My girlfriend Amy and I invited our friends Cindy, Candice, and Mandi to join us for some backyard pickleball. I played too, but the focus today was on the ladies. Amy has only been playing pickleball for 6 to 8 months, and most of her matches have been with novice players that are more friendly and casual than competitive. Today was a chance for Amy to be tested by 3 more experienced female players. Below, I’m sharing a slideshow of photos and one video of today’s pickleball action. Here are a few notes about the video…

• The video is a little over 8 minutes long and consists of the entire first match of today’s play, featuring Amy and Candice vs. Cindy and Mandi.
• I edited the video to remove the dead time between the rallies.
• I added text captions that indicate the score. In the middle of the game, the players lost track of the score. They were calling a score of 6-5 when the score was actually 6-6. The text captions that I added to the video display the correct score, which at times differs from the score that’s called by the server. The scoring discrepancy did not affect the outcome. The real final score of the match was 11-7, but the players thought it was 11-6.
• The stats for the match were very close. Each team made 9 unforced errors, and each team missed 1 serve. The winning team missed just 1 service return, while the losing team missed 3 service returns. The winning team played 12 third shot drops while the losing team played only 7.
• Cindy was the only player that made no errors on serves and service returns – meaning that she got every serve in, and she got every service return in. Amy failed on 1 serve but was perfect on returns. Mandi missed 1 serve and 1 return. Candice was perfect on serves but missed 3 returns.
• Amy’s inexperience shows in the third shot drop stats. She had just 1 third shot drop during the match while Cindy had 5, Candice 6, and Mandi 7. But Amy did play very well. Much to my surprise, Amy had the fewest unforced errors during the match.
• A common complaint among recreational pickleball players is the lack of dinking, because so many players use velocity as their “go to” shot. That wasn’t the case in my backyard today. There was plenty of dinking, as you’ll see in the video.

Here’s the video, followed by a slideshow of photos…