The Pickleball Cheat Sheet All Beginners Need

If I could give every new pickleball player a cheat sheet before they go on court, this video would be it. I have an online pickleball school that has over 1,000 members with players from all different levels. And I asked them, what would you tell a new player? So I took their advice combined with my knowledge playing over the last five years to help you come up with some simple reminders that you can take on court to help you fix mistakes that new players make over and over. And if you're the type of person who likes having these things written out or the ability to print, I will have a link in the description that you can put your email in and download everything you learned in this video whenever you want. And this is Jake. Hi, I sell printers. So if you'd like to print it out, just holler at me. I don't sell printers. Focusing on your feet first. It's the three Fs. Many people will look to their paddle or yeah, their swing motion or the grid on their paddle, whatever, as if that was the reason that they often missed a shot. It's just the natural thing. I rarely do see, I'm even thinking about this as I'm saying it. I rarely see people go, shoot. You should have done a little bit more. I think the common mistakes that happen in pickleball is we don't move our feet to get to the ball early. And instead, if balls are out of our reach a lot of times, we find ourselves leaning, reaching, and then flicking. And when that happens, we make more errors. We hit more pop-ups, which leads to being more frustrated and all the compounding errors that tend to occur. So instead of leaning and reaching, especially if you're at the kitchen line, if you're gonna hit a shot from the baseline, we want to be able to move our feet early to get behind the ball secondly, so we can be still at contact as we watch our paddle hit the ball. So I wanna move my feet in order to get behind the ball so I can be still when I'm hitting and I will have better shots because of that. Now, of course, they are trying to beat you as well. So they're trying to not let you have good footwork. And that's why we used to always call it fight for your feet. Because if you fight for your footwork in basketball, you will be able to get your shot off quicker with less pressure from a defender. And I would say in pickleball, if you can fight for your feet, you'll be able to get into position quicker so you can get still and be calm. So you can get a quiet eye on the ball, watch through contact, hit good shots. Because at the end of the day, I can find this as an example, probably in every area of the game, the quality of the shot is more important than what happens next, your movement forward, maybe them attacking you. We oftentimes get so nervous about what's coming next that we rush our feet and then we get beat anyway. So fight for your feet, get behind the ball, get stable and balanced, and then watch the ball through contact with a relaxed grip on the softer shots so you can hit better shots so you play better. The next one is, and I love it, came from Rhonda in our pickleball school. It's paddle ready position. And so it's pretty common. I've watched at this point, thousands and thousands of pickleball players from every single level. And when you first start seeing people play, they tend to stand at the baseline as if they're like getting a picture taken at the DMV. Hands by their side. They're just sitting like this. And then the ball comes at them and then they're wondering why their hands are slow or they're missing shots. Their license isn't renewing because you're at the DMV. So it's like, what do you do instead in order to get faster hands or to make better contact with the ball? Well, you keep it higher. That's basically the first and simple way to go about this. How high? And stop. Statue of Liberty. So you go Statue of Liberty. So when the ball does go higher, you're ready for it. Now, of course, that's just a slight exaggeration. When you really were, I like it. People will say different things about this, but what I've come to is, well, before I say that, I used to stand like paddle out in front and my paddle would be way out here. And, you know, I think there's like a tracking thing that can be positive with that. This is definitely better than this. I prefer to have my paddle below my chin. So it's not really like in my line of sight. It's really just below my chin, which to be honest, if it is higher, like we just joked about and your paddle is lower, you're more likely to let them go out. I think when your paddle's lower and your arms are a little bit more tucked in, then instead of having a back forward motion, whenever they go to attack you, you only have a forward motion. It's kind of like if you were going to do a punch and you want to see which one was faster and more forceful. Well, maybe it's actually more forceful because you're maybe extending and rotating. It's not faster, right? This is faster. I think pickleball is so much about time. It's a fight for time all the time. They're trying to take our time away and we're trying to give ourself more time. So in this position, anytime I'm trying to have to be quick and be ready for a ball, I want to be moving in the most efficient way possible. Because if I get less efficient and I take a... When I'm more efficient, I have more time. When I have more time, I make cleaner