[00:00:05.240] - Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to Pickleball Therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickleball improvement. It's the podcast with you in mind. I am your host of this weekly podcast, Tony Roig. Thank you to my co-head coach, C. J. Johnson at Better Pickleball for hosting last week's podcast. It was an awesome podcast. If you haven't checked it out, check it out. It was very well received and just really good message about if you have goals, how to get there in some very specific tips on how to do that. Speaking of co-head coach, she's my co-head coach at Better Pickleball. Perhaps you know this, perhaps you don't, but the Pickleball Therapy podcast is made possible by Better Pickleball because that is the engine that fuels all of our coaching, including this one. If you are in a place where you're looking for coaching, whether it's camps, whether it's training, whether it's New Year, New You, but for pickleball, check out our offerings at basketball. Com. That's the easiest way to stay on top of everything that's going on. That and being on the email list, because in the email, we let you know about upcoming activities. If you're on that, you will get notified of those things.

[00:01:13.290] - Speaker 1
This week, we are going to We're going to be talking about performing. How do you know when you have performed to your best? In the RIF, I'm going to give you a specific metric, but first, I want to dive into this idea of what does it mean to do well or not do well in your play? What does it mean to perform and maybe not perform, if you want to think about the negative of it, when you're playing pickleball? What made me think about this topic for this week's podcast was I happened to be inside the ranking ecosystem, specifically, Dupre. The reason was because a friend had asked to partner with them at the upcoming tournament at the US Open in Naples. I did not plan on going. I still don't plan on going for the whole event, but I said, Okay, within striking distance, we can go down and play one event with my friend anyway. To do that, Dupre is a prerequisite. I go into Dupre, and as far as I find out there's three mees in Dupre, so I had to deal with that. But then when the dust settled, I was looking at getting my information off it and liking data on how it applies to pickleball, I happened to look down, and they track wins, losses, average points, and some other information, but that's what caught my eye.

[00:02:41.380] - Speaker 1
I looked down to the wins and losses. So I have... These are not all my games in my existence, but these are the ones that are inside the duper ecosystem. Even those are fascinating because it's 106 match total. Within those matches, I have 50 52 matches, one, 54 matches lost, and then average points, I'm at 49.54%, so just under 50% by 0.46%, right? It's basically 50% of you round it of points one. Find this curious, too, because we'll talk about in a second, being at level. I am, according to Dupre, I'm a five and change player, five and a little bit. Average partner Average ranking or rating is 4.95. Average opponent rating is 5.19. What story does it tell? The story it tells is that over the last 106 matches, I've won half and lost half. If you think about it, it's 52 wins, 54 losses. You take one loss, make it a win. It's exactly 50/50. I'm sure I can find a match that was 11, 9, 12, 10, or something like that that could have flipped the other way. In fact, there was one because I remember seeing it on the top of my chart.

[00:04:12.200] - Speaker 1
It's a match I played with my friend We sometimes have partnered over the last couple of years, Eric Añong, against our friends Chris Bond and Matt Indara, who are very good players. I believe the score in that match was 10 to 9. You take that match, a ball bounces here a little differently. Excuse me. A ball bounces there a little differently. Now we're at exactly 50-50, 53-50 %. 53 wins, 53 losses, right? A couple of points away. Same thing with average points, right? What does that tell us? It's 49.54 % of points. I'm assuming that means I've won those. It just says average points, but I'm assuming that's one average points, or average points, one. But it doesn't matter, because even if you flip it around to lost points, it's the same difference. Basically, it's 50-50. Young points. When we think about playing pickleball, is it not realistic to expect that results over a large sample size. A hundred is a decent, but my guess is, if you listen to this podcast, my guess is, let's do some quick math here. If you play four times a week, say you're playing seven games a time, you're talking about 30 games.

[00:05:30.660] - Speaker 1
You're doing over 100 games in a month. A game in rec world is the match. That's the whole match, generally. You're basically playing In six months, you're going to have 6, 700, 800 matches under your belt. That's a larger sample size. There, I would expect it to get even closer and closer to 50, 50. The bigger the number, the closer to your averages you expect to see over that sample size. The question I would ask you, not the reality. The question I would ask you is, we'll get to the reality in a second. The question I would ask you is, what do you expect for yourself in terms of your performance? Is 50/50 okay with you? Or is 50/50 not okay with you? I think it's a good question to frame for yourself in terms of how you interact with the sport of pickleball. Because if you think about being frustrated, being disappointed, not feeling like you're performing, in this case, we're talking about performance, that has to do with some expectation you have for yourself. Are you meeting that expectation or not? That term, expectations, has such a... It's so impactful, not the term, but the impact of it is so impactful.

