Pickleball Mental Game: 7 Strategies Pros Use Under Pressure

There is a version of you that plays loose, confident pickleball at 3-all. Then the score hits 9-9 on your second serve and that player disappears. Your strokes haven’t changed. The pressure has. And if you’ve ever wondered why that happens — and more importantly, what to do about it — this breakdown is for you.

Pro player Zane Navratil sat down with Jeff Troesch, a mental performance specialist who has worked with MLB organizations, Olympians, and a growing roster of tour pros, to unpack what actually happens inside your head when a pickleball match tightens up. Troesch helped Zane work through a stretch of real burnout, and the conversation is packed with practical tools you can take to the court this weekend.

Here are seven mental game strategies, laid out in roughly the order they tend to wreck your game.

What Is Choking, and Why Does Your Game Fall Apart Late in a Match?

Before diving into the strategies, it helps to understand what choking actually is — because most players think of it as a character flaw or a sign they can’t handle pressure. That framing makes it worse. Troesch describes choking as a physical threat response. Your body reads the situation as danger. Your heart rate climbs, your breathing shifts, your pupils dilate, and blood rushes to your organs as your digestive system shuts down. That’s fight, flight, or freeze, the same system your ancestors used to survive predators.

The trigger is almost always a thought. Something like “I might lose this” or “I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of these people.” Once that response fires, your fluidity goes out the window. Your tempo gets off. You tighten up and get jabby with your shots. The dinks and drives you were making effortlessly at 3-all start sailing wide or into the net because your body is no longer relaxed enough to execute them.

Troesch points to a useful piece of NBA data. The players we think of as clutch — Jordan, Kobe — actually shoot roughly the same percentage in high-stakes moments as they do the rest of the game. The takeaway is sharp: they don’t find some magical extra gear under pressure. They just stay steady. Staying steady is the skill.

Understanding the modern strategies of the game can also give you enough structural clarity that panic doesn’t flood in during big moments. When you know what you’re trying to do tactically, there’s less room for fear to take over.

1. Win the Time Between Points

Pickleball moves fast. Faster than tennis. And because of that pace, players tend to rush straight from one point into the next without ever actually releasing what just happened. That rush is one of the biggest mental game leaks Troesch sees at every level.

When you skip the reset, errors compound. One bad point becomes a run of three or four because you’re still carrying the last one emotionally and physically into the new rally. The tension from a missed third shot is still sitting in your shoulders when you’re supposed to be relaxed and ready.

The fix sounds simple and is genuinely hard to execute in the moment: set down the last point before you pick up the next one. Tennis players internalized this generations ago within the same pace rules pickleball gives you. Use your seconds. A clean reset beats a fast one every time.

Pairing this habit with a repeatable game plan also reinforces the between-point reset by giving your mind something constructive to return to instead of replaying what went wrong.

2. Build a Between-Point Ritual You Run Every Single Time

Troesch calls a consistent between-point ritual “massively important and massively influential.” Zane Navratil has touched the fence after points since his college tennis days. Anna Bright and Georgia Johnson do versions of the same thing on tour. It’s not superstition. It’s architecture.

The ritual functions as a flush mechanism. The previous point gets placed behind you. The next point sits in front of you. The routine draws the line between them. It doesn’t have to be dramatic or complicated. Common ones that actually work include taking one slow breath, using a towel briefly, turning your back to the net and walking away from it, or fixing your eyes on a specific focal point — the holes on the ball, a mark on your paddle, a word on your wristband.

The point is familiarity. When things speed up mentally or the match gets chaotic, the thing you always do restabilizes you. Your nervous system recognizes the cue and starts to settle. It’s the same principle that makes physical practice build muscle memory — repetition creates a response. The right training drills build the same kind of automaticity that makes between-point rituals feel natural rather than forced.

Quang Duong, one of the more interesting stories on tour, looks at his father between points for exactly this reason. It’s a reset for his mind — an anchor that pulls him back to the present when the noise of competition tries to pull him forward or backward in time.

3. Control Your Eyes to Control Your Focus

Troesch draws a useful distinction between focus and concentration. Focus is momentary. Concentration is focus sustained over time. You build the second by repeating the first, point after point after point. And the lever you can actually pull on focus is your eyes.

When you yell at yourself to “focus,” that instruction is too vague to be useful. The actionable version is: put your eyes where they need to be right now. On court, that means eye control — tracking the ball off your opponent’s paddle, watching the holes on the ball as you serve, reading your opponent’s body and swing pattern before they make contact.

Where your eyes go, your attention goes. And where your attention goes, your body tends to follow. If you’re watching the scoreboard or scanning the crowd or looking at your opponent’s face for information about what they think of you, your attention is genuinely somewhere it can’t help you.

Mastering the essential shots of the game also frees up your eyes and attention. When your mechanics are grooved, execution becomes background noise and your visual focus can stay locked on the target where it belongs.

4. Reset After a Bad Call or a Bad Point

Zane admits that the thing that throws him most during competition isn’t pure pressure. It’s getting cheated on a line call. That fight-or-flight response spikes hard and immediately, and suddenly he’s playing the last point emotionally instead of competing in the next one.

Troesch is refreshingly honest here: shutting down the feeling of being robbed is one of the hardest resets in sport. Harder than forgiving yourself for a mistake you made. There’s no trick that makes the feeling disappear. No mental hack that instantly neutralizes the sense of injustice.

What works is the routine. Self-talk that is instructional or genuinely encouraging, a sensory cue, and a deliberate return to next-point mentality. You are not pretending the bad call didn’t happen. You’re not suppressing the emotion. You’re choosing, through your ritual, to redirect your attention back to the only point you can still win — the one coming up next.

