Lessons learned in the Court 1

byMarcsrussell

151 followers

5 years ago

I've had the thought of writing my lessons from my experiences about racquetball for a while now and figured that this would be a good place to start.

The game of racquetball has been with me for the past 20 years when I started in high school. I actually wanted to play before as I knew some kids starting when they were 8 and became very good early in their lives, while I didn't start until my junior year in High School.

A few of my friends, who had been playing for years, formed a team at our High School and were recruiting, it helped that they had won the National Championship a few years prior. So I joined and played that year we won another National Championship. The next year I developed Mono which limited my playing.

I pursued some more in college for a few years and then just didn't pursue it as much until I started working at a company that had their own racquetball court. From there I played about once a week and took some lessons from one of the State Champions to help hone my skills.

I can say that I'm pretty good, I have played against some high performing professionals and I feel like I can hold my own for the most part. But because it's been so long I don't feel I have the stamina to play in tournaments or multiple one-on-one games, so I primarily stick to doubles where we rotate teammates and play a total of 3 games.

It's only been the last few years when we had a mental coach come in and share with us some pointers that he uses with professional athletes to help them perform at their best. So by applying some of those lessons I have been able to evaluate my own racquetball experiences and apply some of his lessons. I plan on sharing my current experiences from my game and what I come up with in my self-evaluation at the end of each session. Currently I only play about 2-4 times a month and plan on writing after each game.

For today's thoughts. I didn't do as well as I thought I would and part of it I blame on one of the teammates asking me "Do you still remember how to play" since I hadn't played for about a month. I didn't think much of it as we started but I know that it affected my performance. I felt a step behind everyone else and started getting frustrated at myself for not moving, which made matters worse. I started identifying how my teammates were the ones scoring most of our points and I was making things worse, which still made matters worse. I felt like I was just in the way and not enjoying the time. Since this was no way 'official' or competitive I should give myself a break.

So after 2 quick games where I felt like I was getting slaughtered I thought to myself that I just need to play. Trust the skills I knew I had and just go out and have fun. So the third game I felt like I was in control but not 'forcing' anything, it's something I call confident fun. I was still playing competitive but I wasn't focusing on what was 'off' I was just trusting I knew how to play and wasn't over-thinking. That lead to a domination where the other team now felt slaughtered and asked, "Were you holding back this whole time in the previous games?"

It wasn't until after when I evaluated what made the difference. And my mind went to explore all the different mentors, coaching and mental focus training that I have received. And the best ones that apply are the ones that I have heard and converted to 'make my own' and turn them into my mantras.

One of my mantras is: identify 3 things that are working well and choose only 1 things to improve upon. Typically we have a long list of things we can improve on but can't see our progress because we don't identify the items that are already working well for us. If you don't think you can identify 3 things then you need to be creative, but keep a positive spin. For example if I believed I was 'skipping the ball' (hitting the ground before the wall) too much, I could say "I am getting into position to hit the ball". Or "I am making correct contact with the ball". Identifying the correct steps being taken up to the point where change needs to occur.

The process of confident fun is easy to see after the fact. While you're getting ready to step onto the court a million thoughts can come to your mind and like today if I'm not ready and bringing my own focus then I open myself up to receiving negative thoughts of others. As simple or jokingly as it was to begin with it stuck with me for the first two games. I need to be more prepared next time that I'm coming to play on my own terms.