Competing in Pickleball: Focus, Friendship, and Earned Confidence
What tournaments, leagues, and private DUPR matches taught me about mastering the fundamentals—and what I gained beyond the game.
What tournaments, leagues, and private DUPR matches taught me about mastering the fundamentals—and what I gained beyond the game.
Part of Pickleball With Mark: Mastering the Fundamentals.
If I could give you one word to carry into a pickleball tournament, it would be focus.
I do not mean only during an important rally or when the score gets close. I mean from the moment you arrive: when you watch your opponents, when you warm up, between points, and between matches.
It sounds simple. For me, learning how to actually do it was one of the most valuable things I gained from competing.
But that raises a question I asked myself more than once: Why compete at all?
I already got so much out of pickleball through exercise and friendship. I could show up, play with people I enjoyed, and leave feeling good. Why spend a day of my weekend putting myself under pressure, using all my energy to try to win?
Over time, I found my answer. Competition became a place to develop a deeper level of focus, strengthen friendships through shared pressure, and test the fundamentals I had spent so many hours practicing.
The goal on competition day was to win. But what I gained from pursuing that goal reached well beyond the court.
Do Not Let the Bracket Decide Your Expectations
One of the first things I learned was not to put too much weight on the number attached to a division.
You might enter a 4.5 tournament and assume you know exactly what the competition will look like. I would not build my expectations around that.
You do not necessarily know who will sign up, who will show up, or how their game will match up against yours. In my experience, the field can feel very different from one event to another.
The division gives you some context. It does not tell you how to beat the people standing across the net.
That is why I want my attention on the actual players rather than the label. I do not want to assume I should win because of a rating, and I do not want to decide I am outmatched before we have played.
Prepare to compete against whoever shows up. Then pay attention to what they actually do.
That is much more useful than arriving with a story about how the day is supposed to go.
Start Studying Before the First Point
If you really want to give yourself the best opportunity to win, start learning about your opponents as early as you reasonably can.
When you know their names beforehand, look for publicly available match footage. If they have videos online, watch them. Study how they play, not simply whether they win.
At the tournament, arrive early enough to observe when possible. Watch their matches. Watch how they practice. Even the warm-up before your own match is an opportunity to learn.
How do they move? Which shots seem comfortable? What patterns do they repeat? How do they work with their partner?
You are gathering information, not deciding that you have figured someone out completely.
This is one of the biggest differences between competition and playing recreationally at your own club. With familiar players, you may already have months of information. You know the shots they like, the tendencies they fall back on, and the situations that make them uncomfortable.
Against someone you have never met, you may have only a few points to start making useful adjustments.
The more you can observe beforehand, the less you have to discover from scratch while the score is moving.
I think of pickleball as a game of pattern recognition. I want to notice what is happening, recognize what keeps happening, and adjust accordingly.
Of course, the match may reveal something different from the warm-up or the video. Your first impression has to remain open to revision.
Scouting gives you a starting point. Focus allows you to keep learning once play begins.
Arrive as a Competitor, Not Just a Friend at the Courts
This was a big lesson for me because I have a lot of energy, and it is easy for me to get distracted.
You arrive at a tournament, see your friends, and naturally want to start talking. That is what you normally do at the courts. Pickleball is social, and that is part of what makes it enjoyable.
But when I showed up with the specific goal of winning, I needed a different approach.
I could not spend the day in my usual recreational mindset and expect my best competitive performance to appear whenever someone called our match.
For me, that meant limiting conversations, avoiding unnecessary wandering, and being intentional about where my attention went. I wanted to know who we were playing, what I could learn about them, and what my partner and I needed to be ready.
That does not mean being unfriendly. It means recognizing why I am there that day.
There are days when I play primarily for exercise. There are days when I play to enjoy my friends. On competition day, I have chosen a different purpose.
Today, we are playing to win.
Once I make that choice, I want my behavior to support it.
Trust the Practice You Have Already Done
By the time I arrive at a tournament, the preparation for how I hit the ball should largely be behind me.
That is why I drill. That is why I practice. Those are the hours when I work on technique, repeat the fundamentals, and make changes to my game.
Competition is where I try to perform what I have practiced.
I do not want to spend the entire match giving myself a technical lecture about every movement. I want to be watching the opponents, reading the situation, communicating with my partner, and making decisions.
There is a difference between adjusting your strategy and trying to rebuild your game in the middle of a tournament.
Looking back, I would say it took me five to ten tournaments to really understand what was missing from my own performance. I knew what I could do in practice, but I was not consistently bringing that ability into competition.
The missing piece I kept coming back to was focus.
I needed to learn how to give the match my full attention and sustain that attention long enough for my preparation to show up.
When Your Attention Wanders, Return to One Word
My reset was not complicated.
When I caught myself getting distracted, I returned to the same word: focus.
Where should my attention be right now? What is happening in this match? What does my partner need? What am I learning about the other team?
Between matches, I often listened to classical music or lo-fi music without lyrics. For me, it helped quiet the distractions and keep my attention connected to why I was there.
Tournament days can involve a lot of waiting as well as playing. I did not want to use up my energy wandering around or getting pulled into conversations that had nothing to do with what I was trying to accomplish.
Resting and recovering between matches were part of being ready. Constant activity was not the goal.
The goal was to be deliberate.
