Hey,

There are 12 days left until ThatPickleballSchool (officially) Launches on October 1st.

As some of you know, we had a special pre-launch on September 15th for the first 100 people to sign up, and it SOLD OUT in 9 minutes! 🤯

We were pretty stoked about that. And so we already have people inside the community going through the newly produced videos and engaging with each other.

I shared a post with everyone in ThatPickleballSchool this week and thought I’d share it with you as well. It’s written out below.

Here’s a picture of the first webinar (many more to come!) with myself, Zach, Tyler and almost 50 students on live inside ThatPickleballSchool:

BTW - If you are not on the priority list, THERE’S STILL TIME.

Click below to get on the priority list for October 1st. 🙂

Today’s ThatPickleballSchool Newsletter has three parts: 

1. My post to the ThatPickleballSchool community 📌

2. Upcoming in-person clinics with ThatPickleballSchool Instructors 👨‍🏫

3. Watch my interview on PicklePod 📺

NOT IMPROVING? BE INTENTIONAL

ANYONE can get better at any skill in this game, IF you dedicate some intentional time to the improvement.

A BIG mistake I made when I first started drilling was working on too many things in one session.

I'd always hit...

1. Dinks

2. Drops

3. Resets

4. Drives

5. Skinny Singles

6. Check my phone

In some order.

And I definitely got better, but it's now my belief that I was getting better WAY slower than I could have if I was doing it slightly different.

This morning I drilled on court and the drilling session looked like this.

1. Left side backhand dinks for 30 minutes

2. Skinny singles - (both players at the kitchen in front of each other) played 12 games to 7 points for 45 minutes.

There's two things to consider with this.

1. Simplicity - I did 2 drills in a 1 hour 15 minute session.

2. Intention - My plan was to get better at the two handed backhand dink + 2 handed backhand speed up.

And when we finished, I knew EXACTLY WHAT I'd improved on. There was no confusion in my own mind about that. And in turn, I gained confidence in those two shots.

ONE FINAL THING:

The 2 hand backhand topspin dink and 2 hand backhand speed up is a shot I HAVEN'T Had for 3 years. And truthfully, you don't NEED it. But it's one I'm working to add because now I'm realizing for my game, it makes sense to have.

Now, this is important to understand. 5 days ago, I sucked at both these shots.

Today, I suck less at it, BUT it's gotten wayyyyy better just because for 5 days, I've worked at it with high intention.

HERE ARE TWO TAKEAWAYS:

(1) You can get better at ANY skill in pickleball, IF you intentionally work at it. And the truth is, to add a skill you're currently not good at, you'd have to drill it before putting it into rec play. You're just not going to get the same quantity of reps in drilling, PLUS, the moment you miss, you'll more likely to stop hitting it because you'll inevitable go back to wanting to win the game. Drilling allows for experimentation and freedom to fail moments.

(2) HAVE INTENTION WHEN YOU DRILL. AND if you don't know what to focus on, we'll help guide you!

Even if you don't have a ton of time to drill (because of life commitments, which is completely understandable), you can still make the most of the time you're on court, and see improvements even quicker than you've had the past.

UPDATE ON MY PRO PICKLEBALL JOURNEY

I was recently a guest on The Dink’s PicklePod with Zane Navratil.

In the interview, we discussed a bunch of stuff:

• New offensive tactics

• Pickleball analytics

• Good vs. Bad Coaching

And, of course, I talked about ThatPickleballSchool launching on October 1st. 😉

Watch the interview here:

Until next week,

Kyle