contact. When I make cleaner contact, I hit better shots. So just starting in a position like this will help you play better pickleball immediately. Avoid this. If he hits me a hard shot and my paddle's down here, I have to bring my paddle back up and that takes time. We don't have time. We ain't got the time. I don't even have a watch, much less time. Actually, do you know what time it is? We got cloud cover today, so my sundial's not working. Here's the next one. Small swings win. And Sue said this in our pickleball school. She said, stop taking such big swings with the paddle. Be more compact with your swing. And it's so important because again, you don't have a lot of time in the game. I think one way to remember this is you don't want the paddle to go behind your body. If it's behind your body, and at this point, I've actually lost peripheral vision of the paddle. If you can't see it, it's too far. So I want to have the paddle in front of my shoulder, which means it's a tight, more compact swing. Again, tight and compact. What's the reason? Efficiency. You don't have a lot of time. This ball's going to be on me in three, four tenths of a second, right? So boom. I just want to be able to put that ball back on him with using the same force that he just gave me. I don't need a ton of extra force on the ball. I can just use his force against him. If I can see it in my peripherals, I'm good. On the backhand side, it's similar. Ball comes at me. I like to just turn and punch as a one-hander. For a two-hander, you oftentimes have to just turn your body. And because you're turning your body on this one, you actually might have the paddle come slightly farther back because you're rotating, but you still don't need to come all the way back. Because again, just remember the principle is time. It's more of a core twist rather than a swing. Boom, boom. Relax your grip. One of the common mistakes a lot of players make before a point even starts, they're going over to serve, or they're preparing to return, is they start squeezing their paddle like it's a death grip. And what happens if you squeeze your paddle like it's a death grip when a ball comes to you is often you lose much of the control that you actually want to have. The paddle becomes more like a wall than something that's absorbing the ball. And in pickleball, you want to be able to control where you hit shots on the court at all times. So the way I like to think about it is you want to hold the paddle like you have a baby bird in your hand. Tight enough that the bird's not going to fly away, but loose enough that you're not going to hurt the bird. It's funny you say that because I was going to poke fun of that. Like in golf, they always say to hold a baby bird. I've never held a baby bird before. Yeah, well. I've heard toothpaste tube because it's a little more relatable. Like I don't really know what a baby bird feels like, but like toothpaste. I think you can envision what a baby bird looks like. You don't want to be squeezing, right? It's basically just- We can all imagine a baby bird. Come on. When you go to put toothpaste on your toothbrush. Your baby bird. I think one of the things too is like with softer shots on court, you want to have control. In a looser grip, I mean, it becomes like, you don't want a trampoline effect because a trampoline effect, if Jake hits me a ball right now, the trampoline effect pops balls way up high and then you end up getting smashed. So what happens a lot of times when you're going for softer shots is you want more of a pillow. You know about a pillow? Yeah, I've touched a pillow. You want to absorb the ball so you can place it into a location, right? That is where you intend. And so relaxing your grip will help you play better. The next one is watch the ball. And I love what Patrick said here. He said, watch the ball into your paddle on every shot. The more, even five years in, I've thought about when I go to hit the ball, actually putting an extra level of focus on the shot in front of me, instead of bringing my eyes up to where the target is going to be helps immensely. Because what happens is when you lift your head up to look at your target, you tend to shift your shoulders. You tend to move your arms sooner or later than you wanted to. And then you make contact that isn't exactly how you intended to. And so if you just keep focused on the ball for an extra couple milliseconds, you're oftentimes going to make cleaner contact. That's why when you see pros paddles, you can oftentimes see where their ball marks are on their paddle. And most of the time they're more in the center than most amateur players. Most amateur players are hitting the ball all over. And so if you keep eyes on the ball, you will make cleaner contact and hit to your intended targets more often. I was trying to think if it was worth saying about, like I've heard people talk about the reason you get low is to have your eye line closer with the ball. But I think it's different than watching. A little bit. This one, I had this kind of big breakthrough on my returns with this, ground strokes more than anything. I tend to miss hits. Go ahead and hit me one. I tend to miss hit, just like not hit cleanly on my forehand drives or on my returns, or sometimes even on my serve. And I think it's often just because I'm thinking like, all right, I'm ready. It's a more aggressive shot. Where's it