The Three Step Foundation to Teaching Pickleball

                        The Three Step Foundation to Teaching Pickleball

If there is one thing that is beyond question, it is that pickleball continues to grow at an astounding rate. It is a sport that connects the dots between all racquet sports better than any other to date because of the appeal to players of all levels and abilities. It holds the distinct advantage of people with very limited athletic ability being able to play and improve as soon as they pick up a paddle. In the last year alone, pickleball has been responsible for unprecedented numbers of new players entering into racquets. A million into tennis and thousands into paddle, simply by pickleball giving them the needed entry point. Pickleball has been responsible for saving struggling clubs and propelling successful ones to new heights. As the Director of Racquets at the Baltimore Country Club, I have seen a 204% growth in our racquets participation and programming in just the last nine months. These numbers are as astounding as they are exciting, but as in any developing industry, there are potential obstacles.

I have been lucky enough to work with thousands of players and certify hundreds more around the country. It is something I love doing and is a fulfilling way to give back to the racquets industry that has taught and given me so much. I have often asked myself whether there is a secret to teaching pickleball. Is it like tennis or is it subtly or even wholly different? My conclusion has been that success in pickleball, much like anything in life, comes from a strong foundation. Simply put, most people overcoach, overtalk and have a poor grasp of how the individual parts make up the whole. And because of pickleball’s meteoric rise in popularity, players are often left with a deficiency of truly good coaches to learn from properly. Sadly, this often results in many players listening to and paying for poor information.

There are three main points to teaching pickleball that I stress above all others. These three all-important competencies apply to all levels of the game. It matters very little whether you are teaching a beginner or a 5.0, it always comes back to these three key points that I call my “Foundation of Three to Coaching Pickleball”

The first part of the foundation is posture. If you watch any professional player, they maintain perfect posture as they play. This is best demonstrated by thinking of the middle of your chest as a bullseye and always attempting to keep the bullseye pointed straight ahead. I like to tell students to imagine their shoulders are a table and that they should always attempt to keep their table level. Any time you dip your chest and break your posture, your contact point suffers. One of my favorite drills to practice posture is dinking back and forth from the NVZ line while trying to take as many balls out of the air as possible. The key point being when you reach forward into the NVZ, you maintain perfect posture. The further a player reaches forward the greater their risk of breaking their posture. Coaches should look to challenge students by creating situations that make it difficult to maintain proper posture while putting the focus on how important it is. Calling attention to this simple but essential point during all your teaching will make a huge difference in your students improvement. It is also critical to demonstrate often. As the saying goes - a picture is worth a thousand words.

The second part of my foundation is contact point. It is important to note that if you don’t have perfect posture, you will struggle to have the correct contact point. (Thus contact point being #2) In order to keep your swing simple, you should strive to have the paddle to do the work for you. To do this effectively it is essential that your contact point be at a balanced point out in front of your body. Taking an unnecessarily long backswing or using your wrist to compensate for a poor contact point should be avoided at all costs. The tip of the paddle should always be in front of your hand during preparation and at the point of contact while maintaining a locked wrist throughout the swing. If you toss a ball to an outstretched paddle held by one of your students, the ball should come back with adequate lift over the net. Contact point and paddle angle go hand and hand and it is only by ensuring that the paddle is extended out in front, that allows for consistency. I often have my students put their arms to full extension at the NVZ to get comfortable taking the ball as early as possible. A similar exercise would be to make a “V” with your elbows in front of your stomach to visualize the correct contact points in front of you. This is when a coach should stress the importance of favoring the forehand side over the backhand since it allows for greater reach and stability when leaning over the NVZ. Pickleball is being flooded by tennis and paddle players who tend to favor their backhand volley which should be discouraged when extending forward to improve their contact point. It is important to highlight the simple fact that the closer your paddle is to the net, the higher your contact point will be, and the easier clearing the net becomes. 

The final part of the three part foundation is footwork. Teaching proper footwork in pickleball is surprisingly counterintuitive. In general, the default mindset regarding your feet is to always keep them moving. This is turned on its head on a pickleball court! The key to footwork at the NVZ line is actually to decrease, not increase, how much you move! This highly irregular thinking actually makes sense because of the limitations the NVZ line places on you. By minimizing the movement of your feet, you maximize your reach over the NVZ line and can prioritize your posture and contact point. When used together, these three parts that make up your foundation are the cornerstones of building a consistent pickleball game. To practice the less-is-more footwork approach I tell students to anchor one foot to the ground while at the NVZ line. They can move one foot as they pivot on the other, but can never lift both at the same time. This teaches them to shift on their outside leg to push the ball forward instead of moving completely while dinking and volleying. Some of the most illuminating drills you can do, involve forcing players to minimize rather than maximize how much they move their feet. One of my personal favorites is to dink down the line or cross court while imagining my feet are glued to the ground. Another similar game is to play points from the NVZ where players can only take one step at a time. The minute a player takes more than one pivot step, they lose the point. It is amazing how quickly this can make footwork patterns click for a player who has never been introduced to the less-is-more approach. The more in control they are with their footwork, the better their posture can be, and the better their contact can be. 

The biggest difference between teaching tennis and pickleball lies in where you begin. You teach tennis from the outside in - groundstrokes, then volleys, then serves, etc. In pickleball you teach from the inside out - starting with dinking before you progress to the back of the court. This is less because the majority of points are played at the NVZ, than it is that learning to hit the dink builds the foundation of technique for all other shots. How you dink can be translated to how you drop, how you drive, or even how you serve. Drive home the three foundational points of posture, contact point, and footwork no matter what stroke you are teaching and it will translate into swift success for your students. Keep it simple and they will improve more then they ever thought possible!