I Got Targeted as the Weaker Pickleball Player — Here’s What Actually Helped

I still remember the exact rally where I figured out I was the target. Third game of the day, my partner and I were up 6-4, feeling good, and then the ball started arriving at my feet like it had my name written on it. Not once. Four times in a row. My partner, bless him, hadn’t touched a ball in two full points and looked almost bored.

I want to tell you my first reaction was calm and strategic. It was not. My first reaction was something closer to quiet panic mixed with the specific embarrassment of being the obvious weak link in front of people I was going to see at the courts every Tuesday for the rest of my natural life.

Here’s the thing I wish someone had told me courtside that day, instead of me figuring it out three losses later.

Being targeted means they’ve shown you the pattern they trust most. A team that decides “we’re just going after him” isn’t necessarily out of ideas, but they’ve picked one approach and leaned on it. That’s useful to know, because now you’re the only person on the court who’s seen it enough times to start reading it.

I didn’t believe this the first time a friend told me. It sounded like the kind of thing you say to someone who just lost 11-3. But it held up, and here’s what I actually did about it, in the order it occurred to me mid-match, not in some tidy plan I had going in.

First, I stopped standing awkwardly in the middle of the court. I didn’t even realize I was doing it, but I was hanging back about two-thirds of the way to the kitchen, which meant every ball landed at my feet in that awful in-between zone where you can’t volley it clean and you can’t let it bounce either. Once I made myself get all the way to the line after my return, a lot of those “gotcha” shots turned into regular volleys I actually had a shot at. Small fix, big difference.

Second, I said something to my partner instead of just absorbing it. This part felt harder than it should have. I think there’s a version of pride that makes you want to just tough it out silently so nobody thinks you’re asking for help. I got over that around game four and just said, “Hey, take the middle balls for a bit, I’ll cover the line.” He said sure, like it was the most normal request in the world, which it was. I’d been treating it like a confession. It’s just a plan.

Third, I started hunting their weak side back. Turns out while they were so busy pounding on me, I had three or four rallies’ worth of free scouting on them. One of them clearly didn’t like backhand dinks. So I started sending soft ones right there. I wasn’t trying to win the point outright, just trying to make them think about something besides me for a change. It worked better than I expected, honestly.

Fourth, I started making them move instead of just picking on their weak side. A ball sent behind them, or a direction change they didn’t see coming, does something a straight shot to a weakness doesn’t. It forces footwork. A player who’s comfortable parked in one spot targeting me got a lot less comfortable once they had to cover ground to do it.

Fifth, I had to talk myself out of trying to end every point with one big shot. This is embarrassing to admit, but there’s a real temptation, once you know you’re the target, to try to hit one gorgeous winner that shuts the whole thing down and proves a point. I tried that twice. Both times I sailed it long. Turns out a defensive position is a bad time for a hero shot. I started absorbing the pace instead, resetting softly into the kitchen, buying myself enough time to get balanced again. Much less dramatic. Worked much better.

We didn’t win that match, for what it’s worth. But we made it a lot closer than the first six points suggested it was going to be, and I walked off the court feeling like I’d actually played, not like I’d just survived.

Here’s what I keep coming back to since that day. Getting targeted isn’t some special humiliation reserved for the weaker player. It happens to good players too, the second someone across the net spots any opening at all. The only real difference between getting steamrolled by it and turning it into a decent match is whether you treat it as bad news about you, or as information about them.