I was not trying to carry a dozen motivational instructions in my head. I wanted one word that brought me back to the task.
Focus.
Why Choose the Stress in the First Place?
My good friend Mark Boyd helped me understand competition through an idea that stayed with me: simulated stress.
The pressure you feel is real. You care about the result. You do not want to let your partner down. You want all those hours of practice to mean something when the match gets difficult.
But you are still playing a game. We are hitting a plastic ball over a net.
I found it useful to hold both of those truths at once.
I could care deeply about winning without pretending the outcome was a life-defining emergency. Professional players may have financial stakes attached to their results, but that was not the reason I, Mark Miller, was spending my weekend competing.
I was choosing a challenge.
As a businessman, I already had responsibilities and pressure in my everyday life. For a while, I wondered why I would voluntarily add more.
What I came to appreciate was the opportunity to practice how I responded to it.
Could I stay present when things were not going our way? Could I keep making decisions instead of getting consumed by frustration? Could I perform what I had practiced while feeling the weight of the moment?
Competition gave me somewhere to work on those things.
I did not need to treat the result as a measure of my worth. I did need to commit honestly to the challenge I had chosen.
That distinction helped me understand why competing could be valuable even though, in the larger picture, it was still just pickleball.
The Focus I Developed Carried Into My Life
The concentration I developed through competing became useful beyond the sport.
I felt it when negotiating high-value real estate transactions. I felt it when learning something new that required sustained attention. I recognized the same task: put the distractions aside, understand what is happening, and remain engaged with the problem in front of me.
I think of that focus as a muscle I strengthened through experience.
I had to earn it. Knowing that I should concentrate was not the same as being able to concentrate deeply while performing physically, making decisions, and managing the pressure of a match.
Recreational pickleball served a different purpose for me. I did not want every afternoon with friends to become another exercise in maximum concentration. I was already asking a lot of myself at work.
Sometimes I wanted to move, laugh, and enjoy being outside.
Competition created a deliberate occasion to ask more of myself.
I would show up and say, in effect: Today, I am going to see how fully I can commit to this.
For me, practicing that level of commitment was part of the reward.
Shared Pressure Can Deepen a Friendship
One of the things I came to love most about competing was doing it with a good friend.
You are not just spending time together. You are trying to solve a problem together while both of you care about the outcome.
That creates a different kind of interaction.
You get to see how your friend responds to pressure, and your friend gets to see how you respond. You discover how you communicate when things are difficult, how you handle mistakes, and whether you can help each other stay engaged.
When the match becomes uncomfortable, can you still be there for one another?
Can you work through the puzzle as a team rather than retreat into your own frustration?
For me, those experiences created opportunities to strengthen a friendship in a way that ordinary conversation or casual play did not always provide.
I think of it as a kind of shortcut to learning about each other—not because pressure automatically makes every relationship stronger, but because it gives you something meaningful to navigate together.
You are sharing a goal, facing a challenge, and choosing how to support one another through it.
That became one of my favorite reasons to compete.
Winning with a friend felt good. Learning how to be better partners under pressure gave the experience another layer of value.
Watch My Full PPA Masters Tournament
This is the full PPA Masters tournament I competed in and won, with every game recorded in order. For me, it is the clearest example of what I mean by taking the test: bringing the fundamentals into competition, adapting match by match, and sustaining focus through an entire event.
Competition Is Where You Take the Test
One of my coaches, Morgan Evans, gave me another way to understand why we compete: competition is where we go to take the test.
That idea brought everything together for me.
Practice matters. Drilling matters. Understanding the fundamentals matters. But I also wanted to know whether I could bring those things into an environment where I felt pressure and the other team was trying just as hard to win.
Could I execute against unfamiliar opponents? Could I adapt? Could I stay focused when the result mattered to me?
There is a difference between believing you can do something and having the experience of doing it.
I had spent so many hours practicing. I knew what I was capable of in familiar settings. But going out, performing, and winning gave me a different kind of confidence.
The medal was satisfying, but it represented something more important to me: I had taken the test and performed what I had worked on.
That was when I felt I had earned the confidence to say I had mastered the fundamentals.
I do not mean that I had become unbeatable or that a medal could summarize everything about a player. The uncertainty of who shows up still applies.
What changed was my relationship with my own preparation.
I no longer had only a belief about what I could do. I had experienced myself doing it under pressure.
That gave me real fulfillment. It felt good to know that the work had become something I could trust.
Play to Win—and Recognize What Else You Can Gain
I did not need competition to make pickleball worthwhile. Exercise and friendship had already done that.
But competing gave me something different.
It challenged me to sustain my attention. It gave me a place to experience pressure without confusing the outcome with the importance of my whole life. It allowed me to grow friendships through a shared challenge. And it gave me confidence grounded in performance, not just possibility.
Those were the benefits I came to understand through doing it.
Whether you are entering a tournament, playing in a league, or arranging a private DUPR match, there is value in being clear about why you are there.
When I chose to compete, I chose to pursue the win with my full effort. I wanted to prepare, pay attention, support my partner, and give the fundamentals I had practiced an honest test.
The result mattered to me. But the ability to bring myself fully to that challenge was something I could carry home, take into my work, and use in the next difficult thing I chose to learn.
And for me, it all began with one word.
Focus.
