Why your third shot drop is not improving

Open play is a good evening. It is also, as practice, close to useless. That is not a criticism of open play. It is a criticism of expecting it to make you better.

Count the reps

Two hours of open play, a busy night, paddles in the rack, four or five games. Say you serve a third of the points and your partner serves a third. Realistically you hit somewhere between fifteen and thirty third shots in a whole evening, and every one of them comes off a different return, from a different spot, against a different pair, with nobody telling you what went wrong.

Forty minutes of drilling with one person who will feed you consistently is two hundred third shots. Same return, same spot, until your hands know it. Then you change one variable and do it again.

Fifteen versus two hundred. That is the whole argument, and it is why the players who improve fastest are almost never the ones who play the most.

Games teach you to survive. Drills teach you to hit

In a game you are solving a problem: this ball, this opponent, right now. You will reach for whatever you already own, because the point is on the line. That is a good way to sharpen what you have and a terrible way to build something new.

A drill removes the stakes so you can be bad at something on purpose. Nobody drops a third shot into the kitchen the first fifty times. You need the fifty-first through two-hundredth, and no game will ever give you those in a row.

So why does almost nobody drill

Not discipline, and not motivation. Ask around your club and you will hear the same answer in different words: it is a hassle to organise.

A game organises itself. You turn up at open play and the format does the work. Drilling needs one specific other person, who is at your level or close to it, who wants to work on the same thing, who is free when you are free, and who will actually turn up. That is four conditions, and the only tool most people have for satisfying them is texting nine people one at a time.

Three answer. Two flake. You end up at open play. Another week goes by with no good reps in.

The fix is boring

There is no training secret here. If you want the third shot drop to stop being a maybe, you need a standing slot with a person who shows up, and you need it to survive the week without you renegotiating it every Sunday night.

Everything else is downstream of that. Find one partner who turns up, put a repeating time on it, and pick one shot at a time. The improvement takes care of itself.