[00:07:01.700] - Speaker 1
How we set our expectations for ourselves does so much to how we then feel afterward. Getting a grip on the expectations that we have in our performance will help us as we then evaluate that performance after we play, after we were done with our session. Let's ask a question again. What do you expect is reasonable for you during a pickleball period? During a pickle ball, let's take a big picture first, and then you apply a smaller picture. What do you expect for yourself, say, for the next six months? Would you be satisfied with a report like my duper. Let's say you played 600 games, so you would have 298 losses, let's say, and I'll give you more wins, 302 wins, about 50/50. The same thing for points. You would be somewhere in the 47 to 53% win or lost. So call it, again, 50/50 for our purposes. Are you good with that? If you're not good with that, why are you not good with that? Are you not good with that because you believe you should get more than your opponents in the big picture? Let me dive into that for a second in terms of what I mean by To frame out the whole idea of us and our opponents in a couple of different ways.

[00:08:33.780] - Speaker 1
One way is, are you playing at level? At level means that it's not that you're going to win all the time, it's not that you're going to lose all the time. It's that you have a reasonable chance of losing. Because if you don't have a reasonable chance of losing, what's the point of the match in terms of a contest? We address this in a different podcast, but think about what it means to play at level. In my case, Again, I'm about a 5:0 player, a little bit five and change. Average partner, 4.95. Average opponent, 5.19. Pretty at level, right? It's not like my average partner was 3.7, and my average opponent was still 5.19. That's not at-level against me. If my average partner was 4.95, and my average opponent was 4.0, not level in my favor. So then that would skew results. But when you're playing at level, that 50-50 relationship doesn't seem so weird, does it? You know, 50-50 in terms of the results, in terms of our performance and how we did. That's one way I want you to think about it, right? If you're playing at level, 50/50, it sounds about right because that's how it should be.

[00:09:53.750] - Speaker 1
Then I'll throw another angle at you. This way of thinking comes to me from our friend I mean, still a mentor, but now we become friends, Peter Scales, who really thinks about this in a very mature adult way, very, very, very deep way. He has this principle that he uses that guides all of his thinking in terms of sports psychology, which is compete, learn, honor. Those are the tenets. And honor is the priority. Honor takes number one. Gets the gold medal in that scenario. So what he What that framing would tell us in this case is, if you're not happy with 50/50, meaning you want more than 50, isn't that basically a little bit of slight to your opponent and your friend, the folks who you know, the folks who you play with. What I mean by that is this. If you get more than 50% or expect, you're like, No, I should 80 %. This is common. We'll ask this question from time to time in different scenarios. Not a criticism of the answer because that's a very natural reaction. What percentage do you want to win? It's like 80 %. If I get 80%, Then what do my opponents get?

[00:11:17.480] - Speaker 1
I leave them 20 %. If we live in a world, first of all, of realism, as I mentioned earlier, the idea that I'm playing a level, it's probably going to be 50/50 anyway, Otherwise, what's the point of the contest? If I can win 80 % of all the points, then I'm probably not playing a level. Secondly, a little bit of empathy, a little bit of understanding of others, their desires inside our sport as well, not just all about us. I'm going to play a game in a situation where all I leave is 20 on the table, 20 %. Probably not a fair contest, if I'm doing that. If I'm beating up on players who can't possibly win 20 %, that's how I get my 80 because it's It's a zero-sum game in terms of the overall performance, overall results. Not performance. Let me step back a second. It's not a zero-sum game on performance as I'll talk about in the RIF, but it is a zero-sum game in terms of results. It means only one team can win and only one team can lose each rally, each game. If I want 80, that means I'm leaving 20 on the table for my opponents who, again, are my friends.

[00:12:22.040] - Speaker 1
That just doesn't sit right once you think about it that way. It's the idea that I mentioned with Coach Scales on Compete, Learn, Honor, which is honoring. Honoring yourself, honoring your opponents, honoring the game itself. You can check out Coach Pete's book. If you go to betterpickleball. Com, under resources, there's a series of books in there. Coach Pete's book's in there. I highly recommend it to you. Give that some thought. In terms of your performance and what you expect of yourself, I would submit to you that when you're done with your analysis, I am hopeful that I have laid out the case for 50/50. For a 50/50 relationship. 50/50 performance is fine. If you're okay with 50/50, then how you evaluate your performance at the end of a session should be consistent with that. What I mean by that is, if you... It looks like my background just went dark. Let's see if I can get that back on. I forgot it has a little sleep feature to it. If you go 50/50 We're going to finish it. We're going to power through this thing. If you're going to go 50/50 on your performance, that means that this session, you went 0 and 7.