Reviewing how even elite players faced and recovered from adversity — like a look back at the biggest stories in pro pickleball from last season — gives you a useful lens for understanding that the reset isn’t weakness. It’s what champions do, and they do it repeatedly across an entire year of competition.

5. Beat Overthinking by Getting Into Your Senses

Overthinking is rampant in pickleball. Part of what makes the game addictive is also what makes it mentally exhausting — there are dozens of tiny adjustments available on every single ball. Spin, speed, angle, placement, height over the net, shot selection. The brain can flood with variables before you’ve even started your swing.

Troesch’s primary fix is sensory awareness, and it sounds almost too simple until you understand the neuroscience behind it. Feel your feet on the ground. Press your thumb and forefinger together. Take a breath you can actually feel moving through your body. When a player is genuinely locked into a sensory experience, the cognitive traffic in the brain drops dramatically. Brain-wave studies back this up. Your body stops waiting for directions and starts doing what it’s been trained to do.

The other half of the fix is narrowing your attention to one clear intention before each point. A single serve target. The angle of your paddle face on the return. One concrete task crowds out the noise of competing thoughts. It gives your mind something specific to do instead of spiraling.

Working through the shots you must master in deliberate practice gives your attention something concrete to lock onto during drilling, which makes sensory grounding easier to access in competition when it counts.

6. Beat the Pickleball Yips with Target Orientation

The yips are the most visible and most humiliating form of overthinking. Your serve — a shot you’ve hit thousands of times — suddenly leaves you. You miss it wide. You miss it into the net. You start dissecting every millisecond of your motion and that dissection makes it worse. The harder you try to think your way through it, the more it breaks down.

Troesch explains the yips as usually two things happening at once: a physical, twitchy nerve response below the forearm, and a psychological stress response layered on top. The physical twitch is real and physiological. The psychological layer is what you can actually address on the court in real time.

The escape is to stop thinking about your hand and start thinking about your target. Get crystal clear on where the ball is going. Visualize the spot you want to hit before you start your motion, then accelerate through the ball with commitment. The same principle applies to the dink yips, which are more common than people admit. Focus on the spot you want to hit, not on what your hand is doing to get there.

According to NBC Sports, performance coaches consistently teach that athletes should commit to a target before executing a movement — not during it. The commitment to destination is what allows the body’s learned movement patterns to fire without interference.

Also worth considering: making sure your equipment isn’t adding variables to the mental equation. Understanding the paddle guidelines ensures your gear is never the extra thing feeding a mental spiral when you’re already under stress.

7. Treat Confidence as a Fact, Not a Feeling

This one reframes the entire mental game. Troesch’s definition of confidence is precise and genuinely useful: confidence is a thought about your skill set, and your skill set is static. However many reps you have hitting a pickleball — in practice, in matches, in casual play — that is how good you are today. A bad serve for ten minutes does not erase those reps. A rough first game does not downgrade your ability.

The mistake players make constantly is downgrading themselves in the moment. Your backhand feels off, so you tell yourself you’re an 80 today instead of your usual 100. You play tentative. You guide the ball instead of hitting it. You avoid your backhand when it matters most. And in doing so, you manifest the 80 you told yourself you were.

Troesch’s reset is a question: are you capable of getting your serve in right now, based on the sum total of your entire life as a pickleball player? The honest answer is almost always yes. Walk into each point with that answer and you are far more likely to accelerate through the ball with real intent instead of steering it and hoping.

Watching how the best players on tour sustain that confidence across a full season of high-stakes competition — something you can get a sense of by ranking pros by their medal counts — is a useful study in what sustained competitive confidence actually looks like in practice.

What Happens When You’re the One Getting Targeted?

Sometimes your opponent figures out you’re the weaker player in the partnership and starts feeding you everything. Every ball, point after point. It stings. There’s an emotional insult baked into being targeted, and that emotional layer is where most players lose the battle before the ball even comes over the net.

Troesch’s answer is direct: do what the game asks. If every ball is coming to you, play your best pickleball with each one and minimize the reward your opponents get for picking on you. Make them question the strategy by executing. If your partner is the one being targeted, support them and resist the urge to over-poach, which takes you out of position and undermines their confidence further.

The real battle is emotional. Shut down the insult of being seen as the weak link and lock your attention onto the next ball. It’s the same emotional discipline that underpins any sound tournament strategy, and it’s a skill that compounds over time the more you practice it deliberately.

Knowing the current rulebook cold is a useful parallel habit — players who know the rules deeply remove one more source of in-game mental clutter that can pull attention away from competing.

Stop Expecting to Win. Start Expecting It to Be Hard.

One of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice in Troesch’s whole framework: wanting to win is great. Putting your attention on winning is a distraction. Expecting to win is a setup for an internal alarm the instant things go sideways.

When you step onto the court expecting to win easily, the first tight game or the first bad run triggers an “uh oh” response that shouldn’t exist. You start protecting the outcome instead of competing for it. Upsets happen the moment a heavy favorite starts thinking the match will be straightforward.

Troesch tells the players he coaches to expect their opponent to play the best game of their life. Expect every moment to be harder than they imagined. Walk in with a blank slate, prepared only for difficulty and the need to adapt. That expectation protects you from the letdown that sinks number one seeds in every sport, at every level.

It’s also worth noting that even tour pros regularly rethink their approach and adapt. Looking at why pros abandoned the slice in 2025 is a sharp example of how the best in the game rebuild confidence around entirely new skill sets without ego getting in the way.

What to Do With All of This

Troesch’s parting advice is to pick one skill to develop each time you play, then give yourself honest feedback afterward. Not harsh, not soft — honest. Did you run your ritual? Did you keep your eyes where they needed to be? Did you treat