Practice on Saturday and Hibiscus Open Doubles on Sunday!

Sorry to hear you had a tough outing. After such a day I put the boules away for a while, and when I go out for my next practice I do it all alone so I don't have to re-tell the story to all my clubmates until I've had a chance to throw some good ones. I've recently played really poorly in two tournaments... it just didn't work on either day. And once I lose a game or two that I think I should've won, the situation spirals worse and worse. In our area we have some players who seem to be motivated by being down, they relish the comeback battle and actually play better under that added pressure. I haven't figured out how to feed off that same spirit or how to impart that kind of "battler" mentality to my teammates in a way that improves our performance.

I often do a warm-up exercise of “shooting” at 1 or 2 metres. I am almost perfectly accurate! I am still very accurate at 3-4 metres. As I gradually increase the distance, my percentage goes down… small mistakes in alignment, arc, and force are amplified. For your issue of always pulling to one side, maybe try these very short shots and see how you do. Where does the problem start to show up? If you find it easy to hit at a short distance, you can learn how that throw feels, and slowly slowly try to capture that feeling in longer shots.

You make reference to Claude Raluy’s book on pétanque. Not easily accessible here in NZ unfortunately. A listing of recommended books and web sites for training plans, drills, marking sheets for training, exercises both physical and mental, etc would be a really useful addition to this community.

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