Don’t Go Into a Tournament Until You Admit You Want to Win

#1013: Thomas Yelloweyes (IPTPA and PPR certified) of Night Train Pickleball in Oregon discusses how to decide if you’re ready in your personal PB journey to try a tournament? Admit you want to win — an admission he explains is tough for many people, but without declaring it there's no point competing.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Pickleball Obsession. Pickleball Obsession is the first podcast created just for recreational picklers because the more a rec player knows, the better they'll play. Do you watch pro pickleball on YouTube thinking it will help you, then wonder why your game doesn't look at all like Annalise or Ben John's? Everybody on a pickleball court is obsessed to some degree. So pickleball obsession is for you, whether you're a social player out there just to have fun or a competitive one trying to sharpen your skills and win more. This show will bring you short, useful advice from a variety of certified pickleball coaches that amateur players at any skill level can put right to use. I'm your host, Tracy Hotner. You might know me as the pet wellness expert on NPR, Sirius, and my own pet podcast network. But here I'm no expert, just another admittedly obsessed player. This show is brought to you in partnership with the IPTPA, the International Pickleball Teachers Professional Association, and in partnership with APP Tournaments. Sign up for the weekly episodes and embrace the obsession. Thomas Yellow Eyes is back from Night Train Pickleball in Oregon. Thomas, just because I'm fascinated and impressed that you have a background different from some of us, and maybe people missed our first episode. Tell a little bit about your background and how and how and how you're a Native American, which I think is just fabulous myself.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Yeah, so it's it's uh I was born and raised actually in Texas. Uh I am Native American. I grew up in the foster care system from the age of three, so that is a little bit of a different um I from the age of three, and I was raised by eventually long term was raised by a Caucasian family. Um there were four of us, um, but we are we're both we're all Cheyenne and Arapahoe. Wow from the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Nation.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

That's really amazing. What a great family to have kept you all together so that culturally you had that connection. And ultimate frisbee was a sport that you played competitively and were and were very successful at, and then you morphed into pickleball with a kind of a passion not unlike a lot of us, where you try it and you're already hooked. You just get hooked. What the heck? Uh it must be some brain pickleball connection where the sound just, I don't know, lights up some part of your brain, right? One of the things you do in night train pickleball, you've given s hundreds of clinics, mostly in the Oregon area, but sometimes elsewhere. You prepare people for competition, and that's different than other clinics that just want to tell people how to score. I I find it always amazing to me, beginner clinics. Let's talk about how to score. It doesn't matter. You got to learn how to, you know, deal with the ball in your mind and your feet. People some of these beginner classes are like, let's talk about, you know, you are the first server and you're the second. Let's talk about tournaments because that's something that you you have a system that you've designed of your own creation to prepare people who want to go into a tournament. And I know the first time I went to a tournament, I thought, oh, well, maybe this will be fun. And guess what? It really wasn't fun. Now, why was it not fun? And um, and what should our expectations be? And how do you prepare people, especially mentally, for the experience of being in a tournament, even a small local tournament? Maybe you know a lot of the people, you think, oh, it's no big deal. I just want to have fun. But it is a big deal because it's a competition where the score counts, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Right. I think to the first thing to understand is um, you know, this is not rec play. This is not, this is not even glorified rec play. This is where the things that you don't take serious in rec play become now become serious and they matter. Yes. And what a lot of players they don't want, they they'll give you the answer. I so here's a question I ask all the time when somebody says to me, players new to tournaments, whether they played one or whether they're about to play the first one, and they get they're all excited, you can see it in their face, and then I I will, you know, I'm I'm excited for you. But then the question I have to ask is what is your goal? What do you want to accomplish in this tournament? And you know, one of the biggest, the the overlying answer I get is I just want to have fun. And that is always a red flag to me.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

Yeah, because you just want to have fun, guys. Stay on the record, it's a different beast when you get there, and your whole endocrine system, your your everything, you have to go to the bathroom suddenly, your mouth is dry, your heart's beating really fast, your limbs are frozen. I mean, and you thought, oh, I just want to have fun. What happened? Right?

