Health, Fitness, News & Fun for Picklers of All Ages

What's Cooking in the Kitchen This Week:

• Special Founders Note: My Birthday & My Gift To You

• Contact Point Awareness The Real Key To Consistency

• The Weird Reason You Miss Easy Shots on Indoor Courts

• DRILL OF THE WEEK: 7-in-a-Row Consistency Challenge

• Fitness Expert Glenn Dawson: Why Spanish Squats Fix Knee Pain

• Why the Kitchen Line Decides Doubles Matches - Kyle Koszuta Breaks It Down

• Pickleball Brawl: Ponce Inlet Couple Arrested On Assault Charges

• 98-Year-Old Pickleball Player Celebrates Birthday With Friends And A Paddle

• HUMOR: Winning The Game You Were Not Supposed To Win

• Coach Mary: How to Beat a Team That You Think is Better Than You

📜 FOUNDERS NOTE:

It’s My Birthday & I Want To Give You A Gift

I started The Fit Pickler during a time when I was injured. Sitting on the sidelines, I realized not only how much I missed playing, but how much I missed the people I was playing with. No sport creates communities like pickleball does.

I started it as way to stay connected to the game and I never imagined that we'd grow to over 10,000 readers in the first 4 months!  That incredible growth was a lightning bolt moment for me. I learned that recreational players were hungry for a voice and a platform. And your recent survey results confirmed it. (More on those next week).

Recreational players were responsible for the insane growth of the sport yet most everything out there was aimed at tournament-focused players and pros.

I wanted to find a way to get our voices heard beyond the newsletter, to build an Association, a membership organization like AARP, thousands of players leveraging our collective buying power to secure deals and benefits that are usually reserved for the pros:

Travel and hotel discounts, gear deals, deals on local services, resources like Fitness and Injury Prevention videos and Coaching videos.

I wanted us to be able to meet new friends when we travel and create groups with like-minded friends, groups for drills and games, AND groups for book clubs and happy hours, because off the court connections matter too.

I wanted to see a calendar of events that were happening in the community and let everyone post events they created. I wanted to share pictures and videos with friends without having to be on Facebook or in some 600 person WhatsApp group.

That's why I created the Recreational Pickleball Players Association (RPPA). 
A place where we could say, “Wherever you play, you Belong here.”

I’ve been plugging away at it for over 18 months adding benefits beyond the discounts and we’ve slowly grown to 6,500 members but now it’s time to truly grow and claim our space. The newest benefit is our own App where we can meet each other, post about all things pickleball, ask Q’s in a safe space, share wins and tips without trolls, see new deals in real time and celebrate the pickleball lifestyle. The more players we have the stronger we are together!

Today, I'm inviting you to become a Founding Member of the RPPA for FREE!

And if you want to upgrade to Premium Membership you can do that today for only $15/year. (a small amount to help me cover the costs of the videos and the travel site, and that price will never go up.) Use code: FITPICKLER at sign up.

I'm so grateful to be on this journey with you here, and I can't wait to see what we can build together in the RPPA.

Join on the website RPPA.ORG
Join by Downloading the Apple APP
Join by Download the Google Play APP

See you on the courts!
Elena Saris
Founder, The Fit Pickler & RPPA

🥷SKILLS

Contact Point Awareness
The Real Key To Consistency

Most players blame inconsistency on their wrist, their paddle, or their nerves. Very often the real issue is simpler: the ball is not in the same place relative to your body from shot to shot.

Contact point awareness means knowing where you want the ball in relation to your body and using your feet to make that happen. Once that stabilizes, every shot gets easier. Dinks feel softer, volleys feel cleaner, and drives stop sailing long or diving into the net for no apparent reason.

What We Mean By Contact Point

Contact point is simply where the ball is when it meets your paddle: in front of you, beside you, too close, too far away, too high, or too low.

For most pickleball shots, the ideal contact point is slightly in front of your body, at a comfortable distance where your arm can swing without feeling jammed or stretched.

Even on higher balls, your ideal contact is still in front of you. You simply meet it a little higher in your strike zone, not way above your shoulder or behind your head.

Think in three simple labels:

💪 Health & Fitness Section

The Weird Reason You Miss
Easy Shots On Indoor Courts

Do you find that you miss balls that you’d normally hit without thinking?  

A sitter to your forehand drops into the net. A simple speedup blows past your paddle. You feel slower, but your fitness and paddle have not changed.  

Very often, the real change is in your eyes, not your hands. You can check if that’s the case in 10 seconds.  

