coaching

Pickleball Coaching

Set the Lesson Tone: First impressions Matter More Than You Think

Whether you’re running a beginner clinic or working with advanced players, the tone you set at the start of a lesson shapes the entire experience. Before you even feed the first ball, players are forming opinions: Is this coach prepared? Do they take this seriously? Am I in good hands?

One of the easiest and most effective ways to set a professional tone is by arriving early and showing up looking like a coach. These small habits build trust and create a strong foundation for learning.

Pickleball Coaching

Keep It Game-Like, Coach! The Importance of Training Players Through Play

In pickleball coaching, one of the most effective ways to help players improve isn’t a complicated drill or a long explanation—it’s simply to make practice look and feel more like the real game. When your drills reflect the actual situations players face in matches, their learning sticks, their decisions improve, and their skills transfer more easily.

Pickleball Coaching

How to Give Effective Feedback: Coaching That Drives Improvement

Providing effective feedback is one of the most important skills a pickleball coach can develop. The way you deliver feedback can make the difference between a player feeling motivated to improve or becoming frustrated and discouraged. One of the best ways to ensure that your feedback is clear, constructive, and encouraging is by using the "What, Why, How" feedback method.

Pickleball Coaching

Starting with the Fundamentals: The Big Five

No matter your skill level, mastering the fundamentals is key to improving your pickleball game. Too often, players jump ahead to advanced strategies without first developing a solid foundation. By focusing on the Big Five—Grip, Setup, Impact Point, Sensation, and Recovery—you’ll build consistency, control, and confidence on the court. Let’s break them down.

Pickleball Coaching

Coaching a Game of Movement: Throw and Catch Drills

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times: pickleball is a game of movement. You can have the nicest swing in the world but if you can’t get to the ball, you can’t use it. That’s why pickleball coaches should get their players – especially those who maybe don’t have an extensive ball sport background – to work on their catching skills. Here’s are three examples of catching-related drills that will help your players improve:

Pickleball Coaching

Show, Don’t Just Tell: Why Great Coaches Demonstrate 

When it comes to coaching pickleball, one of the simplest yet most powerful tools at your disposal is demonstrating. Whether you’re teaching technical skills or running a new drill, showing players what to do — and how to do it — can make the difference between confusion and clarity, between a practice session that drags and one that’s dynamic and effective.  

If you’re serious about helping your players improve, here’s why demonstrating is essential — and how to do it well.  

Context-Based Coaching

Have you ever taken a lesson (in pickleball or anything else), felt really good about your progress and then failed miserably when trying to apply your new skills in a game? This can be a frustrating and even demoralizing situation and very often it stems from a simple coaching mistake: the failure to contextualize the skills being learned.

How do you hit a good volley? That's a reasonable question that a pickleball or tennis player might ask. But before answering the question, the coach should ask one of her own: which volley are we talking about? Are we discussing volleying when the ball is driven hard right at you (e.g. when playing bangers)? Or are we talking about playing a volley when the ball is slow and high? What if it is a volley off an opponent's third shot drop or dink and is now below net level?

Each of these situations -- or contexts -- require very different technique. And unless we identify the context we're imagining, how can we work on building the skill in a meaningful way?

At Third Shot Sports we make sure that our students are always crystal clear on the situation we are training. It is vital that they know exactly when in a game they might encounter one shot versus another. A good habit for coaches to develop is to introduce a skill by saying "Here's the situation..." and then proceed to outline when the skill they are about to work on might be useful.

When coaches fail to do this, when they merely say "today we will learn...", they disconnect the skill being learned from the game being played. By doing so, they make it much harder for the student to identify the moment in a game when the skill could be used. This failure to perform the newly acquired skill in a game situation is not the fault of the student; it is a mistake on the part of the coach.  

So if you're a coach, try to contextualize your students' learning. And if you're the student, feel free to ask the question "So exactly when in a game would I use this shot?". 

 

Mark Renneson is the founder of Third Shot Sports. He has been coaching tennis for over 20 years and now travels around North America coaching pickleball.