When I was a kid, I spent a mostly-bored summer teaching myself to play tennis.
OK, not exactly the game of tennis, but the act of hitting a tennis ball with a racket.
I was basically the human equivalent of a Golden Retriever in those days. I was drawn to anything that involved a ball.
I had already spent countless hours throwing, hitting and chasing baseballs, dribbling and shooting basketballs and working on a tighter football spiral.
In those pre-electronics-age summers, you just stayed outside all day trying to figure out something to do. Skateboards, bicycles, and fishing rods figured in.
But mostly, it was about some kind of ball.
Tennis was a new for me that summer. My parents bought me a racket and left me to my own devices. There was one public tennis court within bicycle range, and it was usually occupied by adults.
And there weren’t a bunch of tennis-playing friends available to show me the ropes. No lessons. No clinics. No ball machines. No players.
But there was a Catholic school a few blocks away that had a big paved playground that was empty and open all summer. On one side was a big brick wall that faced a large expanse of empty asphalt.
It wasn’t ideal. The asphalt didn’t come all the way to the wall. There was a dirt apron next to the wall, and then a cobblestone curb. The dirt, the cobblestone curb and the rugged, unsmooth wall itself sometimes created some weird bounces.
But it worked.
That wall became my tennis partner that summer. I started from scratch and after many hours I became comfortable hitting tennis balls toward the wall and scrambling after the rebounds.
I even concocted my own drills against the wall, counting the number of consecutive returns I could make.
It wasn’t until I was in high school before I started playing tennis on an actual tennis court with a human opponent.
I thought of that school brick wall recently because after more than a half-century break, I found another wall to practice hitting balls.
This time it wasn’t tennis. It was pickleball.
Unlike my discovery of tennis, my introduction to pickleball was anything but solitary. My pickleball learning curve during the past nearly-five years has been full of other humans with both in-person and video instruction sessions, and even the occasional ball machine for drills.
I didn’t think I’d ever need something as primitive and non-social as a wall again.
But speaking of walls, I’ve been feeling lately that my game has metaphorically hit one.
I should be developing a roll shot, but it’s not happening. My dinks ought to be more consistent by now. And why am I the guy who too often ends the rally with a poorly placed return?
I play a lot at a public tennis center that has made room for pickleball courts. It has a big practice wall there, too. It’s almost always used by tennis players. But once in a rare while I’d see pickleballers hitting there too.
It got me thinking. Maybe 56 years is a long enough break from hitting a ball off a wall.
So, I went the other day just to hit balls off the wall.
How did it feel? To be honest, I really hoped the session would be cut short by a few players showing up and asking me to be their fourth on a nearby pickleball court.
After being addicted to playing games of pickleball with and against other humans, hitting balls against a silent wall seemed like a poor substitute for fun.
But the primary mission of drilling isn’t fun, I guess. It’s developing the mechanics to make better shots, to improve one’s eye-hand coordination, and to isolate problem areas, such as footwork, and work on them at a pace that suits you.
The fun comes when the drilling shows results.
So, I decided that going forward I’m going to make some time for hitting against the wall. Will it work? I’ll see.
If not, well, at least I got to relive a little slice of my youth.
Finally, here are a few pointers for those who want to also try a wall.
You might want to bring some painter’s tape and a tape measure to the wall before you start. If the wall you’re using is marked for tennis, it will have a horizontal line on that wall that’s at a tennis court’s height.
The height of a pickleball net in the middle is 34 inches – two inches lower than a tennis net. Using your tape measure and the painter’s tape, you can create a second net height that mimics the pickleball net.
And while you’re at it, you can also put another strip of tape on the ground seven feet from the wall. That’ll be your kitchen line. You’ll want to stand there as you practice volleying the ball against the wall.
If you want to see some of the do-it-yourself drills you can try on the wall, here’s an excellent video from ThePickler:
