By Mark Renneson

If you are a regular pickleball player then you know that one of the hardest things to do in a group or club setting is to determine how court time should be allocated. Should you put the newbies on courts 1 and 2 and let 'Masters' play on 3 and 4? A challenge court where if you win you stay? Random selection? Trying to figure out how best to distrubute court time and access to a wide range of people can be a real headache.

Generally speaking, games are most fun when you are playing with people at a similar skill level. If the abilities of players are too far apart, the game is boring and/or hopeless. People don’t have to be exactly the same, but having some degree of parity makes the action more interesting. So how do you do it?

COMPETITIVE vs. RECREATIONAL

One method that is frequently tried is to separate courts and identify some s “competitive” and others as “recreational”. And while this might make sense at first glance, there is a significant problem: we’re identifying the wrong thing!

That's right. Playing competitively or 'just for fun' says something about your mindset, but says nothing about your skill level. A strong desire to win and willingness to try hard may be admirable traits, but they don’t much make up for the ability to hit consistent drops, devastating drives, or put away high balls on demand. There are extremely competitive 3.0 players who live and breathe pickleball, who travel to tournaments, who proudly wear the medals they've won and who will fight tooth and nail to win every point. And given the option between playing on the comp court or the rec court, these people would (rightly) gravitate to the competitive side. When it comes to pickleball, they are competitive.

Likewise, there are 5.0 players who show up for a little social time and couldn't care less whether they win our lose. If asked "are you a competitive player" these people would understandably answer "no" and move to the rec side of the gym. But that doesn't solve the problem of having skill level mismatches. While you might have grouped people who have similar attitudes when it comes to sports in general or pickleball in particular, this does nothing to make it more likely that the games will be good. A person can be as competitive as they want, but if the are severely outmatched by players with more skill, it isn’t much fun on either side of the net. Again, if you are looking for evenly matched pickleball games, organizing by attitude is the wrong way to go.

WHAT TO DO?

If organizing people by desire is a losing game, what’s better? Personally, I believe that if you want close games then you need to organize by skill level. Simple as that. This, of course, is easier said than done. Who is the arbiter to decide each person’s skill level? Is it based on notoriously unreliable self-ratings? Is there a test people have to take before stepping on the court? Some clubs that choose to use a challenge court system (i.e. you win you move up, you lose you move down) is tricky since it is relatively easy to isolate the weaker player which will simultaneously attribute the ‘L’ to his or her partner.

Personally, I like ratings systems that are as objective as possible. I find the wording of the current systems unnecessarily vague and open to interpretation. What exactly does it mean when a person has “increased consistency”? Increased compared to what? How do we measure that a person is “starting to understand the block/reset volley”? I prefer a system like the one we use as part of the PCI Level 1 instructor certification test (see video below).

It is relatively objective and a player either meets the standard or they don’t. It’s not perfect since it doesn’t take into account a player’s decision-making ability or ‘court sense’, but compared to the rather nebulous wording used in most current systems, I prefer its rigidity and focus on performance. To be perfectly honest, if I’m playing a good game with someone I don’t really care if they know why they are doing what they are doing — I just want them to be able to do it.

Mark Renneson is the founder of Third Shot Sports and Pickleball Coaching International.