7 Tips for Playing Pickleball With Your Spouse
If you’ve ever played pickleball with your spouse or romantic partner, you may have experienced some of the emotional challenges that can come with it.
Because you are more comfortable with each other than other people you might partner with, it’s easier to use harsh words or place blame on each other. This is a quick way to create tension on the court, which leads to poor performance, even though you both might be great players! You love the idea of playing with your “partner,” but you just struggle to get along. Check out these tips to make playing with your romantic partner easier.
1. Call Your Balls and Communicate
One of the biggest ways my husband and I were able to improve as partners was to start talking during play. We call pretty much every ball as “yours” or “mine”, even when it seems obvious. I do the majority of the calling, but that doesn’t mean I am calling them all for myself. And hint: it has little to do with which side of the center line the ball is on. We like using the X-Method to help us figure out whose ball is whose, but if it’s an overhead in the middle or even more on “my” side, I’ll let him take those most of the time because he is taller, has more power, and I want to win the point!
2. Be Okay With Losing Rec Games
Rec games are different from tournaments because at the end of the day, they don’t mean anything towards your rating. So use them with intent and purpose. Play practice games with your spouse that allow you both to figure out what works best for you. Maybe you want to try stacking or switching. Rec games are a great time to try it, and because there are no consequences, it doesn’t really matter if you lose. Eventually, you may find that you start winning a lot more games together because you sacrificed some earlier rec games to figure out what works.
3. Forgive Each Other’s Mistakes
Great players know that while you are working on improving your game, there are going to be ups and downs and lots of mistakes. Give your partner the space to mess up! Nothing is more nerve-wracking than your partner rolling their eyes or scoffing at every error you make. So don’t be that person! Boost them up and tell them they’ll get the next one. Encourage them if they were trying to do a smart shot but missed it. Or, laugh it off if they made a “silly” decision. Embrace the highs and the lows with your spouse, because improving your pickleball game is a long journey!
4. Praise Each Other’s Successes
This seems obvious, right? Hitting a great winner or set-up shot always feels great, but it’s even better when my husband acknowledges it with a smile and pumps me up, and I try to do the same for him. Sharing this kind of affection is a great way to express love for each other, and will make you both more confident players.
I’m not saying you have to kiss each other after each point or game, but I’d definitely recommend complimenting each other as much as possible to keep morale high.
5. Trust Each Other
Trusting each other is essential to building self-esteem. For example, I hear many mixed teams talk about how much they hate when their partner poaches. I think the frustration of the non-poaching teammate is they feel like their balls are being “stolen,” or that their partner doesn’t trust them to hit it well enough. I personally love when my husband goes for it (and I like to do it, too), and if done well, it can be a great move to take the opposing team off-guard and win some points. To build some trust around poaching, drill it as a team and make sure you know the right times to poach.
Poachers — show your teammate you trust them by not over-poaching all of their balls.
Non-poachers — try giving your partner some space to poach and see how it goes!
6. Set Rules for How You Talk to Each Other
Both of you should talk about what is helpful for you to hear on the court, and what brings you down or puts you in a bad headspace. This is going to be personal for all of us. I know people who like a lot of uplifting words, and people who like a tough-love nudge to kick it into next year.
For me personally, I don’t mind a reminder of a strategy like “let’s slow it down” or “let’s bring them to the net”, but I don’t like being told what shots to hit or not hit because it makes me overthink things and I make more errors. Together, we’ve figured out what our own pain points are and have agreed to not say certain things, or at least not to say them in a certain way.
7. Figure Out a Strategy That Works for Both of You
If you like to speed up the ball, but your partner doesn’t have the fastest reaction speed, it’s not a great idea to put them in tough predicaments just because it’s the way you like to play (unless they request that you do so, so they can start improving). If your goal is to win more games, you need to play smart as a team. It’s not just about showing off what you can do, but setting up your partner for success.
How you want your play style to look and feel is up to you both to determine, but it’s worth figuring out together.
Every Doubles Team Is Different
At the end of the day, you and your partner have to find what works best for you. One thing for sure is that it takes effort from both sides to work through the tough times and make permanent changes for the long haul.
I’m lucky that my husband cares a lot about us being a successful team. He’s also a very kind soul, so it’s relatively “easy” to work out our issues and be nice to each other on the court. We have had our fair share of arguments as a pickleball team, and we still have them occasionally. The main difference is that the work we did in the beginning of playing pickleball together has made it much easier to bounce back from any issues as they come up now.
If you’re like us, you may see your efforts showing up in the non-pickleball parts of your marriage, which is a huge bonus of playing pickleball with your spouse!
