Welcome back to The Pickleball Clinic Newsletter!

Is previous racket sport experience an advantage or a disadvantage? Has the pickleball bandit been brought to justice? Today, we’ll explore those subjects and a whole lot more!

Let’s get into it! 👇

So you're starting to play pickleball and you have a background in ping-pong, tennis, racquetball, squash, badminton or another racket sport. Is that a good or a bad thing? The answer is a little bit of both. 😃

The PROS…

• You're comfortable hitting SOME of the basic shots, like volleys and groundstrokes.

• You know how to hit a ball cleanly and in the direction where you want it to go.👍

• You're comfortable with some basic lingo and concepts — words like "forehand," "backhand," "topspin," and "backspin" are not foreign to you.

• If you were really good at another racket sport (think college level or higher), then you'll probably be a 3.5+ player almost immediately.

• (**Sorry, we know it's frustrating that those people above can usually skip the beginner levels. But think about it, if a new instrument came out that was a mixture between a guitar and a ukulele, you think Eric Clapton might have a bit of a head start on the rest of us? 😁)

The CONS…

• You don't know how to dink! (The dinking motion isn't really a part of the other racket sports, so you're going to have learn it — just like everyone else!😄) 

• Arrogance — Many people who come from another racket sport think that because they have a leg up, they can coast just on that. This is NOT the case! (Higher level doubles pickleball requires much more than the ability to handle a racket. If you're not employing good court positioning and shot selection, you simply cannot get to the next level.)

• Arrogance part #2 😂 — All of the above PLUS there are a few areas where doing your old racket sport stuff not only doesn't help, but actually hurts your pickleball game.
  
  Tennis example: Remember how very good tennis players can skip a few levels? Problem is, if they keep trying to hit the ball hard and speed up all the time — without earning it first through dinking — higher level pickleball players will punish those speedups and send them right back at their feet.
  
  Racquetball example: A lot of racquetball players have very long swings, and they often hit with a lot of slice. At the intermediate and advanced levels of pickleball, long swings and constant slices rob you of valuable reaction time and the ability to use topspin, respectively. 

SO, is it ultimately better or worse to have previous racket sport experience? Drumroll please... better, but it's close. And you certainly don't need it. If you have it, take advantage of your initial leg up, but be careful of the pitfalls and make an effort to play pickleball the right way. 👍

Mastering the soft game is the key to success!

If you want to progress past an intermediate level, learning to drop, dink, and reset is imperative. There are two main reasons:

1. It's much harder to attack a ball that bounces in the kitchen than it is to attack out of the air.

2. Soft shots hang in the air for longer, and if they’re going to bounce in the kitchen, your opponent has to let them bounce. That means there's more time between when you hit the ball and when your opponent hits the ball, which means you have more time to get to a favorable court position if you aren't at the kitchen line.

Pickleball’s greatest player of all time, Ben Johns, answers the question, “What is something most players aren’t working on but they should be?”

“Hey Bulletin Readers!

Something not many players work on is specific combinations both in attacking and countering. Certain patterns occur frequently when countering and attacking, and if you are creative in how you set up your drill you can isolate these patterns and improve at them.”

Follow Ben on Instagram and YouTube here!

UTR Pickleball Amateur Series!

UTR Sports has launched a new year-round series of USA Pickleball-sanctioned pickleball tournaments called the UTR Sports Pickleball Amateur Series and the first event is open for registration!

• What: UTR Sports Pickleball Amateur Series - Rome, GA

• When: March 15-17, 2024

• Where: Rome Downtown Racquets Center in Rome, Georgia

• Registration Deadline: March 8

• Divisions: Men’s & Women’s Singles, Doubles and Mixed Doubles 19+, 30+, 40+, 50+, 60+

REGISTER NOW

The first 200 players to register for this event will receive a discount code for ASICS pickleball footwear!

Two Pickleball Amateur Series events this year are Golden Ticket qualifiers, meaning players have a chance to earn the exclusive opportunity to pre-register for the USA Pickleball National Championships.

Is this a pickleball point or the grand finale of a fireworks show?!⚡🎇🔥

The Pickleball Fraudster

Rodney Grubbs was described as a friendly and charming guy, someone you could trust.

He traveled the country to pickleball tournaments, meeting people and getting them to invest in his pickleball equipment and apparel company, Pickleball Rocks. 

Grubbs would often say that there was one more investment slot available and through promissory notes, he said the investment would get a 12% annual return. But in what now appears to be little more than a Ponzi scheme, the investors never got their money back.

And it wasn't just a few investors — it was well over 100 investors totaling in the millions of dollars.

Attorney Matthew Foster, who represents roughly 80 such victims of the scheme, filed a bankruptcy petition against Grubbs in an Indiana bankruptcy court.

Judge Robyn Moberly had more than enough information to make her decision, which was to order Grubbs into bankruptcy.

That process entails searching for all of Grubbs' assets, selling them to create a pool of money, and then dividing the pool among the creditors who are owed.

Unfortunately, it looks like while Grubbs owes millions of dollars to his creditors, he has less than a million dollars of assets. And that means that unless they find more assets, his creditors will be out most of their investments. 😥

Moral of the story: keep enjoying your pickleball communities because the vast majority of us are well-meaning, fun-loving picklers. BUT always be careful who you trust with your investments.

As long as you have a pickleball court, everything else in life is kind of irrelevant. 😂 

Franklin is on the Ball!

When you’re the official ball of The Pickleball Clinic — sorry, that just got us thinking of the song from West Side Story that goes “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way!” because the concept is the same. When you’re our official ball, that means we’ve got your back and the utmost confidence in you and your brand.

After all, half of the word “pickleball” is “ball,” so the ball we endorse is pretty darn important. The other half of the word is “pickle,” and you can rest assured that whatever our official pickle company is😄, we have the utmost confidence in them too (Vlasic, you interested?). Anyway, go get some Franklin X-40s — and use code “clinic15” for 15% off! 

Want to hit your drives the RIGHT way?

Well, Coach Tanner is here to show you what you should and should not be doing in order to hit a great drive.👇

Key takeaways:

• Get under the ball with your body and your paddle — swing low to high.

• Bend your knees — the height of the ball dictates how much you bend.

• Use your other arm to get the rest of your body involved.

• Step forward into the shot.

Most people like playing pickleball in nice weather. You know, 60s, 70s, maybe low 80s. But depending on where you live, that's not always possible. In March of 2021 in Charlotte, Vermont, Christopher Vatis was looking for something more than just walking and hiking to get out of the house. Enter pickleball.

Within a short time, Vatis was part of the local pickleball community and organizing regular games with a big email list he had built up. Plus, a group of hardcore pickleballers, who play all year round and call themselves the "Polar Picklers," was created. In the winter, the group digs the courts out from under snow and they play in hats, gloves and masks to stay warm.

"As the zeal for playing and the need for camaraderie grew, the threshold for when it was too cold dropped,” Vatis said. “It’s now 10 degrees!”  

Thanks a lot for reading. See you next week!

- Your Friends at The Pickleball Clinic

Join the conversation below! ⬇️