Recycle Sunday - Moving as a Team - Let's Stay Together

A blast from the past...

This week's Recycle Sunday article was originally published January 14, 2016.

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Everyone has heard the saying "Two heads are better than one". In pickleball, two players are better than one...if they play as a team. Pickleball is a game of quick shots and strategy. A team must be properly positioned to to account for both factors in order to maximize the probability of winning a rally.

Before beginning the discussion of team positioning, let's review the court dimensions.

Comfort…Your Key to Better Pickleball

I am about to embark on scheduling a bunch of tournaments for the rest of the year. I will be entering some tournaments without a partner and asking for the tournament organizers to find me a partner. I have only done this one time in the past and it had good results with a gold medal in Hilton Head. But the comfort level of playing with a complete stranger is something that concerns me. This article from Sarah Ansboury came at very good time for me.

Comfort…Your Key to Better Pickleball

We all play better when we have fun!  We have fun when we are comfortable … with ourselves and the people we are playing with. So it seems, comfort is a key to better pickleball.

The Dink Game

I have previously written about the dink game in the post Dinking Drills. A simple description of the dink game is that it is played just like a regular game except that all play occurs with players positioned at the non-volley zone line. All shots, including the serve, are dinks and scoring is identical to a regular game. Deb Harrison takes the game to the next level in her video The Dink Game Pt 1.

Triangulation in the Dinking Phase

Since dinking comprises such a large part of the game, it is essential that players understand where they should be positioned during the play. We talked about team movement while at the kitchen line in the post Moving as a Team Part 1 - At the Kitchen Line. In that post, I talked about forming a wall in order to cover the 2/3 of the court that opponents could most easily exploit. Deb Harrison talks about the same concept in her video Tipbit: Triangulation.

Prem Carnot Webinar (Part 2)

Yesterday I started to present the slides from Prem Carnot's webinar 7 Steps to Playing Advanced Pickleball. The size of the presentation required splitting it into 2 parts. This is part 2.

Prem Carnot Webinar

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a webinar hosted by Prem Carnot and his wife, Wendy Garrido. I sat through the 90 minute presentation and later received a 94 page slide presentation that was the basis for the discussion. Because you likely weren't crazy enough to sit in front of your computer for 90 minutes, I will present the key parts of the presentation here.

The first 20 slides were generally establishing the bona fides of the couple as pickleball experts. Most readers will accept that as fact and I will not include those slides. The next 30+ slides were dedicated to the presentation of the 7 Steps to Playing Advanced Pickleball. These are the slides shown in this blog. The remainder of the presentation was an "infomercial" promoting their boot camp and are not included.

The size of the presentation requires splitting it into 2 posts. The relevant slides for the first post are presented below without comment. The strategies and tactics discussed are nothing new to readers of this blog. But it is worth a read because it links a lot of thoughts together into a structured format. Click on the image to make it larger.

Follow the Ball

A while back, I wrote a series of posts about moving as a team. The first of these posts - Moving as a Team - Let's Stay Together - discussed forming a "wall" by positioning partners about 6-7 feet apart and moving together. A later post - Moving as a Team Part 1 - At the Kitchen Line - discussed where the wall should be positioned based on the court position of the opponent who hits the return.

I recently ran across an article that explains the same concept a little differently. I really like the catch-line that explains the concept in a simple phrase - "Follow the Ball". The article is from rvpicklers, self-described as a couple of retired women who live in The Villages but travel in their RV to play pickleball. The article follows and can also be found at their website rvpicklers.com.

Stacking

Several months after I started playing pickleball I was ready to serve when I saw something like this on my opponents' side.

Since this was a social match, I stopped before serving to tell them I was ready and they should get into position. They told me they were ready as well and to start the game. I didn't know what to think so I just played my normal game. That was my introduction to stacking.

Stacking is a positioning strategy where players on a team stay on the same side - right or left service court - throughout the game.  To be clear, the rules state that players must receive and serve in the courts in a specific rotation or lose the point. But there are no rules about the positioning of players not involved in the service. Nor are there rules about where the players may go after the first hit ball on each side. This results in some odd positioning and movement compared to the normal player rotation described in the Doubles Scoring and Player Positioning post. Players will be positioned side-by-side or on the same side of the court. Players will run diagonally across the court. It seems like mass confusion.

