THE RECOVERY SERIES #3: Why Coaching Pickleball Is Different (And Why That Changes Everything)

I’ve coached a lot of things in my time - sales training, recruitment, career development, etc. I’ve been coached in even more. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that most coaching relationships come with an unspoken agreement: I know things. You don’t. Let me fix you.

Pickleball? Doesn’t really work like that.

Here’s what makes it genuinely, weirdly, beautifully different.

Most of your students already know how to play

I work alongside some brilliant tennis coaches — Jim and Bree come to mind — who do an extraordinary job of taking small humans and turning them into proper tennis warriors. Building from scratch. Clean slates. Years of patient, methodical work to ingrain technique before bad habits ever get a chance to settle in.

When those same kids grow up and walk onto a pickleball court, I get to benefit from everything Jim and Bree built. Which is a pretty good deal for me.

But here’s the thing: almost nobody comes to me as a blank slate. They come as a tennis player, a badminton player, a table tennis tragic, or someone who once watched a game on a cruise ship and figured they’d give it a crack. And every single one of them brings something to the table that I’d be an absolute fool to erase.

The temptation for a lot of coaches is to treat prior experience as a problem to solve. Wipe the old habits, install the new ones. In my experience, that’s exactly backwards. The tennis player with 20 years of net play in their body already understands angles, patience, and the value of court position. My job isn’t to override that. My job is to show them how to use it on a smaller court with a softer touch.

Every player has superpowers. The best coaching I can do is find them and build from there.

The outcomes look different here too

In a traditional sport coaching model, success tends to be linear. Do the drill. Improve the skill. Win the match. Rinse, repeat. Progress is measurable, and the end goal is usually competitive performance.

Pickleball players, in my experience, mostly don’t come to me because they want to go pro. They come because they want to stop feeling lost out there. They want to enjoy themselves. They want to hold their own in social play without feeling like a burden to their partner or a punching bag for their opponents.

That changes how I measure success. A 65-year-old who walks off court laughing after their first competitive rally? Win. A tennis veteran who stops muscling every shot and starts trusting the soft game? Big win. Someone who used to dread being attacked at the net now grinning as a drive barrels towards them? That one might be my favourite.

Progress isn’t always about the scoreboard.

The failure tolerance is extraordinary

Here’s something I say often: mistakes aren’t just okay in pickleball, they’re essential.

And I’m not saying that just to make people feel better about popping the ball into the stratosphere, though it does also achieve that. I’m saying it because of how error-based learning actually works — and this is something I find genuinely fascinating, partly because I studied it, and partly because it explains so much of what I see on court.

When the brain makes a mistake, it detects the gap between the expected outcome and the actual one — what neuroscientists call prediction error. That signal triggers a recalibration process: the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex activate, adjusting the decision-making pathways for next time. The miss isn’t a setback. It’s the mechanism. You don’t learn around errors. You learn through them.

There’s also strong evidence that productive failure — being encouraged to attempt something and struggle before receiving instruction, rather than being handed the answer upfront — produces deeper understanding and significantly better long-term retention. Which means the coach who lets you work through the problem before jumping in with the fix is actually doing you a favour. (You’re welcome.)

So when I say Have Fun Failing Fabulously, I mean it literally. The giggling, the ridiculous misses, the shanks that go sideways into court three — that’s not a consolation prize for not being good yet. That’s the mechanism by which you get better.

The best sessions I’ve ever run are the ones where people are laughing at their own disasters and immediately trying again. That’s not a lack of seriousness. That’s the whole game.

So what should you expect from coaching?

Expect to be challenged in ways you didn’t anticipate. Expect to feel occasionally brilliant and occasionally like you’ve forgotten how hands work. Expect that some of what you already know will serve you beautifully, and some of it will need to be gently set aside for a little while.

What you shouldn’t expect is a lecture. You shouldn’t expect to be told you’re doing it wrong and handed a clipboard of corrections. And you definitely shouldn’t expect it to stop being fun.

That’s the deal. That’s why I coach it. And if you get on court with me and you’re not smiling at least once, I’ll consider that a personal failure.

Fair enough?

Boothy

Brendon Booth is the founder of Fair Dinkin Pickleball Academy, coaching across Bendigo, Castlemaine, and the Loddon Mallee region. He coaches because he loves it, plays because he can’t help it, and writes because vertigo is currently kicking his butt.