This Game-winning Pickleball Strategy is... Boring?

Earlier this year, I talked to coach Matty Klein on the Pickleball Fire podcast. He said during the course of a game, he and his partner try to limit their errors to just two or three during the contest. Yes, you read that right! The goal is for a doubles team to limit your errors to just a couple per game. This is because the team that makes the fewest errors will win regardless of whether you are a 3.0 player or professional competitor. 

If you take a look at some statistics tabulated by Max Jolly for the 2018 Grand Canyon State Games, you'll notice how few mistakes the pros made. The match analyzed was the men's doubles final with Kyles Yates and Dave Weinbach versus Aspen Kern and Matt Staub. During the course of three games, only two out of 110 serves were missed. Kern didn't miss a dink while he hit 58 of them and Yates missed only one dink in 112. Also, Weinbach didn't miss a third shot drop. And remember the professionals have very long rallies so the consistency described above is critical to success.

Now at the beginning of this article, I wrote the team with the fewest errors wins. So where were the errors in this game? As it turns out, they were on the serve return with only 92.7% of returns in the court. Now, Yates and Weinbach only missed one return each so the errors had to come from Staub and Kern. The ratio of winners to unforced errors was also calculated. Apparently, Staub had a tough day as his unforced errors were almost double of his winners. So who do you think won the match? Yes, it was Yates and Weinbach by a score of 10-12, 11-5, 11-2.

To me, the winning team's statistics are amazing, but it shows you need to play what Matty Klein calls percentage pickleball. John Sperling, a top senior pro who was also also on the Pickleball Fire podcast, said you just need to play boring pickleball. Regardless of the wording, limiting your mistakes is the key to winning pickleball.