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Right. No, they they they'll say, I want to have fun. I said, Well, you're doing that on the record, like you're doing that during open sessions. Why, what makes this different? And when we go round and round for a few minutes, I finally say, Hey, listen, can I just share with you what my goal is when I go to play? And uh they'll they're like, sure, sure. I said, I'm gonna say it. You don't want to say it, but I'm gonna say it. It's to win. Why else would she go play? Now, I want to share something else with you. Winning is fun, yes. So there's there's different types of winning. You can win on the record, is not as much impact. Losing is not as much impact. Tournament plate winning is amplified. You're gonna the winning in a tournament's amplified, but losing, the thing you're not considering is losing is amplified, or maybe you're considering it, and that's why you're saying just want to have fun.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

That is just put so brilliantly, because if we don't say I want to win, then when we don't win, we're like, oh, well, I just came to have fun. I I played one of I played a bunch of tournaments kind of early on, um, and found, stumbled along, found my way. I had a coach back home, but the coach didn't go with me to the tournament. It's not like, you know, high-level tennis or something, or even or what the competition I used to do on horses, where your coach is like by your side with the groom at all times. You know, you're never alone. You go to a tournament, you have your partner, but sometimes you've never even met the partner before. And I went to a tournament thinking, well, I really want to play with this gal, Suzanne. I adore playing with her. I haven't played with her even on a record in ages. And I got there and um it was in some adjoining state to Vermont where I live, and it was about 38 degrees. Now, I don't do any outdoor sport at 38 degrees unless it's skiing with lots of clothes on. And I didn't even bring, I don't know, gloves or a jacket or sweatpants, and I was freezing. So I already knew I wasn't gonna have fun, Thomas, because my fingers were frozen. And so we we both didn't play our best to put it mildly. And so someone else said, Hey, you want to come and just play some more games? And I just sort of shook my head, and Suzanne said, I think she's gonna go home and commit suicide. So it, you know, it's like I I thought, you know, she's not wrong. I'm I'm not suicidal, but I felt that bad. And I mean, I think that's a proof that even if you go thinking, I'm just gonna go for a lark, because I've been to a lot of tournaments and this one really doesn't matter to me, guess what? If you play poorly, it really does matter in a completely different way. And I think you made a brilliant point. If you don't say I'm going to win, you think you're protecting yourself from not winning. But in fact, you have an inner, almost uh, I don't know, a combat internally. You really want to win, and some part of you're saying, Oh, it doesn't matter, it's okay. Her serve went out, or I I gave I uh oh, my balls are popping up because I'm so uptight. It's okay, but it isn't, it's horrible. So when you get people to admit, yeah, I'd really like to win, then what do you do to prep them for a tournament? Because it's a different mental prep.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Yes. Well, then the next question, the obvious question is what have you done to prep? What have you done to train for this moment? And a lot of them goes, Well, we've been playing a lot more together in rec play, and I'm going, and and that's another red flag. Uh I'm saying you're getting the variety, maybe you're getting the variety, unless it's the same groups, and then you're just playing the same people who are probably not going to be in the tournament.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

But I promise you this the top teams are practicing, the top teams have paid for lessons, the top teams are in training programs, yes, and they're they have dedicated to even if they've done it just for two weeks before the tournament, they're already more prepared than you are walking into that tournament. So, what type of prep have you done? Had you considered um, you know, uh who's who's what player is going to play what side, who's who's the stronger one, got a better forehand, backhand. And you could just see the shock on their face. The the just the total I we didn't think about that. Yeah, you're just going to go play thinking this is glorified rec play. It is not. It is people there, they want that medal. And I know people will downgrow the medal and say it's like a$3 or$5 medal. No, there's way more to what that medal represents, and people want that medal.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

That's a such a great point. The idea that if you I did have a coach, but I often had a partner when I did have a partner that I went with, as opposed to picking one up there that you kind of met on the internet, you get matched like really bad, you know, e-harmony, if you will, on on the the platform for the for the tournament. And now you've called each other or you've sent a text, well, this'll be great. And you're supposed to say to them something like, What's your strength, or what do you love doing? It's like nonsense. It's total nonsense. You've never been on the court with this person, you're totally across purposes. They can burn you down the middle all day long or out wide because you guys are not, they don't have a bungee cord between you. But when I've been able to work with a coach, like you said, and have a coach work you in preparation as a team. And are you have you been able to do that for your for your clients?

