Finding the Perfect Pickleball Partner
Hint: There is no such thing as perfect!
In Today’s Bite Size Pickleball newsletter:
Finding the Perfect Pickleball Partner
FINDING THE PERFECT PICKLEBALL PARTNER
(for competitive purposes)
Understand that, like any kind of partnership in life, it is challenging.
If it doesn’t feel right from the get-go, trust that feeling and back-off the partnership.
Don’t be scared to hurt someone’s feelings, and cut ties, but be an adult about it and communicate properly. Anna Leigh Waters just dropped her partner after one loss. She then poached Anna Bright from her partner Rachel Rohrabacher who then went and teamed up with Water’s former partner Catherine Parenteau. Talk about your rotating prom dates! And before that, Ben Johns dropped his own brother! If you want to win, you have to be a little selfish, and a little ruthless, and do what is best for YOU. I just played a whole league with a partner that was not best for me, and visa versa. I was not ruthless, I wanted to drop out the week before the league started, but I allowed myself to be talked into playing with the partner by an outside person. I wish I would’ve listened to my gut, because it would have saved me weeks of frustration.
Do you like your partner? If the answer is, “kind of,” that’s not a good enough answer. You need to really, at least somewhat, enjoy spending time with this person and have a mutual respect for one another.
Does this player complement your style of play? Do you feel confident when they play alongside you? Because you should. It should be empowering, not anything that remotely worries you. Like, if you ask someone to the prom and you’re worried about how their style of dress might draw too much attention to you…
BIG NOTE: You want to find someone as close to your level as possible so neither of you can be singled out and picked on in a match. This is very important.
You, and whomever you team up with, need to commit to working together. Being in any kind of couple takes work. You can’t just form a partnership and, voila!, you turn the switch on and everything is perfect. It won’t be. It will take work. And not only physical work, drilling with one another, it will take work learning how to best communicate with one another.
Once you HAVE committed to the partnership, DO NOT make excuses and blame your partner when you lose. Because you will lose, and blaming your partner is an easy out. Instead of blame: How could the two of you have played better? How could YOU have played better? How could you perhaps have communicated with your partner better? What needs to be worked on between the two of you? Get out and practice it! The big positive I took away from my partnership is that we drilled a lot, and it was awesome, because my short game definitely improved. That would not have been the case if I wasn’t in a league and drilling. I would have been lazy just playing rec. So I thank my partner for that major plus in our experience together.
Team up with someone relatively close to your age. I’m 62, my partner was 22. Just too many decades in between us, and two very different schools of how we approach life, the mind and sports.
Find joy in the overall experience and learn to love the process with one another. If you’re always focused on the wins and the losses, the losses are going to hurt really bad. Instead, focus on maxing your potential with one another and letting the outcomes take care of themselves. Play for, and in, the moment. Give it your best shot and when it’s all over, go have a drink together.