going to go? What can I do after? When in reality, if I just take two extra tenths of a second and actually keep my, well that sucked. Actually keep my eye on the ball. There's some great tennis videos that have talked about, I think there's some varying opinions on this, but you can find different tennis players, elite tennis players. Some will look at their, look at the ball through contact and their head never moves. And there's others where their eyes actually start to drift up as they make contact. Because I think it's not maybe physically possible for you to see the ball all the way through contact because of how fast it's moving. But my whole goal is, at this point in my pickleball life is, I'm trying to watch the ball all the way through contact. And if I do that, I know for a fact for my game, I am hitting more clean contact, especially on some of the harder shots. But I think it's really relevant to all of the shots because it just works. So the next one is hitting more balls on the fall. And I love what Ashley said here. She says, one habit that has been really, really hard to break is hitting the ball sooner than I should. I really wish I would have known in the beginning to slow down, take more time and hit the ball when it's dropping. I've been playing for a few years and I'm still trying to break this habit. So what does she actually mean by that? A lot of new players, what they do is they see the ball bounce and their first instinct is to rush forward and hit it while it's still rising. And sometimes you have to do that because the other team makes you, but if you don't have to, you shouldn't. And here's the simple physics because I'm a physician. After the ball bounces, it starts moving upward, but then gravity is immediately pulling it back down. So as the ball rises, it's slowing down. Then it reaches its peak where it almost hangs for a split second and then starts to fall. And that little hang moment should be your friend. If you think about it, like pushing a kid on a swing, you don't push them while they're whipping through the bottom and still flying up towards you. That would be, that'd be tough. You naturally wait until they reach the top. And they're almost still. Where they're almost still. And then, then you push them. I like the kid on the swing. And so pickleball is very much the same. When you hit the ball while it's rising, you're trying to control it while it still has a lot of bounce energy. It's still moving faster. So the timing of that is way harder. It's much more difficult. It's what leads to pop-ups. But when you let it rise, peak, and then start to fall, the ball has slowed down. It's calmed down. It's a lot easier to time. And now you can see it better and time it better. You can guide it back with control. It actually slows your body down quite a bit because you're having to wait for it to rise. And then before the hang moment. So the simple rule is this. Don't rush to hit the ball while it's on the rise. When you can, let it hit the top of the bounce and then play it as it's on the fall. And a lot of this does come down to footwork. So you're gonna have to create enough space between you and the ball by using your feet early so that the ball can fall into your hitting window instead of crowding you and forcing you to take it early. The only other thing with that is like, you want to do that and also then the more advanced skill is learning how to take it on the rise. Because sometimes again, you're playing against someone who's trying to beat you. Like you're not always going to be perfect with your footwork, but most people aren't trying to let it fall. They're just racing towards the ball and by rushing and racing towards the ball, you're hitting worse shots. Push that kid. The next one is locking your wrist on many of the shots in pickleball. And I got this one from Alejandra in the school. She said, I can't emphasize enough how important it is to lock your wrist. So what's the opposite of locking your wrist is using a lot of wrist while you're hitting shots. Now, if you're around some higher level players, they're going to talk about some wrist manipulation. And there are some shots that you do want to use wrist on. However, there's a lot of shots you don't. If you use your wrist at the moment of contact, shots become more inconsistent because the paddle face tends to change angles at the moment of contact. And you often will add a force that's greater than what you need, again, at the moment of contact. And so a lot of times what happens, especially on like drops or dinks, what happens is you come here and you'll get a big flick of the ball. Because of that, you end up hitting so much through the ball that then the ball sails farther than you want it to. A big part of pickleball is keeping a locked wrist. So you eliminate variables. It's already a very touchy game. Like there's a lot of small targets you end up wanting to hit. It's a small court, 44 by 20. And so if I want to put the ball in the kitchen, I want to have as few variables as possible. And I would prefer to be using the bigger muscles, not the really small wrist muscles as my form of consistency. In addition to often just brushing up the back of the ball when you're trying to hit softer, instead of hitting the entire ball. If you hit the entire ball, the ball goes, right? Which is, you know, obviously when you're hitting a drive, you