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Yes, absolutely. Now you you got to keep in mind the timeline. If you're getting coming to me, I had one team come to me the day before. Um, and it's just it turned into more of a life coaching opportunity than it did. I like pickleball coaching. Uh, and then I've had people come to me a few months before. You know, those two types of trainings are gonna be different. If you come to me right before, even a couple weeks before, all I'm gonna do is throw you into the scenarios. It's no learning new skills, there's no learning new uh techniques. It's I'm throwing you into the fire so you can start handling the things mentally between the ears that you're going to see. If you give me a few months out, I can teach you something and then slowly integrate you into the fire, and you can slowly figure out yourself how you need to handle that. So there's a lot of things that you're shortchanging yourself if you come to me the day before, opposed to if you come to me months before, and we can go through that. And you know, and that's what our our training program is. It is to help you play competitive, and we'll put you in scenarios where you what's happening between the ears will come out. It needs to come out. Yes, it needs to come out so we can see it, and so we can create a plan. If that when this comes out, not if, when this comes out, how are we going to keep the train from coming off the tracks?

SPEAKER_01 11:37

I love it. I mean, and anyone who's been in a tournament knows that there are plenty of those moments, whether it's you or your partner, you kind of freeze or you start to get uptight and you do start to put the ball up. Now we know that at any level of play, putting the ball up is a prescription for disaster. They're going to drive it back at you in one way or another. You never want to put the ball up. When you start doing that, you just do it more because you get more uptight, you feel more bad, you feel more apologetic to your partner, and if your partner's doing it, you try to make them feel better. Oh, it's okay, but it's really not okay because now you just got drilled and nailed, and the score's not looking good. So I think that that's a really great point. When you go to a coach, it's not to say, let's practice cross-court short dinks. It's more like if your partner is dinking cross-court, what should you expect, right? I mean, there's all these things that we don't think about in rec play. We don't always rarely play with the same person. And it's like, oh, you it's so easy to shrug off these bad moments. Oh, yeah, I shouldn't have hit it cross-court because you're standing right there. It's putting you at a disadvantage. You do it in a tournament, you just lost a bunch of points, and you don't even know how it happened. Right? Right. Strategically.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Yeah, you're you're paying so and in that scenario, you're paying so much attention to what your partner's doing or not doing, and you didn't even pay attention to what happened across the court. Exactly. Like, why, why was that? Why did that happen? You know, uh, because if you if you I mean, say you're thinking strategically, if you can't assess the situation, oh, it's just because you pop it up every time. No, what ball are we giving them that they're hitting at you that you're popping up? Maybe I'm the one hitting it and you're the one popping it up, and I'm the one paying for it. Maybe that's the scenario we're in. So don't give them the same shot, you know?

SPEAKER_01 13:31

That's that is so perfect. And of course, it's very difficult, even if you really know the other person and you're really comfortable with each other, to do that verbal assessment during the tournament, but you have to. You have to say, don't hit to his backhand, it's his favorite shot. Because you've just learned this about a total stranger. If you hit that person, two or three backhands, and they can smoke you on their with their backhand, uh, don't put it there anymore. Just don't put it there. Go in the middle, go to the other person. But if you don't assess it, you you just think, oh, they're so much better than us. No, just like you said, you gave them something that they could either you did an error that they could take advantage of, or you played to their strength. And that's something that it really a coach needs to help you to see that. It's not what's happening on your side of the net, it's what's happening on the other side.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

Right. When you're looking, say you're in rec play, say you're in rec play and you played that team and they smoked you. But if you took away all of the stresses, you took away the wins and losses, how many times would you beat that team out of five times, out of ten times? You probably would be surprised how many times you actually could win. But the minute you go, this is your one shot, this is it, right? You gotta win it to keep going, all of a sudden, what what happened is not what that team put on you, it's what you just put on yourself as a team. And everything that you're fear you're scared of, all your fears get amplified. And then the first thing you want to do is attack the thing that is not um not speaking to those no positiveness to those fears, which happens to be your partner a lot of times. And then we, you know, you know, one of the things I had to learn as a this a foster coming out of the foster care and and into the world is to I had to learn to emotionally regulate, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

