The Secret to High-Level Improvement

We all know I love a good floor/ceiling analogy. I’ve written before about the importance of improving your floor, but what happens when your floor is fine? What on earth do you need to do then??? Of course, everything is on a case-by-case basis, and it’s hard to answer literally any question in pickleball without the essential qualifier “it depends”, but there are some general heuristics that anyone in this situation can apply. Read on if this is you!

First of all, it’s hard to KNOW if it’s ceiling development time unless you have WATCHED YOURSELF PLAY PICKLEBALL. Get out there, bring the dang camera (or iPhone, probably), and watch yourself back. Things can “feel” one way, and be entirely different in actuality. If you watch yourself back and find you are losing because of loose errors more than anything else, go and find some of my content on floor development. The #1 improvement hack is to simply make more balls.

If you watch yourself back and find you aren’t losing due to loose errors, then it might be time to start prioritizing other things in your drilling sessions. Reaching this point in pickleball is where IQ really starts to come in, and you have to develop your IQ like it’s a muscle, along with your weaponry. Adding weapons without being able to utilize them will just clutter your game and make you worse.

If you’re losing matches because you are not enough of a threat or because your opponents are too comfortable, then it’s time to start actively adding to your game. In my view, there are a few ways to do this.

Variety is, to me, basically your arsenal. Every single shot you have in your bag. Do you have speedups off the bounce and out of the air on each side? Can you move them to multiple spots? Can you mix up your speed and your shape and your spin? At a certain level, you need to have a weapon on both your forehand and backhand side. It’s ideal to be good aerially and off the bounce off both wings, but you at least need something off each side.

If you have nothing out of the air OR off the bounce to a certain side, then people can just go there all day. It’s entirely safe! Why would a smart opponent do anything else? Hint: someone smart wouldn’t. If you lack an aerial or off-the-bounce weapon on a particular wing, it’s time to get to work. Even if your ball-tolerance is high.

It’s optimal to be dangerous off the bounce and aerially off both wings, and we can see in the pro game how this has become increasingly important. If someone has nothing off the bounce, as long as you can make the ball hit the ground, you still feel safe. Conversely, if someone has nothing out of the air, you know you can roll the ball quite aggressively to them with little consequence.

So, it’s essential to have at least one weapon off each wing, but ideal to work towards both. Ben Johns didn’t spend years learning a 2-handed backhand just for fun, and JW Johnson isn’t implementing off-the-bounce speedups into his game finally because he woke up one day just wanting to work on a new skill. These are active attempts by these players to raise their ceiling. Did I learn how to flick just because I thought it looked cool? NO! I was tired of lacking a weapon.

When I watch myself back or other professional matches, a big thing I notice is not what I did, but what I didn’t do. The times when I could have hit the ball a few feet deeper because my opponents didn’t move up. The times when I didn’t threaten speedup, but could have. The times when I didn’t squeeze the middle because I was worried about a shot someone hadn’t proven. What I am looking for, and what I notice that you probably don’t when you watch yourself, are the times when I could have applied more pressure.

When Ben Johns is asked to describe his game in one word, he always says, without fail, “pressure”. I would know, I’ve done a lot of media with the guy, and it’s a pretty common question. Pressure is a tough word to define in the context of pickleball, but here’s the definition I use in my Academy: the process of making our opponents feel suffocated, like they have to be perfect, like any error they make, no matter how slight, will be punished to the maximum.

Applying maximum pressure doesn’t mean that you’re trying to hit every ball as hard as you can, quite the opposite. It means you are consistently inflicting as much damage as you reasonably can on every given ball. The way Hayden Patriquin applies pressure is very different than how Ben Johns applies it, but they both apply it. In the above interview with Hannah, Ben references “pressure” regarding his choice to partner with Gabe repeatedly.

Ben suffocates you because you know there’s no escape. He will hardly make an error, it’s rare for something to work on him twice, and a bad decision? Never. Every mistake you make will be punished. No one’s 4th shot or ability to keep opponents back rivals his. Anna Leigh applies pressure a bit differently. She can dink you to death, or she could speed up every ball at you and make you feel like there’s nowhere to go, nothing is safe.

The way you apply pressure can vary wildly depending on your game style. But we want to be able to make our opponents panic, make them feel like they have no refuge. If you’re already pretty consistent, then you probably need to work on becoming more dangerous or figure out exactly how you will apply pressure. For some people, it is through Consistency, Anticipation, and extremely tight Decision-Making. For others, it’s about maximum aggression (while maintaining Consistency) and absolutely relentless, smothering Variety. A hack: work on your fourths. They aren’t that hard to improve at and have a really high ROI as they happen almost every point. I’ll write on the importance of the 4th shot in the future.

That’s all for this edition folks. I hope you all gained something from it! Much love, always❤️

XOXO, your internet bestie, Anna❤️🫦✨