Poaching

Poaching is the practice of one player moving into his partner's court to return a ball that would normally be taken by the player's partner.  The poach generally takes place at the kitchen line but could occur anywhere on the court.  There are two kinds of poaching - planned and unplanned.  (Some would agree that there are two kinds of poaching but would change the labels to "good" and "bad".)  A poach is shown below.  The player starts in the left service court and returns the shot after crossing into the right court in front of his partner.

Forehand Takes the Middle

A commonly heard phrase in pickleball is "forehand takes the middle". This is one of those axioms that irritate players who have relied on individual skills and have yet to understand the strategies of playing doubles. Even as a novice player, I thought I had a strong backhand that I brought from my tennis background. I could not understand why I would cede that middle shot to a weaker partner. This post will try to explain why I was wrong.

The primary reason this phrase applies is that most players have a stronger forehand shot than their backhand shot.  Competitive players usually have partners with comparable skills, so the forehand would provide the better chance to succeed. This is not always the case, though, and the tactics to be used during a match should be part of the pre-match discussion.

Even in the case where one player's backhand is stronger than his partner's forehand, there is a physical reason the phrase applies.  A forehand is a natural extension of the paddle arm that allows the body to remain in a position to more quickly prepare for the next shot.  In contrast, a backhand to cover the middle causes the player to reach across his body and the player is not in a position to quickly recover.

Moving as a Team Part 3 - Defending the Lob

Defending the lob was briefly mentioned in Communicating with a Partner - During a Rally where I stated:

The rule of thumb is that the player on the opposite side of the court should run back on an angle for a lob over his partner’s head. Of course, the pre-match discussion should include the specific tactics used for this shot based on partners’ relative strengths. But the rule of thumb doesn’t always apply anyhow. If the lob is short, for example, then the player on the same side of the court should call “mine” as soon as possible to preclude his partner from running to the backcourt and allowing him to keep his position on the court.

Let's dive a little deeper into what this means for player movement by looking at an example as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Moving as a Team Part 2 - Baseline to Kitchen

The single most difficult decision in pickleball is when to move from the baseline to the kitchen line. That decision becomes doubly hard when playing with a partner. A basic rule of thumb in doubles is that players should move together (Let's Stay Together). Therefore, the decision to move forward must be shared by two minds.

First, we must acknowledge that getting to the kitchen is a worthwhile goal. A previous post - written by Prem Carnot and titled You. Must. Get. To. The. (No-Volley) Line - detailed the reasons why getting to the line is important so I will not revisit that issue.

It is easy for one player to advance to the kitchen. He can almost walk to the line when a ball is hit to his partner.  So, why not have that Player A advance and then allow his partner to work his way to join Player A at the line? The answer is simple - the gaps created are huge and both players are put into hard-to-defend positions. Let's revisit the 3 lanes available to opponents as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Moving as a Team Part 1 - At the Kitchen Line

When a team is at the kitchen line, it seems natural for each partner to be accountable for the most of the service court in which he is positioned. It also seems reasonable that the best place to defend that court would be to stand at its mid-point as shown in Figure 1 below. The prevailing theory among top pickleball doubles teams is that 2/3 of the court should be covered just by where a team is positioned. This positioning covers t least 2/3 of the court. So, is it the best positioning strategy? 

Figure 1

Before we can answer that question, we need to understand the opponents' options when returning their shot. I like the concept that a returner has 3 lanes in which to hit the ball. Lane 1 is down the middle and is the safest option.  Lane 2 is down the line and is a higher risk return. Lane 3 is crosscourt and is the highest risk return. A team must position itself to defend the easy shots and force the opponent to make the difficult shot. Let's first look at the mid-court positioning of Figure 1 with the 3-lane options of a corner return.

Moving as a Team - Let's Stay Together

Everyone has heard the saying "Two heads are better than one". In pickleball, two players are better than one...if they play as a team. Pickleball is a game of quick shots and strategy. A team must be properly positioned to to account for both factors in order to maximize the probability of winning a rally.

Before beginning the discussion of team positioning, let's review the court dimensions.