South Carolina Pickleball Coach Remembers Players By Paddle Face. Here’s How To Never Forget Poor Ethel

RJ Mack sits in a chair at the edge of the court. He doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t peek. One by one, players walk up behind him and hold their paddle in front of his face — just the paddle, nothing else — and RJ says their name.

Every time.

It looks like a magic trick. It’s actually something better: a coach who decided that knowing his players by name matters enough to build a system around it. He coaches at Pickle Yard in Mauldin, South Carolina, and somewhere along the way he turned an ordinary act of courtesy into a bit that’s now getting passed around because people can’t quite believe he pulls it off.

Here’s why it matters more than it looks like it should. Pickleball courts are one of the few places left where strangers become regulars fast. You show up for open play, you get paired with someone new, you play four games, and by the end of the session you’ve learned their backhand, their sense of humor, and absolutely nothing about their name. Everyone’s just “the guy in the blue hat” or “she’s really good at dinking.” The sport is built for connection, but memory is the bottleneck. You can watch the video here.

RJ Mack turned a weakness into a party trick — and a lesson

By pairing each player with something distinct and visible — their paddle — he gave himself a hook that doesn’t rely on hearing a name once in a noisy gym and hoping it sticks. Paddles have color, shape, brand, wear patterns, stickers, scratches. They’re memorable in a way that a name alone never is. He’s not remembering “Ethel.” He’s remembering the beat-up green paddle with the chip in the corner that belongs to Ethel, and that association is what surfaces her name the second it’s held up.

It’s a small thing that says something bigger about what pickleball culture is supposed to be. This is a sport built on community as much as competition, and the players who make courts feel like a place you want to keep coming back to are usually the ones who remember your name before they remember your third-shot drop. Coaches especially. A player who feels seen and known is a player who sticks around, brings a friend, and keeps showing up on Tuesday mornings whether or not their game is improving that week.

So how does the trick actually work — and can regular players do it too?

You don’t need to be a coach running drills for forty people a week to borrow the method. Memory researchers have been saying for decades that the brain holds onto pictures, stories, and strange associations far better than it holds onto isolated facts like a name. Here are three ways to put that to work the next time you’re trying to remember who you just played against.

1. Attach the name to something visible, the way RJ does with paddles.
You don’t need a paddle trick specifically — you need any strong visual anchor. Bright shoes, a distinctive hat, a tattoo, a team shirt from another sport. Pick one detail about the person and mentally staple their name to it. “Sandra with the sunflower visor” is much stickier than “Sandra.”

2. Borrow a celebrity or a rhyme.
This is one of the oldest memory tricks in the book for a reason — it works. Meet a “Michael” and think of Michael Jordan holding a paddle. Meet a “Frank” and picture him being blunt, no filter, “Frank” by nature. The sillier and more vivid the mental image, the better it sticks. Your brain remembers absurd pictures far longer than it remembers a name spoken once in passing.

3. Say it, use it, repeat it — immediately.
This one sounds obvious, but almost nobody actually does it. The moment you hear a name, use it in the next sentence. “Nice to meet you, Ethel — you’ve got a great reset shot.” Then use it again before you walk away. Good games, Ethel.” Repetition within the first thirty seconds does more for retention than anything else on this list, and it costs you nothing but a little intention.

The paddle is just his method. The instinct behind it is what’s worth copying.

None of these tricks require a paddle trick or a chair at courtside. What they require is the same thing RJ Mack is really demonstrating at Pickle Yard — the decision that remembering people is worth the effort.

Next time you’re standing at the net waiting for open play to rotate, try it. Pick a detail. Build the picture. Use the name twice. You might not turn it into a court-side act like RJ has — but you’ll walk off remembering more names than you used to, and that’s the whole point.