Now he wants one more box. He wants me to do whatever I want. He wants underspin, flat, and top spin in no particular order, placement or speed. But he wants the FREQUENCY of the balls to be....FASTER??? He's complaining that I can't pick the balls out of the box fast enough. He tells me not to look to see if I hit the table or not. Just grab a ball serve it and grab the next one. Don't stop. AS FAST AS I CAN. So I do it. This goes against all my coaching instincts, because usually I check the student to make sure that every stroke is correct. I push 10 in a row, some finger breakers, some death chops. I smack one flat to the wide backhand, and push one "fingerbreaker" to the forehand, then smack one flat to the wide forehand, then to the middle, then to the backhand, etc. I'm doing whatever I can to make him miss. I can't see if he's missing or not, but I hear the rips bouncing on my side of the table, then onto the floor, onto the back wall of the garage, some of them are bouncing onto the table but we don't stop. I'm trying REALLY hard to make him miss, I'm feeding the balls as nasty and as fast as I possibly can, but he still doesn't miss much.
After, I realize that I feel like I'm driving a Ferrari. He's a sports car, and he responds to whatever I do. I put my foot on the pedal and there's just no speed the car can't reach.
We finished up the 2 hour session with him doing some serves. OMG, he's asking me to explain how the pros are serving these days! I just tell him that I'm not qualified to answer, but I have the killerspin video I promise to bring it next time. I do some of my serves and he watches and returns a few by ripping them to various places. For the record, he missed some of the short dead serves but he missed very few of the super spinny sidespin serves or the underspin ones. Then he did some serves, mostly underspin, not much spin, he was trying out the new rule, and I was pushing as nasty as I could and he ripped everything. Only my very, very best pushes caused him to slow down just a bit and slow spin but that was rare.
We're on again for thursday night.
He says that when he comes back from Paris he wants to make a clinic for high rated people. I said I would try and put the word out and see who is interested. We haven't yet discussed pricing, or what the rating cutoff would be. But readers may assume that the prices will be reasonable, and that somewhere near 1900 will be a minimum skill level. He says he can coach people even up to 2600.
marco
(only 1800, but I'm the all-american practice player)
Want to read more from Marco? Check out his personal website at www.marco-borrillo.com.
Next: Day 2
