Tessa’s family Update

Tessa is a 12-year-old with fast hands and a real drive, a player who came to pickleball from tennis and brought the pace and the competitiveness with her. She plays the left side when her team stacks, so her forehand covers the middle, and she has never once been intimidated by an adult across the net. Playing junior doubles at Lakeside Pickleball Club this spring, along with open play at the club and a few tournaments, the hard half of her game is real, and it's what everything else is being built on.

Here's the honest thing about this season: Tessa's hands were better than her results, and the reasons were specific and fixable. She drove nearly every third ball, which is a tennis instinct, and against a team already at the kitchen line those drives came back at her feet; her team rarely got forward. When she did move up, she tended to get caught in the transition zone, still running when the ball arrived, hitting a hard shot from the worst spot on the court. At the line, her quick hands made her want to attack everything, including dinks below the net that went into the net or sat up for the other team. And when she got nervous, whether in a close junior bracket or a skill bracket full of adults who picked on the kid, she sped up everything. So the work went straight at all of it. A third-shot drop, drilled from the baseline until she could land it soft in the kitchen. A split step and a reset every time the other team made contact, so the trip to the line was a series of balanced stops instead of a sprint. A simple rule at the kitchen: below the net, stay soft; above the net, go. And a paddle tap with her partner after every point, one breath and one word, so nerves had somewhere to go that wasn't the next ball.

There was also a sore elbow in April, from pickleball most days of the week on top of tennis. We treated it as a signal instead of something to play through: two rest days a week since, eye protection every session, and the elbow hasn't been a problem again.

It came together over the spring: she started choosing the drop, getting to the line, and winning the hand battles that start there instead of the ones that start at the baseline. Her DUPR moved from 3.2 to 3.6 along the way, which is nice, but the number followed the skills rather than the other way around. Her goals from here are specific: a drop she trusts on the biggest points, a reset that holds when an adult attacks her on purpose, and the patience to out-wait players who have been dinking for twenty years. The hands were never in doubt. This season was about giving them a soft game to set them up.