The Four P’s of Pickleball

In my last column titled “Power Play,” I discussed the theory of improving your skills in order to progress the level of your game beyond playing with bangers. I also discussed the fact that higher level players have the skills to apply a variety of spins and speeds in order to be able to effectively place the ball to a location on their opponent’s side of the court that will not allow them to be aggressive with their returning shot, aka, bang the ball.

In review of that column, I want to apologize to my readers for kind of putting the cart before the horse in regard to this theory. In order to begin to work on applying a variety of spins and speeds on the ball, you must first conquer what I call the Four P’s of pickleball. The Four P’s of pickleball are, percentages and placement precede power, and the priority of the Four P’s need to be followed and applied directly as stated.

Percentages are the number one most important factor. Your goal should be that (as long as you are not being strategically forced by your opponent) you should be successfully executing at least 90% of your shots.

Once you are successfully executing at least 90% of your shots, you need to work on and conquer proper placement of your shots and apply the 90% rule to this part of the formula.

The last part of the formula is applying power (as needed) to the ball.

While it really feels good to smack the daylights out of the ball, your attitude and mentality needs to be to only hit the ball as hard as is necessary to effectively (and successfully) get the job done. The harder we try to hit the ball, the higher our chances go up of missing the shot. And simplistically speaking, winning or losing a point comes down to the basic fact that the last person to hit the ball over the net and inside the lines wins the point!

Conquering and applying the theory of the Four P’s to your game will help to build confidence in your abilities to effectively execute successful shots and win more points. Building on this confidence, you can now begin to work on mastering the skills of applying a variety of spins and speeds to the ball.