And that is something that I find a lot of players that get into tournaments, they actually don't know how to regulate their emotions.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Explain that a little better because I I'm I'm very familiar with the foster care system from the other side because I I was part of a philanthropic group in Los Angeles, and we went down to it was called United Friends of the Children. We went down to a facility that held actually children who weren't even in foster care. They were in an institution trying to be put into foster care. And um I got involved with with several of the kids. And it's a really complicated system, and those of us on the outside only kind of have some vague idea of what that means, and we always think, oh, it's terrible, and the person's gonna be ruined, and then you look at people like you or people who have, you know, two law degrees and a medical degree, and it's like, you know, it's not one thing. But what is a but but the idea of um the emotional regulation is really interesting because that young person has to deal with abandonment and and to reorganize themselves in a new situation and survive and then thrive. So, what do you mean by emotional regulation?

SPEAKER_00 16:30

Most of us have figured out how to regulate our emotions day-to-day and figure out how to stay in non-stressful situations. When you're growing up in the foster care system, there's really no non-stressful situation. Wow. It's all stressful, and people are leaving who said they would stay, and people are doing things that they said they wouldn't do, and basically people are just lying to you. And you first you get angry and first you act out, and then at some point, like me, you just learn to start holding it all in. And so mine would come out in bursts, like I would hold it, I would hold it, I would hold it until you popped up the fifth ball, and then I would explode. And you don't keep partners that way, you don't keep uh so you have to learn to recognize when that emotion's coming up, and then you have to, and this is you know something that all of us in foster care had to learn is we have to take ownership of our uh what's happening with us, whether it's fair or not. It's is that it's happening to me, and how I choose to deal with this as it's coming will determine you know, my relationships will determine my um situation. Is it gonna end up good? Is it gonna end up not good? And so I'm learning to recognize that and learning to figure out okay, this is what it is. I need to put a plan together, find somebody to help me put this plan together, and start learning to regulate. Like it's okay to be angry. Actually, when I play best, I'm a little bit angry.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

I have the biggest smile on my face, but I I am a little angry. It is a superpower. If you I love it.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

Oh my god, okay, we're gonna do um, I think we we need to do another episode on anger as a superpower for real. Because if someone does something, I don't know, like body bag me and hit me, I'm like, really? I know where your face is too. I'm going for your belly next time. And it's not really a vicious kind of anger, but it's more like I'm fired up. Or they really smoke me down the line when I knew that I should have been watching my line. It's like, no, no, that's not all right. I'm not you I'm gonna get you back. One way or another. I'm gonna smoke you somewhere. So, Thomas, I really appreciate you sharing part of your life with us. I think it's incredibly valuable that we all see each other as human beings, and each person is on a personal journey in their life and they're dealing with things that we cannot even imagine. So, kindness to each other is really important and empathy, and if someone does get really upset, you have to sometimes sort of stop and say, I wonder what's really wrong with them. It really wasn't just that pickleball. So, just in closing, I want to say that I think the most brilliant thing you've said that other people and like you said, people don't want to say it, is you do want to win. It's okay to embrace that, but remember that your whole life, whether you grew up in the foster care system or you know, picket white picket fence kind of background, losing always felt bad. And depending on your parents, your teachers, your peers, losing made you feel maybe really bad. So we have to acknowledge that and say, well, now we're all grown up and we can say I want to win. And if we don't, at least we went in saying, I want to win. And I think that that's a really a wonderful life lesson for all of us. And I I thank you for that. And I thank you for sharing part of your life and part of your heart with us. I think it I think we all need to humanize each other more, and I think that was that was a beautiful way to do it. So thank you. Thank you. Look forward to you coming back, and we're gonna talk about anger, the superpower, next time Thomas Yellow Eyes is here. Go to Night Train Pickleball. You're gonna see some great YouTube, some just some great philosophy of Thomas's that I think all of us can learn from. Thanks again, Thomas.

SPEAKER_00 20:33

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope it will help you get up to the kitchen faster, dink with a purpose, and help you win paddle battles. Please sign up on the newsletter for the weekly episodes so you can embrace the obsession every week.