are going to hit more of the ball because you're going to have more force on the ball. But if you brush the back of the ball with a neutral wrist, or even if I come in here to the kitchen, I want to just use a neutral wrist to push the ball so I have more control instead of using all of the flickiness. And what's crazy, if we connect a couple of dots, when you're able to move, where you can let the ball hit its hang point and you keep a neutral wrist, you're going to have more consistency. Wrist. The example we'll show it on screen right now is a lot of times Jake goes into a right side dink. And this is an example of where his wrist actually gets really aggressive and it like chops at the ball. And oftentimes this actually leads to more pop-ups because of everything we just said. Where if you see this example, you'll see Jake keeps his wrist neutral and he just comes through the ball with a neutral wrist and the ball will be way more consistent when he does this. And when you do this more often. Any expert in anything, like you think of a pianist who's like playing the piano, they are, like you look at the quiet eye studies, they're actually, like their eyes move less than any amateur. Cause they've done like eye tracking on them, right? So their eyes are still and their hands are moving. And if you look at an amateur, they're here, they're here, they're here, they're here. If you watch a very beginner pickleball player, they're often sweating more than you would be because they are moving so much. They don't understand. They don't know how to move. There's no efficiency in their movement. And I think even just to go one layer deeper to technique, you watch pro players, their technique is actually much simpler than most amateurs. But again, it starts with their feet first. So they get their feet and then their motions are just very smooth. They're repeatable. They do use wrist sometimes, but there's plenty of times they don't for specific shots where they want consistency. And so it's like, as you get more experienced in anything, you do less. It's like, you become more efficient. You become smarter. You become more technically sound. All those things are just kind of a progression of improvement. So get started on piano lessons. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. As early as you can guys. You run piano lessons, don't you? In Phoenix, aren't you doing piano lessons? Yeah, I got a whole school. It's a different video. Piano, that pickleball, that piano school. The next one is serve and stay. And Marty, who's in the school, said one of a good player early on told him serve and stay. Meaning when you serve, do not step into the court because if you serve and move in and then the ball comes back deep, because remember in pickleball, we have to let the return bounce before we can hit our third shot. So if we catch ourselves serving, stepping in, and then a deep return comes, we're gonna be hitting on our back foot. And anytime we're hitting on our back foot, it's more likely the ball is gonna go higher into the air, which will give them an easier smash. We're gonna be less consistent. If we're death gripping the paddle and we're not watching the paddle and we're on our back foot, bad things are going to happen. And so instead of serve and move in, what you wanna do is serve, stay, and then you can evaluate where's the ball at? Do I need to move in? Do I need to stay put and hit so I'm more unbalanced? And of course, if somebody keeps hitting you short returns over and over, yes, you should move in. You should adjust. But as a good default starting place, serve, stay, evaluate the situation, read the situation, and then move to the next ball. I've legitimately told beginners before that it's illegal to be inside the white line after you serve. That's obviously not true, but it helps build a good habit. It's actually illegal to be inside of the baseline after you hit a good serve. Because that always happens. They always drift in or like you're serving and their partner is like stepping in, like, oh, actually, illegal. You can't be in there. Yeah, that's great. You know what's funny? This has become a habit that even Zach, who coaches me, I have a habit of it too. I think what happens a lot of times is you serve really big and your momentum takes you forward. And then- And then like a deep return. And then you do have to hit that ball. And so it's like, I've actually done my best to start just two feet back. So my momentum forward actually just keeps me behind the baseline and in a legal position. That's a joke. The next one is return and run. So what you want to avoid is when Jake hits me a serve, I hit a ball and I stay back at the baseline. Now, a big part of the reason that that's not as ideal of a strategy is because when you are the returning team, you start with a slight advantage. And one thing we've developed in our pickleball school is this thing called the advantage scale. So you're always in one of three phases. You're either an advantage, disadvantage, or neutral. Advantage is like you're ahead. Disadvantage, you're a little bit behind in the point. Neutral is like nobody really has a lead. It's pretty much neutral. So when you do the returning team, you start with a slight advantage. I call it a plus one advantage because you have one player up at the kitchen while they have zero players up at the kitchen. We have the