Club League Matches

Played three league matches today at the club. When I was warming up I was trying to use my de-1 blade, but decided that the weakness with serving was too much and switched back to the KLHS. After playing most of the night with the KLHS, I think the YinHe De-1 is better for everything except serving. If I can learn to serve with a different grip I think even this can be overcome.

My first league match was against Jeff. It ended up being a 3-1 loss, but was closer than it should have been. Jeff was making a few errors that he normally doesn't make. I actually won the game where I missed 2 serves. I think I missed one more each in the third and fourth games. This was really unaceptable and I probably could have won another game, if I hadn't missed any serves. I'm not entirely sure why I missed these serves. Concentration is the only explanation I can come up with. We had some nice rallies with me playing defense. These were where Jeff was making some uncharacteristic mistakes. I don't think I could have played much better.

My next match was against Yoshi. I managed to win 3-1. The change from last time was mostly that I was more aggressive with backhand service return, and I would force shots to Yoshi's backhand. My safe backhand to backhand topspins were enough to win points. I also was getting easy points off my serve.

My last league match of the night was against AJ. I also won this 3-1. The main reason I won was that I found a serve that AJ could not return. It was a long low heavy backspin serve to his backhand. AJ didn't try to lift his push up and kept putting this serve into the net. I leaned heavily on this serve and probably served it for 50% of my serves in the last three games.

For the most part I just played my game and managed to dictate the pace of the matches I won. Neither Yoshi nor AJ were aggressive enough to take that away from me. I also played Waad in a couple of singles matches. Some of the games were close, but I only won 1 of 7 games. He gets me to make some errors with a pretty good block. I probably need to play a more controlled looping style against Waad. The other adjustment I should have made was to push more and invite his attack.

All in all I'm pretty happy with my progress recently. I've been hitting my backhands more consistently and this has strengthened my game as a whole. I haven't been working too much on flipping in games. In fact I can only really flip against people whose serving is fairly predictable. I am doing better with pushing and am starting to gain confidence that I can beat some of the people just below my level with pushing. In my league matches I made a fair number of errors when I backed off the table and tried to loop from mid distance. I'm guessing this was a combination of switching rackets and being more anxious and rushing shots.

One things I'm very happy about is that my fitness level has gone way up. I felt that my legs could have played several more matches. My shoulders on the other hand are pretty tired. I'm not sure how much of that fatigue is from doing pushups again and how much is just trying to play at 100%. Hopefully if I keep at the pushups this will help with my match endurance. If not, I may have to start doing other exercises.