I need to mention it anyhow. I'm fit, and I've got endurance. I can handle long rallies, and I need to think about using this to my advantage. The longer I can make the rallies, the better for me. There's lots of reasons why this is the case.
The longer a rally goes, as I mentioned above, the more time I'm spending keeping the ball in play, and the more I can focus on making good fundamental shots.
The longer the rally is, the greater advantage having high endurance and being fit becomes. If you're feeling tired, just imagine how wiped your opponent must be. Keep that in mind the whole time you're playing.
Thinking about keeping the rally going gets my mind off thinking about putting the ball away with a winner. If I had to choose one thing that Bevan or myself would see each other doing in tournament matches and tell the other to stop doing, it was being impatient and trying to kill the ball. Focus on the rallies, and let hitting winners come naturally.
See a pattern here? We're back to what I always return to: the fundamentals. So, like I said, my shots are loose. Everything else sucks too, but I can only deal with one thing at a time, and if you're going to choose something, make it something that is fundamental.
So, I'm back where I was last year - going to the court by myself, and hitting drives. Over and over... and over. Then stop, get some water. Then do it some more. It's simple, and that's what I need to work on right now - the simple stuff.
So, I've got my work cut out for me. Nothing here is particularly complicated, it's just a matter of regaining the discipline to put it into practice.
The rest of the time I had when I was injured I put into practicing dancing. I wasn't able to practice anything particularly energetic, but the need to strengthen my ankle. As I've said in the past, gliding is a technique that requires very good balance on the ball of your one raised foot. This technique adapts itself particularly well to the excercises I needed to do to strengthen my ankle back to its former glory.
So, I spent a lot of time balancing on the ball of my foot, and then practicing sliding my other foot, kept parallel to the floor, around the the ground. This is again practicing the fundamentals. I'm not practicing any specific move here, I'm just working on improving my ability to balance and maintain my position while moving my other foot. This is a valuable skill for any popper to have (or really, any dancer at all) and is worth practicing if you're ever bored and looking for something to work on.
I've been working on a few other techniques in particular, but will save those for a dance-related entry. The pivot that I had been working on is very gradually coming along. I'm able to pivot pretty well when fully standing, but now need to start to bring my body down lower, and spread my legs apart further (the further apart the legs are, the greater the effect).
I think that's enough for now. I'm trying to get back into the training headspace, and have been lucky in that I have lots of people that are down to do drills with me. That means I should hopefully have plenty of entries coming up. Until then.
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