slight positional advantage. So when I hit a return, I want to move forward towards the kitchen line, return, and run so that I can get up to the kitchen line. So now my partner and I are at the kitchen line. Now we have a plus two advantage. We just went from a plus one advantage to a plus two advantage. We extended our advantage. If we can keep opponents, other people, other people we're playing against away from this kitchen line, we will continue to have an advantage. If you return the ball and you stay back at the baseline, you're giving your opponent a chance to flip from being in a disadvantage to being in an advantage. Because when they hit their third shot now, they have all of this space in front of the area where you didn't run and take away their targets. Think about like a dart board. If you go to throw a dart and you have the entire board to work with, all you have to do is hit it anywhere on the board. It's going to be a lot easier than if you have to just hit it in the bullseye. The target shrinks. Your accuracy has to improve. And so when you return and run to the kitchen, you are shrinking the targets that the opponents have to hit the ball. And now their accuracy has to improve. And everything you just learned is why you should come to the kitchen line more often. Even if you feel maybe a little afraid because the balls are coming hard at you or you feel a little uncomfortable about how to play the game, trust me, moving to the kitchen line after the return is the way to play strategic pick a ball that wins. Somebody say accuracy? So the next one is don't race to the kitchen. When you are the serving team, let's lock in on there for a moment. So when I served the ball, Jake just hit me a return, right? I've already stayed. Now I'm hitting my third shot of the rally. And this is, a lot of people are going to give you advice on the third shot of the rally. There's a lot of different things you can do in the third shot. You could hit a drop. A drop is a ball that intends to land in the kitchen and make Jake hit up. You could also hit a drive. It's just a harder shot. It's more like a baseline volley in tennis. And so let's just say for a moment that we are going to hit a drop. A drop, like I said, is supposed to land in the kitchen and make them hit up. Also the intent of a drop is to allow us time to get into a better court position. Remember, being at the kitchen line is a more advantageous place to play the game. So a softer ball that lands in the kitchen gives us more time. Now here's where players go wrong. Not every shot is created equal. So if I hit a ball that's up at Jake's head, I would call that a red light drop. Think red light, yellow light, green light. That was bad. If I or my partner hit that ball and then run forward very fast to the kitchen line because someone said, you got to get to the kitchen line as quickly as possible, you are wrong. And I'm not going to say that a lot about many different shots in pickleball, but I will say it about this. Because if we do that, you're very likely just going to, ow, lose or get hit or get your partner hit. And everyone's going to be frustrated. That's a red light. A yellow light is anything that's probably around belly button to shoulder height on Jake that he is going to hit out of the air. I don't feel comfortable yet to move forward because he can still hit it with a little bit of pace, but I don't feel terrible because I think I might be able to handle this. But a yellow light is a ball I'm going to take caution on. So a red light, I'm often going to retreat and give myself more time and space. A yellow light, I'm going to stop. I'll use a split step if I can and try to control this shot. And then a green light, the shot that we are aiming for, is a ball again that's going to bounce ideally. It's going to make them hit up and it will give me time to move forward. That's a ball that I feel more comfortable, green means go, moving forward on. Now, how far forward do you move? Well, if you hit a ball that's good, but maybe it's kind of a low trajectory, I can't run all the way to the kitchen line, especially for my more experienced players watching, 60, 70, 80 year old experienced players. You might not be able to get up to the kitchen all the way off of one drop. So the rule of thumb is you get up as far as you can on a green light drop without still moving when they go to make contact. So I want to get up as far as I can, but then when they go to make contact, I better break down and be ready to hit this ball. So let's say the ball sits in the air a little longer. I might move in and now I made my way all the way up to this position. And now I can get up to the kitchen on my next shot here, rather than trying to move all the way up on the first ball I hit. You don't have to race to the kitchen. You can take your time getting to the kitchen when you are the serving team. When you're returning, return and run. When you're serving, serve, stay, read the ball, use the traffic light system to move up to the kitchen. Here's the next one, the most beautiful rule in sports. Now rules inform the strategy of any sport. And I think about, I played basketball growing up and when they introduced the three point line in 1979, actually originally it didn't change a whole lot because players were like wondering, how do we use the three point line? But over the course of time, teams started