Switching Your Playing Hand
By Matthew Schwartz
August 27, 2024
CJ Roberts hit an overhead smash in a pickleball doubles game and knew immediately that something was wrong with his right shoulder.
“It felt like a tear,” CJ told me on the phone from his home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “It really hurt.”
The 63-year old business marketing man couldn’t sleep that night or lift his right arm to brush his teeth or hold the steering wheel. “I never let my wife drive and she drove to church the next day,” he said with a chuckle. The next day was Father’s Day. Not the best one ever for this father of four boys.
CJ (short for Claude John) has an MRI scheduled for later this week. He says he’s a 3.5-4.0 player right-handed and had to take a month off after the injury. However, he said, “I couldn’t bear the thought of not playing [any longer].”
So he switched to playing left-handed.
The transition has been difficult physically. CJ told me is now a 3.0 level player as a lefty and has mostly quit playing with his regular group of 3.5-4.0 players. “I can’t hang with them,” he said. “I’ve gone from being a force on the court to a target. I’m missing shots I can place with ease right-handed. Having to learn to serve again and missing my serve is something I rarely did [right-handed]. I am re-learning everything. I am a beginner again.”
CJ says all this without a trace of anger. This is a person who looks at the glass as being half-full. The country could use more people like him. Especially now. Countless players have been in this pickle, having had to switch playing hands due to injury. What is unusual about CJ’S situation is his outlook.
“I am embracing it,” he says about the switch. “Opponents used to try to avoid hitting to me and now I’m getting a lot more play, which I want. I look at it as a challenge and a way to stay active. It keeps me off the treadmill, which although I will do for cardio, it is not my favorite.”
These days CJ plays primarily with beginner and intermediate players. And the injury has in no way affected another aspect of his pickleball activities. For the past seven years CJ has been a leader in the Tulsa pickleball community. He organizes a group of players ages 26 to 75 who play together three times a week.
Holly Beitel is one of those players. She has played pickleball with CJ for a year and a half and says as a righty, “CJ is a very good player. A power player whom you never hit one to intentionally higher than his waist. He is known to say, ‘He who rises, dieses’ after slamming one back at you. He also loves to place balls down the baseline if you cheat at all to the middle.”
Regarding CJ’s switch to lefty, Holly says, “The first couple of weeks were rough for him, but we played some guys in their 20's [recently] and he held his own! His serve is taking the longest to adjust. He has gotten proficient very quickly. He is having to rely more on finesse shots than power shots. That would be perhaps one major adjustment [he has made].”
Andrew Bednarzik has counseled thousands of athletes on the mental aspects of performance. Bednarzik owns Riverbank Counseling in Asheville, North Carolina.
“It can be difficult, frustrating and humbling to go from playing at a certain level to playing at a much lower level,” Bednarzik said. “I would encourage [CJ] to be patient as he recovers from his injury, to trust that he will improve even if it seems like progress is slow.”
Bednarzik says learning how to play with your off-hand can be beneficial in the long run. “Namely, the brain development that comes from learning to use our off hand. There are countless pickleball benefits that come from learning to play with your non-dominant hand. There is a lot of growth and development that athletes experience when they are forced to play from a place of diminished skill or diminished athleticism,” Bednarzik said.
Dr. Samuel Sanders is an orthopaedic surgeon at Greater Washington Orthopaedic Group in Rockville, Maryland. He specializes in sports related medicine and says CJ’s injury is common among pickleball players. Sanders has not examined CJ but says the upcoming MRI will likely show either a torn rotator cuff or tendonitis. If it’s torn, Samuels said “Surgery will be recommended in an active recreation athlete.” If it’s tendonitis, Dr. Sanders said CJ would have to rest for about four weeks, do physical therapy and take anti-inflammatory medications.
We will provide an update here next week after CJ’s gets his MRI results. In the meantime, he maintains a wonderful attitude for someone whose skills are noticeably weaker as a left-handed player. When asked what he likes about pickleball, CJ says, “Everything! The rules, the paddles, how men and women and people of all ages can play it together. I love it as a form of exercise and socializing.
“I love pickleball,” CJ says.
We appreciate people like you, CJ, and wish you a fast and full recovery.
Overheard at the courts: “I hope the bangers we’re playing next game bang everything because they can’t dink with us.”
Book recommendation of the week:
If you are in any way interested in health and fitness, I think you’ll enjoy reading “Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity” by Dr. Peter Attia. I think anyone who reads it and implements some of Attia’s suggestions will see improvements in their quality of life and overall health.
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Thoughts of the week, not all pickleball
The Japanese practice something that I learned about five years ago and it’s helped me. It’s called “Hara hachi bu” and it roughly means “stop eating when you’re 80 percent full.” Only four percent of Japan’s population is obese. The CDC says 40 percent of Americans are obese. From my observations, I’d bet the percentage of obese pickleball players is much closer to the Japanese obesity level than the American.
The serving “yips” was one topic I didn’t mention in last week’s profile of prominent pickleball coach Richard Movsessian, better known as “Coach Mo.” The “yips” is a common sports term for suddenly and consistently being unable to perform something routine. It is most commonly used inbaseball when a player can’t make an easy throw. It’s happened to good major leaguers including the pitcher Jon Lester, and second basemen Steve Sax and Chuck Knoblauch. Coach Mo and I discussed the service yips because I had them a couple of months ago. His advice: Hold the ball slightly above shoulder high and pointed towards the middle of the service box. Then drop serve. I’ve been doing it since his advice and my yips are gone. Several other instructors I watched online when I was experiencing the yips also recommended the drop serve.
Baseball’s video review system has virtually ended colorful arguments between managers and umpires. I loved watching managers go nose-to-nose screaming at umps. Earl Weaver, Billy Martin and Lou Piniella were good for several temper tantrums every season. Most disputes now are over balls and strikes and checked swings. And those will also go away if Major League Baseball institutes robotic home plate umps. The robots will be used next spring training as a test. I hope MLB never switches to robotic umps. Not only will the human element be gone, jobs will be lost.
I lob when I think it’s a strategically good shot but lobbing six or seven times a game in rec play against not the most agile senior players seems excessive to me. Work on your third shot drop or dink it back if possible.
I’m bothered by sports announcers who are homers. I repeatedly hear home team announcers say critical things about opposing players that they’d never say about players on the team for which they broadcast. It’s just one reason I think the New York Mets broadcast team is the best in MLB. They criticize a Mets player when deserved. They don’t get fired because their bosses understand that knowledgeable viewers know when a hometown player screws up.
I recently played pickleball 20 straight mornings until the courts were too wet one day. A couple of fellow senior players asked how I felt. I told them the key is I stretch every morning as soon as I wake up for 15 minutes. I have upper back soreness when I awake but it’s gone after the stretching. Having a good home massage chair, a heating pad and excellent CBD cream helps too.
I enjoyed watching the Little League World Series this past week. I took my two sons there when they were in Little League because the site in Williamsport, Pennsylvania is a field of dreams.