One-on-One Pickleball Drilling: My Practice Blueprint
How I used modified one-on-one drills to build my game—and how to measure your own repetitions instead of guessing at the benefit.
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The biggest difference-maker in my six years of pickleball was one-on-one drilling. Not simply playing singles. I mean modified, purposeful exchanges that let me choose exactly what I wanted to practice and return to that situation again and again.
If I wanted to improve my dinking, I did not need to serve, return, approach the kitchen and hope the rally eventually became a dink exchange. My partner and I could start at the kitchen line. The part I wanted to learn became the session instead of a small piece of it.
- Choose the skill first. Design the exchange around the shot or decision you want to improve.
- One-on-one does not have to mean full-court singles. Cooperative feeds and constrained games serve different purposes.
- Count useful repetitions. More paddle contacts are not automatically better practice.
- Make your practice time count. Use our modeled game baseline of about 60 personal touches in 15 minutes, then compare it with my 10× drilling estimate.
I wanted to choose what the session taught me
Recreational games gave me friendships, experimentation and enjoyment. Drilling gave me control. I could isolate a weakness without waiting for three other players and the flow of a doubles game to produce the right ball.
That also made practice more physically engaging for me. I was involved in the next exchange instead of occasionally watching the ball move between other players. The workout was part of the appeal, but the larger benefit was being able to connect an intention with repeated feedback.
There are two useful versions of this format. In a cooperative drill, your partner helps you repeat a situation. In a constrained game, you compete inside agreed boundaries: dinks only, half-court play, or a reset required before the rally opens up. Neither requires turning the session into an unrestricted singles match.
More touches because the ball comes back to you
In one-on-one drilling, every ball your partner sends back is yours to play. There is no teammate taking the next shot while you wait. And you can start directly in the situation you want to improve: a dink exchange, a reset under pressure or a controlled hands battle.
That is why I value both cooperative drills and modified one-on-one games. You can repeat a shot or decision many times in succession instead of waiting for it to come around in a normal 2v2 game. Keeping exchanges going, restarting quickly and choosing the starting position all help concentrate your practice.
For this tool, we estimate about 60 personal paddle touches in a 15-minute doubles game played to 11 with traditional side-out scoring and a two-point winning margin. The scoring calculation includes rallies that do not score a point and games that continue beyond 11.
My estimate for focused one-on-one drilling is 10 times as many touches per minute. Using that multiplier, the same 15 minutes becomes approximately 600 touches.
The game baseline combines a published scoring model with our stated shot-count and pacing assumptions. It is a planning estimate, not a measured average for all recreational players. The 10× drilling multiplier is Mark’s estimate.
How much more can you get from your practice time?
How much time do you have? Enter your minutes to compare estimated personal touches from doubles games with one-on-one drilling.
How we estimated a game to 11
1. Count every rally, including side-outs. We implemented the side-out scoring model described by DeFord and Ethier: play starts at 0–0–2, each subsequent team has two servers, and play continues until a team reaches at least 11 with a two-point lead. With equally matched teams each winning 44% of their serving rallies, the model gives 40.23 rallies per game. The 44% parameter is informed by professional data cited in their paper; its use here is a modeling assumption for our planning baseline.
2. Include close-game extensions. Scores such as 12–10, 13–11 and beyond remain in the calculation. Under these assumptions, about 13.2% of games reach 10–10. Requiring a two-point margin adds about 0.59 rallies to the average across all games compared with stopping at the first score of 11. The model does not cap the final score.
3. Estimate touches. We assume six total paddle contacts per rally, including the serve and contacted errors. That gives 40.23 × 6 ÷ 4 ≈ 60 personal touches, averaged across the four players. Six is our working assumption for recreational play, not a measured population mean. Actual touches are not necessarily shared equally. At four or ten shots per rally, the same scoring model would yield roughly 40 or 101 personal touches per game.
4. Estimate elapsed time. We allow an average of eight seconds of rally time and 14 seconds between rallies: (40.23 × 8 + 39.23 × 14) ÷ 60 ≈ 14.5 minutes, rounded to 15. These are pacing assumptions informed by published doubles activity research; they are not that study’s reported averages. Warm-up, waiting for a court and between-game breaks are excluded.
5. Apply Mark’s drilling estimate. The calculator uses the rounded baseline: 60 touches ÷ 15 minutes = 4 touches/minute in games. Multiply by 10 for 40 touches/minute in drilling. All displayed totals are estimates. Counting 250,000 simulated games independently checked the scoring calculation and produced 40.23 rallies per game.
This is a model for estimating practice volume, not a survey of recreational games. Sources and limitations are listed below.
The repetition advantage becomes especially useful when you choose one skill to practice. A dinking or reset drill brings that situation back repeatedly. The calculator counts all paddle contacts; it does not claim every game touch would train your chosen shot.