The 10-Second Blur Test 

On court, look at small detail: the text on your paddle or a thin line on the far fence. 

 Blink normally three times. 

 If things look sharper after those blinks, your vision was slightly blurred just before. That kind of blur that clears with a blink usually comes from a dry eye surface, not from slower reflexes. 

 Thankfully, that’s a problem you can fix. 

 Why Winter Indoor Courts Blur Your Vision 

 Heated indoor air in winter is dry. Humidity often drops well below what you feel outdoors in summer. At low humidity, the thin tear layer that coats your eye evaporates faster and breaks up sooner between blinks.  

🥷 DRILL OF THE WEEK

The 7 In A Row Consistency
Challenge

Consistency wins more points than flash. This drill strips everything down to one shot and one rule: hit it cleanly seven times in a row. Miss once and you’re back to zero. It’s simple, frustrating in the right way, and brutally honest about which shots actually hold up when there’s pressure.

See how to set the targets, choose the right shot, and turn short streaks into game-ready consistency.

 🏋️ STAYING FIT with
GLENN & BRIANNA

Why Spanish Squats
Fix Knee Pain

🥷 SKILLS

Why The Kitchen Line
Decides Doubles Matches

Most doubles points are decided before the rally even settles in. New data from pro matches shows just how costly it is to stay back — and why the kitchen line quietly controls almost everything that follows.

See how Kyle Koszuta breaks down the positioning mistake that keeps teams stuck on defense.

🗞️ NEWS

Pickleball Brawl: Ponce Inlet Couple
Arrested On Assault Charges

What started as a routine open-play session ended with arrests. A dispute on court escalated into a physical altercation, leaving two older players injured and a couple facing assault charges - a reminder of how quickly on-court disagreements can escalate when tempers flare.

Read what happened, how it escalated, and where the line was crossed, click here…

👏 COMMUNITY NEWS

98-Year-Old Player Celebrates
Birthday With Friends & A Paddle

At 98, Tom Wilson didn’t just show up to play — he celebrated the only way he knows how: paddle in hand, surrounded by friends, with cake and candles waiting after the games. A Sherman, Texas original who helped introduce pickleball to Grayson County, Wilson has been a steady presence on the court for more than a decade — and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Read more about the 98-year-old pickleball legend who’s still rallying, click here..

🤣 HUMOR

Winning The Game You
Weren’t Supposed To Win

RALLY RUNDOWN:
LOCAL HIGHLIGHTS

ALPHARETTA, GA: Mansion Dwellers Say Their Homes Have Become Living Hell After Pickleball Court Was Erected Outside
SEBRING, FL: 114 Turn Out For Dink Drop Drive Diva Tournament
CHEYENNE, WY: Blue Federal Credit Union Named Title Sponsor Of Wyoming Pickleball Association
MOORHEAD, MN: Pickleball for Humanity: US Tournament Raises Money for Giving Hearts Day Charities
LEHI, UT: Lehi Team Earns 3rd At State Pickleball Tourney
ST. CLOUD, MN: Pickleball Players Unite For Dementia Friends This March
BILLINGS, MT: New Billings Pickleball Venue Designed For Whole Family


DO YOU HAVE LOCAL NEWS TO SHARE? REACH OUT TO US AT
[email protected] and send us a link to your story!

  💪 How To Beat A Team That
You Think Is Better Than You

Back to Tanner Tomasi, with a great short video on this topic.
Be sure to watch the video several times.

·     Step one:  do not self-sabotage!  Stop telling yourself and your partner that you cannot compete with this stronger team.

·     The Kitchen is the great equalizer:  if you place your ball in the NVZ, with a good low, soft dink, they cannot attack you.

·     If you let your mind go blank, and try to drive it through them, they can use their skill to attack you.

·     Against stronger opponents, use your third shot drop rather than a third shot drive.  Keep the pace slow.

·     Hit your dinks to the center of the NVZ, to take away the angle.  The middle is safe.

·     Share this video with your double’s partners!

Tanner offers a second video on what to do when you play a team with one stronger player, and one weaker player.  Be sure to watch the video several times 

·     The trap we fall into is that we try to target the weaker player.

·     That player does not have to move much if you target them, so they make less errors.

·     This gives the stronger player free rein to come over and poach more balls.

·     Best strategy:  exploit the weaker player by hitting more balls to the stronger player on their side.  Keep the stronger player honest by keeping them on their own side.

·     This will open up the middle, and give you more room to attack the weaker player!

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