Built for the player
who's stuck.
Pickleball Rulez exists for one player: the one who plays all the time, loves the game, and hasn't moved up in a while.
You know the feeling. You show up three times a week. You drill when you can. You watch the pros on YouTube. And your rating doesn't budge. The players beating you aren't faster or stronger. They've just fixed a handful of specific things you haven't found yet.
That's the problem we set out to solve.
Why we made the Stuck Series
We're not pros. We're recreational players, the kind you see at the park every morning, and we've been stuck at every level this series covers. We made the mistakes. All of them. Then we got unreasonably serious about one question: what exactly separates one level from the next, and how do you build those skills on purpose?
We answered it the way we answer most questions: like a research project. We recorded our games. We tracked the numbers. We drilled one thing at a time against measurable benchmarks and wrote down what moved the needle and what didn't. Then we played more competitive club games than was probably sensible, just to make sure what worked in drills held up when the score got tight.
Most players figure this out by accident, if they figure it out at all. Your rating shouldn't depend on whether you happen to find a 4.0 player willing to explain exactly what they're doing and why. That information exists. We wrote it down.
How the books work
Every book in the Stuck Series follows the same approach:
Named mistakes.
The specific habits that define your current level.
A shot system and positioning.
What to hit, from where, and why.
Drills with benchmarks.
Clear pass/fail standards, so you know when a skill is built, not just practiced.
A 30-day training plan.
What to work on, session by session.
A built-in workbook.
Trackers and logs that show your progress.
Start at your current rating. When you hit the benchmarks, move to the next book.
What we believe
Specific beats general. "Get better at dinking" doesn't help. "Run this five-shot sequence until you pass this benchmark" does.
Improvement shouldn't cost a fortune. A clear plan should be within reach of every player, not just those who can afford weekly lessons.
You can coach yourself. With the right structure, you don't need someone standing on the sideline.
Who's behind it
The Pickleball Rulez team. Not former college athletes. Not certified coaches. Just rec players who got obsessed with getting better, and who track their own progress with a level of detail our playing partners find mildly alarming.
We've been through all three plateaus, and each one taught us something different:
3.0
The obvious one. The gaps were easy to see and the fixes were technical.
3.5
Subtler. Getting past it meant building new shots, not just cleaning up old ones.
4.0
The longest to crack. At that level you look like a solid player, and the problems only show up in the third game, against opponents who've figured out your patterns, or in the moments when pressure breaks down what you've practiced. That book took longer to build than the first two combined.
We're still recreational players. Still not coaches. Still taking notes. And everything we've learned is in these three books, so you don't have to make every mistake we did to get where you want to go.
Pickleball Rulez is an independent publisher. Every book is written, tested and published by the team.
Find your level
Stuck at 3.0
Work toward 3.5 →
Stuck at 3.5
Work toward 4.0 →
Stuck at 4.0
Work toward 4.5 →
Questions? We'd love to hear from you.