Pickleball Pointers

We are exhausted!  We spent the last three days attending a Level Up Pickleball Clinic in Punta Gorda.  It was a 45 minute drive each day and the lessons were to start at noon and run to 5 or 5:30 with water and snack breaks.  So we packed a lunch and arrived early enough to eat and prepare ourselves for the lessons.  Our friends, Mickey and David attended also.

Tuesday, our first day, was cloudy and started out warm but cooled off as the afternoon wore on.  The lessons were fun and instructive, led by a world class pro and three other ranked pickleballers.  We would start off with a drill and then a game of sorts using only the skill we had just learned.  They taught 4 different skills that first day - dinking, volley, movement, and third-shot drop.

Wednesday’s forcast was for rain starting in early afternoon so the camp started at 10 AM and the rain started at 12:30. We worked on service and service return, and lots of strategy as well as reinforcing the volley and drop shots.  Once the rain started we did get to review the videos of our beginning skills with the pros pointing out what we needed to work on.

Thursday we started at 10 am again to make up for time lost the previous day. We worked on different ways to volley, court positioning, lobbing and over head shots.  By 2 pm John and I were really starting to drag and the youngsters were just getting started showing us some trick shots they thought we might enjoy.  We begged off, practiced some basics and watched the others having fun. We played some skills games as well.  By 4 pm I could barely move and they wanted to take a video of me to show my improvements.  I’m afraid I played worse than when I started on Tuesday!

Thankfully the weather will be cold and windy for the weekend so we have an excuse to rest and recover.