[00:13:43.630] - Speaker 1
You've won zero, lost seven. The last session, you probably had, or maybe not the very last one, but you've had a session of seven and zero, meaning you've won all your games and lost no games. You've had six and ones, and ones and sixes, and fours and threes, and threes and fours. But over the big picture of it, overall, what does that indicate? That indicates 50/50. So your performance is fine based on your understanding of the realities of playing a level, and also your honoring of your opponents and their own quest to perform in a way that is satisfactory to them. Let's get away from this There used to be this saying that when you ended up in a tie, that it's like kissing your sister, meaning there's no pleasure in it, there's no fun in it, there's no... It's just a tie, right? Why is a tie a bad thing? Why is me fighting, competing, doing the best I can a bad thing? If you get to do the same and we end up one-one in soccer. Anyway, give that some thought. All right, I'm going to go fix the board, and then in the rift, I am going share with you an idea that you can use to help with your performance and how you think about the metric or the way that you gage your performance that gets away from the wins and losses.

[00:15:16.010] - Speaker 1
Be right back with the RIF. All right, the board is all set up. The RIF is all set up, ready to roll into the RIF, where I'm going to give you a different way of thinking about your performance when you're playing, and also your improvement, and you can apply this to everything that has to do with you and pickleball and life, because as always, we like to think about pickleball as a piece of our life. Important, but there's more to us than just hitting the ball when we're out on the court. These concepts, you can extend beyond the pickleball court. As we do that, if you're listening to this podcast right when it releases, we have a New Year, New You event coming up. If you're on an email list, you're getting information on it, check it out. It's a good way to work on what we're going to talk about now, which is what's the best It's a good way to think about my performance as a player, as an athlete on the pickleball court. What I would suggest to you is that rather than looking so much at, even whether it's the wins and losses, whether it's how well you're hitting the It's all exactly that day and things like that.

[00:16:17.670] - Speaker 1
It's a big concept. It's a lot chew to it, but I'm going to give it to you. I'm going to explain it, and then I'm going to let you think on it. Then in a future podcast, maybe we'll just, you may be able to parse it out a little more. But The idea is this. Every time that you play pickleball, every time that you navigate a day, every time that you go to the supermarket, whatever, think about doing doing the best you can based on where you're at right then. It's trying your best to be your best. Those are two best, but they're It's different. It's doing your best to be your best. Doing your best means is the part that allows you to accept the way you are today, because today is going to be different than yesterday, and probably different than tomorrow, in terms of how you feel, your body, your mind, how interested you are in getting down low to hit that shot, and all these things. That's okay. That's just It looks like that board just wants to keep going dark. It's basically, how are you feeling? How are you doing?

[00:17:39.590] - Speaker 1
What's going on in your life? Those kinds of things will impact your performance on the pickleball court. There's just no way around it. You have to take yourself as you are. You're doing your best. Then The second piece of it is doing your best to be your best. Be your best is the idea where... Last time I played, I dinked. I missed 30 dinks. Out of 80 or whatever the number is. I made 50, I missed 30. This time, I missed 28 and made 52 out of the same ratio. The idea is that I am I am performing a little bit better. I'm becoming a better version of myself. It doesn't have to be just the number of shots you hit. I'll give you another example where you performed better, where you did better. I warmed up this time. I didn't warm up last time. That's fine. That's doing your best to be your best. I gave some thought to where I was going to aim my serve. I had intentionality to do my serve This is a term that we like to use. That's being a better version of yourself than last time, relative to the pickle ball in this case.

[00:19:07.300] - Speaker 1
The idea is every time that I step out on the court, I'm going to do my best to be my best. If I did that, then I performed. Then I succeeded, if you want to frame it that way. How many games I won, how many games I lost, all these things that happened on the court that maybe I wish had been a different, these minutiae things, fly away, they go away. Instead, I am left with a performance metric, with a feeling that is more useful to me and more relevant to my life in general, which I guess is the same thing is useful to me. But basically, the idea is I'm doing something that's a little more constructive for myself. If I continue to move towards doing to be my best, results will come. You'll have more rallies, one more games, one. Perhaps eventually, you end up playing different levels, meaning you can still hang out with your friends and play those games knowing that you have to maybe play a little differently because maybe a soft game, work on that, whatever. Then you can move on to... You play some other games that are perhaps more challenging to you from a technical standpoint and from a strategic standpoint, and that's just how you evolve.

[00:20:33.220] - Speaker 1
But think about doing your best to be your best every time you play and use that as your performance metric, and you'll feel better and play better. All right, that's this week's podcast. Hope you enjoyed it. If you enjoyed it, as always, please share with your friends and rate and review it, because if you enjoyed the podcast, your friends are going to enjoy it, and those players reading your reviews, they'll enjoy them too. Hope you have a great week, and I'll see you in the next episode of pickleball Therapy. Be well.