Staying Engaged When You Are Not Hitting

Here is an experiment you can try. Record yourself playing a game. Pay attention to what you are doing when you are not hitting the ball. Are you ready? Are you moving? Are you just a spectator, or are you engaged?

What does it look like if a player is engaged in the point?

Posture

If you are engaged in the point, you should have knees slightly bent, feet should be roughly shoulder width apart, slight forward posture, weight on your toes, and your paddle should be held up in front. 

Here is a screen shot of two pro-level teams. The near player on the right is dinking cross court to the far player on the left. But the two other players are alert and ready if and when the ball comes their way.

You can see that the player in red on the left has a much deeper bend to his knees and he holds his paddle higher than the player in the black shirt on the far side on the right. But both players have their weight on their toes, they both are holding their paddles in front of their bodies, and both players have their knees bent. They are ready to pounce if a ball comes high, and they are ready to move if a ball goes to low to either side of their body.

This image shows the posture of someone who is not engaged in the point. Please note, this is an image taken from a clip from a video that was just showing recreational players at a local facility. I don't even know if there was a live ball at the moment the screen shot happened, but I have seen players standing this way during a rally. The person on the near court is not engaged. He is not ready to hit the ball. The person in the background on the far court is in an athletic stance and he is engaged.

When you record yourself, look for that athletic, ready stance when you are not hitting the ball. If you are not sufficiently engaged, try to focus on doing that for a few games. Tie a string around your finger or put something on your arm (server band, for example) that you don't normally wear, and use that as a cue to remind yourself of what you are working on.

The other side of the coin

Like every mistake you might be making, odds are, you will have opponents who are making the same kinds of errors. Being a student of the game means recognizing those tendencies and capitalizing on them. Have one of your opponents checked out of the rally? Are they spectating? Has their paddle dropped to their side? By all means, flick a ball their way. If they are able to get it back, odds are, it's not going to be a strong shot and you might have an opening to fire off a winner after that. In some instances, you might just hit them with the ball on the first shot if they were really dozing.

If this is an area you could use to improve on, great! Keep working on it. But even if you have made a habit of being in that ready stance when you are not hitting the ball, recognizing when your opponent has been lulled to sleep on the other side can be equally important in developing your game. Flick a ball toward the opponent who has checked out of the action and see what happens.

Thanks for dropping by,

No Fun David