shooting so many three pointers that the entire strategy of basketball began to change. Players were shooting more three pointers than they ever had. Defenses had to change coverages based on how many three pointers were being shot. It changed a lot. So pick a ball, one of the things I think is just so beautiful about this game is the kitchen line, the non-volley zone line. The fact that you can't get in front of the line and hit a ball out of the air, that you have to let a ball bounce if you're gonna step into the kitchen line. That informs so much of the strategy. However, I think when we learn the game, when you all are learning the game right now, you're often gonna be told things that are restrictive. Don't go in the kitchen line. You can't step in and hit the ball out of the air. Now, of course, these are rules and these are true, but I'd like to flip and reframe how you think about the kitchen area so you can use it as a place where you have options to play more strategically, rather than just as a restriction of something you can't do. Now, why did this rule even come into place? I'm guessing that they were playing a game, you know, obviously if you step in right here, well, that changes the game pretty dramatically. And so if you're back and you have to stay behind the line, obviously it makes it more difficult for you to reach in and hit shots down at penetrating angles that will end points. So what I recommend for you thinking about the kitchen line is it is your friend. It is a safe area. If you're ever in trouble, you can hit a ball shallow and all of the sudden the other team can't be super aggressive as if you were to hit the ball higher. That's part of the beauty of the game. It's why if you ever watch pro pickleball, you'll see there's a lot of dinking that goes on. It's not just if you're in trouble. Using the kitchen can be a way for you to apply pressure in a different way than just using power. So I'd recommend when you go out and play, just give this a shot. Try to place the ball in the kitchen and see what happens. And here's the next one. And I love what my mom said inside of that pickleball school. She said, don't spend a lot of money on an expensive paddle. Thanks for the setup here, mom. But when I first started playing, I started with like a $15, $20 wooden paddle that I found on Amazon. Then you get to a point where like, I'd like to upgrade paddles. And now I've played a lot of paddles over the years. Jake is actually the guy that sponsors me. He's from Friday. If you don't know their channel, it's Friday Pickleball. Actually one of the most, the funniest pickleball channels that exists. Go check out their channel. And actually one other funny story. It's a good story. Y'all listen to this. It's obviously really quick. I promise. Oh, look, there's his wife. Is she in the camera? Hey, gosh, that's a great, that's such great timing. And let me just tell you this before I tell you about paddles is that girl over there, Rachel. She can't hear us. Jake's wife right here. They introduced me to my fiance. Maybe by the time you're watching this, maybe she's my wife. And so I ended up partnering with Friday because Jake blackmailed me. No, but in all seriousness, these are probably the highest performing lowest price paddles you can get. I have the Aura Pro right here. It comes in 169. You can get an Aura, comes in at 129. But with Kyle 10. Oh shoot, with Kyle 10, you can get $10 off. And if you're still like, I don't want to spend even that much money. You can get two Friday original paddles for $99 which is probably the best deal that exists in pickleball. And I think you can actually get it for $89 with code Kyle 10. So 45 bucks a paddle. I'll leave a link in the description below to check it out. So here's the next one. Slow down, especially as you're first starting out. It feels overwhelming because things are happening fast. Your brain has a lot on its mind. What's the score? Where do I hit the ball? What does my partner think of me? And because of that, we speed everything up. Like you would, if you were just replying to a text message or responding to somebody without much thought. A quick thought, a quick beat will help you hit better shots. So more than anything, this isn't a specific tip on court of something to do. It's more of a mindset piece. I will give you one specific action. As you're playing points, I played a game yesterday and everybody was just playing fast. The game was fast. We were walking fast. We were serving within five or six seconds. And when that happens, it's often easier for mistakes to compound. You make one error, turns into two, two turns into three, three turns into the entire game. And so instead of letting that happen, one thing you can do to mitigate that is just slow down your speed of walking to get the ball. How many bounces you take when you're about to go serve. Maybe be a little bit more like Djokovic. Take 15 bounces. Actually, you only have 10 seconds. So you probably can't do that. I think we should look up that rule. 0.67 bounces per second. You can do it. But the idea is slow down because if you slow down, you will often play better. The next one is placement over power. If you hear this advice from somebody on the courts, it's a good piece of advice. Moaz said it right here in our school, placement over power. The flip of that is just trying to be powerful at all moments. And