Taking Your Pickleball Game to the Next Level with Coach Mo and Coach Matty

Richard "Coach Mo" Movsessian comes from a tennis background like many other well known pickleball players. He was a professional tennis teacher before he became a pickleball coach. When featured on the Pickleball Fire podcast, he discussed how he ran a free clinic for 7 to 8 years before he decided to use another means to convey his knowledge to people across the country.

During a free clinic one of Coach Mo's students told him that he was giving her three hours' worth of information. She said that he should record it all on a DVD so that more people could access this information at their convenience. That was when Coach Mo decided to document his knowledge in the form of a DVD and sold it all across the US and Canada.

After the success of his instructional DVDs, Coach Mo decided to write some books that would reach readers far and wide and improve their game. He did his first book in collaboration with Joe Baker. Coach Mo was in Virginia when he got a call from Baker asking for lessons. After telling him that there are no courts in town, he discovered that Baker wanted a lesson in his hotel lobby. He was looking for a chance to pick his brain for five hours discussing pickleball.

Coach Mo agreed, and the next call he received from Baker was about the book that Baker had written on pickleball. Baker requested him to critique that book, and that's how they ended up writing that book together.

On the same podcast, Coach Matty Klein told his story of how he entered the pickleball landscape after having been a tennis player for over 42 years and a tennis teacher for ten years on top of that. When he approached Coach Mo at his clinic, he intended to challenge him. He wanted to beat him at his own game because he didn't trust his strategies. Coach Matty trusted his own experience and his tennis skills. After being defeated and convinced by Coach Mo's game, he became one of his students and later his partner in teaching other players.

Coach Mo believes that consistency is the key to pickleball. You can't play tennis against people much younger than you, but pickleball is all about making fewer mistakes, remaining consistent, and playing smartly. Even at the national level, he believes these are the keys to pickleball. Other than that, pickleball and tennis are much the same, in his opinion.