How did I play yesterday?

Focuses:
-Forehand looping
-Smashing
-Strategy/shot selection

Mostly practiced against J today. Played three matches against him and I actually won one today. That's the first time I beat him in a long time and probably only the second time when he was playing seriously. Mostly I practiced my forehand against his backhand and as he said good forehand beats good backhand. The thing I tried to do most on my forehand is to hit it a little later letting the ball fall and to not swing too hard, to swing lightly enough that I was consistently getting the ball back.

My strategy when returning serves was when possible to give back dead balls. This kept J from attacking the ball. He would spin these back. This allowed me to do a controlled block back. The other thing I changed was whenever I was off balance to just hit a weak shot that would make it back onto the table and be prepared to play defense. This worked against him, but I wonder if it's a sound strategy against stronger hitters.

My serve in the last two games was working really well. I was getting the return I was expecting on nearly every serve. My one gripe would be that I need to figure out how to get more spin on my side-top forehand pendulum serve. On this serve there wasn't one instance of out spinning the opponent.

I did try to focus again on slamming. I tried to make sure to get my feet into the right position and not to try and hit the ball too hard. It seemed to work most of the time. There were still instances of me trying to hit a ball with a running backhand. I missed all of these. So I guess the moral is don't hit running backhands. Though I think it would be doable if I was just moving strait forward.

Also played a couple doubles matches, lost both. Been working on my forehand service return and I had some trouble. The ball was hitting the top of the net on a handful of my forehand loops. I think it might have been that my rubber may have been too dirty.


Next time I should continue to work on my forehand loop. Make more of my initial warm up. Try to find the right focus faster. Work on shutting out distractions, while playing matches. Work on my pushes.