when you try to blast through people all the times, a few things happen. Number one, actually will work a decent amount. You'll be able to overpower people and they'll miss balls, ow, into the net. And then you'll have this feedback loop that's very positive. I should keep doing that. Here's some of the problems that come with only playing a power game. If power is your only strategy. Number one, when you have success using power, what do you do? You often try to hit with even more power on the next ball. And I call this the power threshold, which basically means there is a threshold where you go past a certain level of power in your own ability, where then you lose accuracy. If you think about, again, throwing a dart, if you start to throw that thing harder and harder and harder and harder, you're gonna lose accuracy. There's a certain level of force, of power you should probably need to use to be able to be the most accurate. It's the same thing in pickleball. The second thing to use the dart analogy is you don't get more points if you hit, let's say you're trying to hit the bullseye. You don't get more points for hitting the bullseye harder. You just get the same amount of points. The point is to hit the bullseye. So in pickleball, placement is just as, if not more important than using power because the ability to play a softer game and to place the ball into different locations that force your opponent to move. So the soft game isn't gonna hinder you. Placement's not gonna hinder you. It's actually only gonna elevate your power. So if I can hit the ball and I can make my opponent move a little bit, shoot, dang it, that was good. Maybe just be powerful. If I can just move my opponent a little bit and get them off balance, all the things that we're trying not to have you do, then you're gonna have a much more effective, successful, great life. And that's where power is gonna be more useful. There's one other thing I think which is just the unpredictability of it. The very best pickleball players know how to put the ball and they know what paces to use. They're not trying to smash everything and they're not going to the same spot, but they use the court space. They use the kitchen as a tool, not a restriction, to be able to move opponents before using power. I like to think of power as you wanna earn the power that you use a lot of the time. So if we're dinking, I wanna earn a pop-up because I aimed at his feet, right? I hit the ball to his feet here, then he popped it up. And the feet are one of the best targets that you can use to earn these pop-ups. And when you get them, absolutely. Crush the heck out of the ball, because that's fun. It's a winning play, but it's not the only play that will help you win. Here's the next one, down beats hard. A lot of times we're in this position where they're a little bit farther back from the kitchen. And I just try to hit the ball really hard at them. Oftentimes, though, that's coming in at a horizontal trajectory, right at their body. And they can do something just like that where they crush the ball. What wins in pickleball is getting the ball down. Often, whoever gets the ball down first will win the point because down tends to lead to up. And so you get the ball down, hits the ball up, and this is where you get the smashes. Let's say Jake is speeding a ball up at me. He's hitting one hard at me. I, again, want to just get the ball down. Where? At their feet. And if you can just think about keeping the ball down at their feet. Sometimes it's going to be hard. Sometimes it's going to be just a soft little ball at their feet. But when that soft ball comes, you're often going to get the pop up and you're going to get the hard ball in order to win points. And that's the beautiful thing about pickleball is soft is coupled with hard. Power alone isn't going to win you games, especially at a higher level as you get better. But power coupled with the ability to get the ball down, coupled with the ability to place the ball at someone's feet will get you a lot of points that you wouldn't have otherwise earned if you were just going for power all the time. Here's the next one. Choose backhand targets. There's a lot of places you could hit the ball on the court. And maybe the worst thing that you could do is not choose anywhere specifically to hit the ball on the court, which is how a lot of people play. And I get it at first because, again, there's a lot of things going on in your mind as you start to play. What you want to start with is, I would just say start with one target theme, which is choose the backhands. Hit more backhands. Like as you see right here, when you're hitting a drop, choose that backhand spot of maybe the player on the right side. That one is specifically really good because it's towards the middle of the court and you have a lot of space to potentially miss. The other backhand target I often see and like to use is the one on the left side player towards their sideline. Now you want to be careful because now you're flirting with a little bit more risk, but this target can still be good. And here's the one that most people never think about or never pay attention to. When you have a lefty and a righty on the same team and both of their backhands are in the middle of the court, you should only be hitting the ball to one location, the middle of the court, because that's where their backhands