The Shot Most Players Never Practice

Soft hands, big money, and a recovery tool your legs will thank you for.

Author

Empower Pickleball
May 12, 2026

There's a shot in pickleball that most players never practice—and it's costing them more points than anything else in their game. We're covering it this week, along with the fitness company that quietly built the sport's most powerful institution while everyone else was still figuring out the rules.

Inside:

  • The reset shot that neutralizes speed-ups cold

  • How Life Time turned $55M into pickleball dominance

  • A recovery tool serious players are adding to their routine

🗞️ What's Happening in Pickleball Right Now

Photo credit: PPA Tour

The sport just got a $225 million vote of confidence.

Apollo Sports Capital and Dundon Capital Partners closed a $225 million investment in Pickleball Inc. this month—and the money isn't just a headline. The deal formally unites the PPA Tour, Major League Pickleball, Pickleball Central, tournament software, and court installation all under one roof, building what the league is calling a fully integrated pickleball ecosystem.

What this means:

  • One company now controls the tour, league, retail, tech, and infrastructure—is that too much power under one roof?

  • Line call disputes continue to plague the pro game—with Pickleball Inc. now unified, could a real solution finally be on the horizon?

PPA Finals

The PPA Tour wrapped its spring season in San Clemente—and the results were about as dominant as it gets.

Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters closed the season the way they started it—collecting gold in every event they entered. Anna Leigh skipped singles, but it didn't matter—she still walked away from the Finals with two gold medals.

  • 🥇 Mixed Doubles: Anna Leigh Waters & Ben Johns

  • 🥇 Men's Doubles: Ben Johns & Gabe Tardio—finished with a pickle in the final

  • 🥇 Women's Doubles: Anna Leigh Waters & Anna Bright

  • 🥇 Men's Singles: Chris Haworth

  • 🥇 Women's Singles: Kate Fahey

🌎 Around the Picklesphere

✋ The 5s launched a new look and are getting clowned
🔦 CBS shines the spotlight on ARTI paddles
🤝 Being a good partner comes in many forms
🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒 Be a part of the Empower Pickleball Fam and save 30% with code EMPOWER30

🚧 How to Reset a Speed-Up (Transition Zone Guide)

Photo credit: The APP

You're moving up to the kitchen. Your opponent sees the gap, loads up, and fires—and just like that, the point is over.

Most players either panic and swing back hard, or freeze—and both responses hand the point away. Here's the fix: the reset. The goal of a reset isn't to win the point. It's to survive it.

Absorb the pace, place the ball low in the middle of the kitchen, and keep moving forward. The four mistakes killing most players in this situation:

  • Swinging through contact—you're adding pace back, not taking it off

  • Gripping too tight—loosen up to a 3 or 4 out of 10. Soft hands are the whole game

  • Aiming for the lines—the middle of the kitchen is your friend under pressure

  • Stopping after the reset—advanced players reset and advance in the same motion, never breaking stride

What separates a 4.5 from a 3.5 isn't athleticism—it's the ability to stay calm when everything speeds up and produce one boring, unattackable reset. Train that shot and the transition zone stops being a liability. It becomes a weapon.

👉 Find the full guide with drills to improve your reset here.

🎯 What If Your Pickleball Rating Actually Reflected How You Play?

Most pickleball ratings only tell part of the story. VAIR takes a different approach.

Built as the first performance-based pickleball rating system, VAIR combines AI-powered game analysis with human verification to evaluate more than just wins and losses.

Players can access deeper insights into their game, match predictions, opponent scouting, and a rating designed to better reflect real performance on the court.

  • AI-powered game analysis

  • Human-verified ratings

  • Advanced player insights

  • Match predictions + opponent scouting

Stop guessing your level. Start understanding your game.

🏋️‍♀️ How Life Time Became a Pickleball Powerhouse

Walk into almost any new Life Time club right now and pickleball isn't shoved into a corner—it's the whole point. 

Between 2022 and mid-2023 alone, the company reportedly invested $55 million into expansion, eventually crossing 800 dedicated courts and adding roughly five new courts per week at its peak. But courts were just the foundation—Life Time built a full ecosystem of clinics, leagues, mixers, lessons, and tournaments that nearly doubled member pickleball visits from 3.8 per month in 2023 to 6.8 by early 2025.

They locked in partnerships with Andre Agassi, Ben Johns, JOOLA, DUPR, the PPA Tour, and MLP, then launched the LT Open—a $250,000 professional singles tournament on ESPN2. They even made their own ball: the LT Pro 48, now the official ball of both the PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball.

What Life Time understood before almost everyone else is that pickleball isn't a court sport—it's a lifestyle—and they built a business that captures every piece of it.

👉 Read the full article to hear more about Life Time’s pickleball empire.

💪 Why More Athletes Are Using NMES Recovery Devices

You played four matches this weekend. Your legs have filed a formal complaint.

Good news: recovery technology has come a long way past ice packs and wishful thinking. NMES—neuromuscular electrical stimulation—uses gentle electrical impulses to stimulate muscles and boost circulation without adding any physical strain to your body. No extra reps. No suffering. Just recovery happening while you sit on the couch.

Brands like Firefly Recovery are making the technology portable and easy to use, so you can recover courtside, at the hotel, or anywhere else life takes you after a long day of play.

👉 Learn how NMES can strengthen your recovery game here.

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