Winning an open-play game can feel like progress, even when it reinforces the habits you are trying to change. Lee Whitwell explains why recreational players need a different scoreboard.

Key Takeaways

  • Use recreational play to develop skills, including when the score gets close.
  • Build new shots through repetition, then add pressure before taking them into games.
  • Measure your decisions, commitment and execution alongside the result.

Stop Playing to Win Open Play

Rec players are my favourite players to coach. They see their improvement, and they celebrate it. Out loud. Occasionally with a little dance.

If you’re one of them, you take lessons. You study videos. You sign up for clinics, round robins, ladders and leagues. You drill. Well, some of you drill. The rest of you play six games and call it drilling.

Which is exactly why this one drives me mad.

The same player who celebrates a clean third-shot drop in a lesson will abandon it the second someone starts keeping score.

You stop working on your game. You start trying to win.

Those are not always the same thing.

Say you take a lesson and spend an hour on your third-shot drop. Or your reset. Or changing direction on your dink. Or recognising which balls you should attack, instead of treating anything above your shoelaces as an engraved invitation to speed up.

Then you go to open play.

At 2–2, you’re trying the new shot.

At 5–5, you’re still mostly committed.

Then it’s 8–8, and that third-shot drop has left the building. No forwarding address. You’re driving again, because you really want this one.

Or you look across the net and think: We should beat these people.

Who cares?

Seriously. Who cares? It’s rec play. Nobody is engraving your name on anything.

The people across the net aren’t your measuring stick. Whether you think you should beat them isn’t your measuring stick. And an 11–8 at open play is certainly not your measuring stick.

That’s the Rec Player Trap: choosing the short-term hit of winning a game that doesn’t matter over building something that helps you win when it does.

And it’s not a character flaw. This is where my psychology degree finally earns its keep. Under pressure, your brain reaches for whatever it knows best. Psychologists call it the dominant response: the more aroused and on the line you feel, the more likely you are to do the thing you’ve done the most.

So at 8–8, you may not be making a deliberate choice to use the old drive. Your brain may simply be defaulting to it. To change that default, you need to make the new shot more familiar and reliable, and that means practising it when it feels uncomfortable.

Please, Please, Please Drill

If you’re trying to improve a skill, isolate it first.

Get reps. Lots of them. Let your brain and body figure out the movement, contact point, trajectory, timing and feel without worrying about winning the point.

Then add complexity. The easiest way is to give the drill a point value:

  • Make seven out of ten.
  • Only successful resets earn a point.
  • Dink crosscourt, and after a set number of balls the point goes live.

Now you’ve added pressure and decision-making without jumping straight from a controlled drill into a game where your competitive brain grabs the wheel and floors it.

The exact drill isn’t the point. The progression is:

  1. Learn it.
  2. Repeat it.
  3. Add pressure.
  4. Use it in a game.

And when you finally take that skill into a game, don’t immediately go back to judging it by whether you won.

Change the Metric

Say you’re working on your third-shot drop. You play a rec game and lose 11–9.

Was it a bad game? I don’t know. Ask better questions:

  • Did I use the drop when it was the right choice?
  • Did I read the ball and decide before I hit it? Or did I hit first and think later?
  • Did I commit to the shot?
  • How was my execution?

And the big one: did I still use it at 9–9? That’s where you find out whether you actually own the skill yet.

And when you answer, be specific. “My drops are rubbish” isn’t feedback. It’s a mood. “I popped two up because I was late reading their return” is feedback. One gives you something to drill on Tuesday. The other gives you something to moan about on the drive home.

If you attempted ten drops, executed seven well and lost 11–9, that might have been an incredibly productive game.

If you abandoned everything, reverted to old habits and won 11–7? Congratulations on your 11–7. Frame it. Now tell me what you actually improved.

Pickleball gives us real-time feedback, yet we’ve decided the scoreboard is the only feedback that counts. It isn’t. The scoreboard is the least informative thing on the court. It can count to eleven, and that’s about it.

You can play the best game of your life and lose because the people across the net played slightly better. You can play terribly and win because they played worse. Winning and playing well are not always the same thing.

The Ceiling You’re Putting on Your Own Game

Every time you choose the familiar shot because you’re afraid of losing an irrelevant game, you reinforce the game you already have.

You paid for the lesson. You learned something new. Maybe you even drilled it. Then, the first time you could use it against real opponents, you shelved it to win.

Three months later, you’re wondering why that shot still isn’t part of your game.

Because you never gave it permission to fail.

New skills are supposed to be uncomfortable. They’re supposed to break down. For a while, your old shot may actually get better results than the new one.

That’s not evidence the new skill doesn’t work. That’s learning.

Rec play is one of the safest places to go through that uncomfortable stage. Use it. That’s what it’s there for. Well, that and the gossip.

There Is a Time When the Score Matters

I’m not saying never care about winning.

Tournament day? Compete. Believe me, I do. A league match that counts? Compete. That’s when you take the game you’ve built and figure out how to win with what you’ve got that day.

But know the difference: competition is where you test the game you’ve built. Rec play is where you build it.

If every game is a must-win, where exactly are you supposed to fail?

Give Yourself a Different Scoreboard

Before your next rec game, decide what you’re measuring:

  • Getting your returns deeper.
  • Dropping instead of driving every third.
  • Resetting through the transition zone instead of trying to win the point from somewhere around the parking lot.
  • Recognising attackable balls, not just attacking more balls.

Whatever it is, that’s your scoreboard.

Then walk off the court and give it an honest verdict: It’s sticking. Not yet. Missed the mark.

Whichever one you land on, write down one thing to take into your next drill session. That’s how rec play feeds your practice instead of replacing it.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do for your game is lose 11–8 while doing something you couldn’t do a month ago.

Stop playing to win open play. Start playing to get better.

You can’t control the people across the net. You can only control your side of it.

Work on that. Your game will thank you. Your partner might too.

Further Reading

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Lee Whitwell

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lee Whitwell is the current world #1 ranked senior female professional pickleball player, a two-time MLP MVP, coach, author, and entrepreneur. A former professional tennis player, Lee has built a reputation as one of the sport's most respected educators and…

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