November 4, 2026
“90 percent of the game is half mental.”
-Famous philosopher and Baseball Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra.
Pickleball players know what Yogi meant.
You’re an intermediate rec player. In some games you play closer to advanced, in others you are a low intermediate. You repeatedly make the same unforced errors. The most frustrating thing is you know what you did wrong on every shot, but you do nothing to fix it.
A former high-level pickleball and tennis player believes his book can help you.
Dr. Joe Montgomery says Your Brain on Pickleball will aid players who feel stuck and help them improve without too much difficulty. The 77-year-old Richland, Washington, resident played Division 1 tennis at the University of Washington. He started playing pickleball in 2017 and became a 4.5 player.
Joe was a psychology professor at Washington State University Tri-Cities and the Dean for Institutional Research at Columbia Basin College. He has spent most of his life researching why individuals think the way they do, and recently how pickleball players think.
I interviewed Joe about the mistakes pickleball players make and why he thinks his book can help them. Here’s an edited version of the interview:
Q: Why did you write, “Your Brain on Pickleball”?
Joe: I wrote this book to help those who feel “stuck” at a certain level to learn how to move forward quickly and easily. I wanted to show that being stuck is a natural result of how our brains function, not because we lack the talent or willpower to improve.
I had begun noticing that most of the people I had been playing with for the past five years were still basically playing at the same level. Most of the 3.0 level players remained at the 3.0 level, 3.5s remained at the 3.5 level, and so forth. I had moved from 3.0 to 3.5, then 4.0 and was pushing into 4.5 territory.
I also observed that very few people would get together with me to practice. Everyone just wanted to play games. They would hardly even warm up, just hit a couple of dinks then, “Let’s get started!” Further, the 3.5 players mainly wanted to hit hard drives, with little consideration for strategy. They would not hit even a single third shot drop, their dinks were very weak once they reached the kitchen line, they made a ton of errors each game, and so forth.
One morning I was taking a nice, relaxing hot shower when a realization hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. The behavior I was seeing in my pickleball friends that kept them from improving could be easily explained by our cognitive biases!
I spent the next year expanding my initial insights into my book Your Brain on Pickleball.
Q: What do you hope readers get out of your book?
A: I hope readers will have a huge “ah ha!” experience, just as I did, as they read the book and realize how they have been unconsciously holding themselves back from improving. I hope they will change their entire approach to learning the game. For example, I want them to realize that practicing and drilling aren’t something that they “should” be doing, rather, it’s vital. Practice rewires our brains and increases our capabilities.
So why don’t we like to practice? We have biases towards immediate gratification (playing) associated with survival and against delayed gratification (long-term learning and improvement) that didn’t contribute to immediate survival. The immediate gratification bias makes us feel impatient with practicing and driven to play instead. Readers will be able to overcome this and other unconscious biases that are holding them back when they read my book.
Q: What are the most common mistakes you see the typical 3.5 and lower rec player make?
A: I think the 3.5 and lower rec players hit the ball way too hard and make too many mistakes, which are actually closely related issues. They get excited by the competition and try as hard as they can to win the game. They think that means hitting as hard as they can. Competition thus becomes like a battle. Unconscious parts of our brains assume that the competition is, in fact, a battle.
We don’t notice how many errors we are making. I often see players make 12-13 errors in one game and have no idea they were playing terribly. I’ve had four or five different partners who made 12 or more errors in each game once we reached the medal rounds of a tournament- and wondered why we lost! Even in rec play, if you ask someone how many errors they made in the last game, they typically have no idea. I always count my errors and set a goal of four or fewer errors per game. You can consciously decide to track and reduce your errors-this is the quickest way to raise your level of play and endear yourself to your partner at the same time.
Q: Why do many rec players reach a certain level then stagnate?
A: The simple answer is that if you don’t practice, you don’t improve. A great deal of sports research has shown that consistently playing any sport, without focused practice on the elements of that sport, leads to stagnation and a decline in performance. If you have a weak backhand drive, you may only get a couple of those in a game-not nearly enough to get any practice. Further, games are over very quickly and you get almost no time to reflect on or process any feedback about your shots. In short, you don’t get any practice and you don’t get any feedback (both critical factors in improving) and you don’t get any better.
Q: Is there anything wrong with wanting that “instant gratification” from just playing games?
A: There is nothing wrong with just wanting to play, as long as you are aware that you aren’t going to get any better. If you’re happy where you are, just keep playing! Many people are quite happy at the level they are playing at now.
Q: What is the best advice regarding the mental aspect of pb that you can provide for the typical 3.5 and lower rec player?
A: The best advice I can think of is to stay relaxed on the court and enjoy the game. Stay relaxed, but very focused. Being focused means maintaining an awareness of your position and the position of the other players, so you will know where to best hit the ball and what shot to hit. High level focus also means seeing the ball throughout its flight path, seeing the holes in the ball as it spins, and seeing the ball all the way to the moment it hits your paddle. This level of focus is really hard to do, so just do your best and try to get better at it. As your skill in focusing increases, your pickleball skill level will rapidly improve.
Thoughts of the week, not all pickleball
· A woman at rec play calls every close ball in her team’s favor. Others know this and a few avoid playing against her. She either has bad eyesight or a lack of sportsmanship.
· I hope you enjoyed the World Series because it probably was the last Major League Baseball you will watch for a long time. A lockout in the spring seems likely because the players union is not budging on the owners’ insistence on instituting a salary cap. Although the Series featured two small market teams in Milwaukee and Tampa Bay, I think MLB needs a salary cap. The league’s massive financial disparities mean small market clubs are priced out of getting and keeping the highest paid players. The Brewers and Rays are exceptions because they have brilliant front office staffs and develop young players. They also lose many of their best players when they become stars to teams that can afford them. Before every season there are too many teams that have no shot at a championship. Teams like the Pirates, Twins, and Reds. The NFL has a salary cap that has brought such parity to the league that the cliché, “On any given Sunday,” is true. The NFL delivers with several close games every week.
· Speaking of the Rays, they had fewer fans at their home games in the Series than the Brewers did. That’s no surprise. Milwaukee is a much better baseball town. The Brewers averaged almost 35,000 fans this season at their home games, approximately double the Rays average home attendance. I lived and worked in Tampa for years. Florida is a bad professional sports state. College football is king. The Rays will draw more fans when their new stadium opens in April 2029. It will be in Tampa, not in a bad neighborhood in St. Petersburg, where dingy Tropicana Field is located.
· The Brewers Jacob Misiorowski could eventually be one of the greatest pitchers ever if he keeps improving his off-speed stuff and of course stays healthy.
· The Dallas Cowboys classic collapse on Sunday vs. Arizona made my day.
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