are. Make adjustments, of course, if someone has a great backhand, but most people don't as... Sorry, I get emotional talking about it. Yeah, I get it. His dad used to be left-handed. He hated the backhands. His favorite dog growing up was left-handed. Had to sneeze, it didn't come. The next one is just pick one thing. We gave you a lot of things in this video. The intent is not for you to go to the court and try to implement all of them at one time. If you do that, you'll be overwhelmed. If you do that, you're gonna miss a lot. You're probably gonna play worse. In fact, you might still play a little worse anyway, trying something brand new. And that's okay, because just because something feels a little more uncomfortable, it doesn't mean it's wrong. It's different than what you've been doing. And I love what Jim says. It's actually, I used to work at a hospital when I was right out of college, and they used to use this term in corporate America so much. Don't boil the ocean. Have you ever heard that before? Don't boil the ocean? Don't boil the ocean. I would never even think about doing that. Yeah. Why is that? It was just a common thing where it's like, hey guys, let's just do- Hey, don't commit homicide. Yeah, I wasn't planning on it. It's like, let's not try to do 50 things at once, but let's just boil a little bit of water that's on our current stove. Let's not go out and try to boil the ocean. That was just, I heard that, and I used to think it was so crazy too. Don't reinvent the wheel. That makes sense. No, no. I'm a bit of an entrepreneur. I would like to- No, that's different though. Reinvent the wheel would be try to change, like to do something different. This is don't try to do everything at once. Don't boil the oceans, like if you're cold. I don't know if I'm getting it. Yeah. Okay, we'll talk about this after. I think that's like, as I've played for five years, anytime I've gone out and played like open play or rec play, or I've been out practicing and drilling, I've always tried to have one, maybe two, but most oftentimes just one. Because when you narrow your focus, you accelerate your improvement. And if you just narrow your focus on one thing and you improve on it, and then another thing and you improve on it, you will improve faster than if you go 17 things at one time over the course of three, six, nine months. And so that'd be my encouragement to you. Don't boil the ocean. So what's that example? Yesterday you played for two hours. What were you trying to work on? Yeah, yesterday I played for two hours and the number one thing I was working on was serves. I call them serve openings, but it was serves, return came back, and where and how I was gonna hit my third shot drop. That was like, I mean, obviously I was thinking about some other things as the game went on, because you have to be, but my focus when I went back to watch the film of our rec play was only on that. I didn't think about anything else. And when I left, I wanted to know that for the two hours I spent playing with my buddies, that that was the one thing I was either gonna progress on or have something to work on, which I do. I think I did both, but that's how I would think about any sort of improvement, narrow your focus, you know, get better faster. Yeah. Don't put your pasta in the ocean if it's boiling. Yeah, that's too much. The next one is just having a curious mindset. I've been around just so many players all the way from the very beginner to the newest player. I think you actually do this really well, which is just trying to be open to what might be a good way to play the game. What if? Yeah, it's like, what might be a better way to hit this shot? And I think if you take that approach, even with people who might be at the park who wanna give you some unsolicited advice, maybe you don't want the unsolicited advice, but oftentimes it's just information. And sometimes you're gonna learn a lot from the better players. Oftentimes you are. That's how I learned a lot. The better players at the park, they wanna share. Everyone wants to share with somebody else. Some people probably share a little more than they should. But if you approach this with, what can I do a little bit better tomorrow? Or how could I learn the shot in a little bit of a different way? Even if it seems unconventional or if it seems different than what somebody else has told you, I think experimenting and just try to figure out for yourself how to play this game well will take you far. I mean, you've been playing for- 20 or 30 years. 23 years, yeah. 30 years, and you've always had that. And I still got more to learn. I was just telling Kyle today, what if you wore a darker shirt so they couldn't see how much you were sweating? That's just part of being curious. Am I sweating a lot? Yeah. Oh, shoot. We're not even moving. It wasn't this hot when we started. It's Phoenix, we're getting into the summertime. Shoot. All right, guys, well, I hope you enjoyed that video. Subscribe to the channel. Subscribe to Friday Pickleball as well. I love these paddles. We love these paddles. And this guy introduced me to my wife. And so that's kind of the end of the story. But they've got a video coming out this Friday. So check that out. I'm gonna keep talking. There's another video right here if you wanna watch that one. Did somebody say there's a video right there? Video right there. Oh! Click on that.