Three ways to start
These are practical session formats adapted from my interview, not a claim that I followed a fixed numbered program for six years.
1. Kitchen-only dinking
Begin near the kitchen line with one partner across from you. Agree on straight-ahead or crosscourt placement and start cooperatively. Choose one objective: height control, depth, placement or recovering your feet after contact. Begin with a feed rather than a serve so the target exchange starts immediately.
Then make it a constrained game: keep the agreed court area and allow only dinks. A rally win is useful feedback, but it should not replace the development objective. Observe whether your intended ball is repeatable, not simply whether your partner made the first mistake.
2. Stationary reset exchanges
One partner works from the kitchen line; the other begins in the transition zone. The feeder supplies manageable pressure, and the receiver practices taking pace off the ball. Switch roles so both people benefit. Our transition-zone guide explains the setup and progression.
Agree on pace before starting. A cooperative feed should help your partner learn, not surprise them with an all-out attack.
3. A drill that opens into a game
Pick a starting constraint—for example, establish a controlled dink exchange before either player may speed up. Once the constraint is satisfied, play out the rally within the agreed court area. This preserves the repeated starting situation while introducing a real decision.
Keep an eye on what the constraint changes. A rule invented for practice is not automatically the right tactic in a match. Finish by trying the skill in normal play, where the ball will not always arrive on your preferred terms.
Do not confuse a higher count with better learning
A useful practice cycle is simple: name one objective, collect a short set of repetitions, notice the miss, change one thing and try again. A coach or a short video can help identify what you are not seeing yourself.
Record the result in ordinary language: “My resets stayed lower when I arrived balanced,” or “My dink depth disappeared when I reached instead of moving.” Those are prompts for observation, not predetermined conclusions you must force your session to match.
Finally, take the developing skill into recreational play with your partner's understanding. My growth-versus-winning framework explains why that conversation matters. Drilling built the tool; a less predictable exchange helps reveal when I can actually use it.
Frequently asked questions
Is one-on-one drilling the same as singles?
No. Singles is a game format. One-on-one drilling can use cooperative feeds, a smaller court area or a specific shot restriction. The purpose here is to repeat a chosen skill, not simply cover the full court against one opponent.
Where do the game estimate and 10× multiplier come from?
The estimated game baseline is about 60 personal touches in 15 minutes. It combines a published side-out scoring model, including win-by-two extensions, with our shot-count and pacing assumptions. The 10× multiplier is Mark’s estimate for focused one-on-one drilling. Both are explained under “How we estimated a game to 11.”
Should I count every hit or only successful shots?
Count all your contacts to measure volume. Track success separately against a defined target. Otherwise, the repetition count hides the misses you need to understand. For targeted practice, compare the same shot type in each sample.
Should I stop playing recreational games?
No. Recreation was part of my learning and social life. My point is to choose practice deliberately, not to remove the parts of pickleball you enjoy. Drilling and games can serve different purposes.
How do I choose the first drill?
Choose a recurring difficulty you can describe clearly, then narrow the starting situation. “Reset a controlled feed from midcourt” is easier to practice deliberately than “be better at defense.” Use the fundamentals checklist to identify a starting point.
Sources, assumptions & methodology
This guide was developed from Mark Miller's September 6, 2026 interview about six years of pickleball. His experience and preferences are firsthand; the session formats are editorial adaptations of that discussion.
Calculator methodology: About 60 touches per player per 15-minute game is a rounded planning baseline. Our calculation assumes equally matched teams, a 44% serving-rally win probability, six contacts per rally, eight seconds per rally and 14 seconds between rallies. The 10× drilling multiplier is Mark’s estimate, not a result established by the cited studies.
USA Pickleball: Side-Out Scoring — official explanation of traditional doubles scoring and the two-point winning margin.
DeFord & Ethier: Does the first-serving team have a structural advantage in pickleball? — mathematical model used to calculate rally counts, including extended games. We implemented and independently simulated the model; 40.23 rallies is our computed result at the stated parameters.
Lozano et al.: Match activity profile analysis during professional men’s doubles pickleball tournaments — observational research covering eight professional matches. It reports that 67.4% of rallies lasted 3–9 seconds and 84.3% of rest intervals lasted 9–15 seconds. These are distributions, not mean values; the study does not establish our six-shot or recreational-time assumptions. Its whole-match duration was not treated as the duration of one game to 11.
PrimeTime Pickleball: How Many Points Is Pickleball Played To? — coaching guidance estimates game lengths at 15–25 minutes. This is practical guidance, not a timed recreational sample. Our 15-minute default is a rounded model estimate.
Technical reference for the reset exercise: USA Pickleball: What Is a Pickleball Reset Shot and How to Hit It. For official play, consult USA Pickleball's rules; a drill constraint is not a rule change.
