According to Annie: Stacking Is For Cowards And People Named Brad

I have been asked, repeatedly and by people I am increasingly disinclined to play with, to soften my position on stacking. I will not.

Stacking, for the uninitiated, is the practice of arranging yourself and your doubles partner so that your stronger side is always positioned in the more advantageous court regardless of the actual serve rotation. It is technically legal. So is bringing a folding chair to open play, and I have written about that elsewhere.

The argument for stacking is that it allows partners to “play to their strengths.” The argument against stacking is that it is the recreational pickleball equivalent of having your mom call the school to ask for extra time on a test. You are 58 years old. You are playing 2.5 round robin at the Greenwood Community Recreation Center. There are no strengths to play to. There is only the game, which you are now trying to optimize because optimizing it is more comfortable for you than being bad at it in public.

I have watched the same man — I will not say his name, but his name is Doug — stack his way through three consecutive Tuesday round robins. He and his partner have a system. They have hand signals. At one point I observed Doug appear to call an audible. This was during the warm-up.

When I asked Doug, politely, why he felt the need to stack at the 2.5 level, he told me he was “trying to find his game.” Doug has been playing pickleball since 2019. If he has not found his game by now, I do not believe stacking is going to locate it for him.

Here is what stacking communicates to the other side of the net. It says: I am so concerned about my own performance that I have introduced a layer of administrative complexity to a sport that is supposed to be played in flip-flops. It says: the game, as designed, is insufficient for my needs. It says: my partner and I have discussed this. It says: there are now two of us doing this.

I want to be clear that I am not opposed to people getting better at pickleball. I am, in fact, very interested in this, and I have a number of suggestions I am happy to share at length with anyone who asks and with most people who don’t. But there is a difference between improving and contorting. There is a difference between drilling and engineering. There is a difference between studying the game and trying to outsmart it before it has had a chance to embarrass you, which it will.

Stack at the 4.0 level. Stack on the pro tour. Stack at sanctioned tournaments, where stacking is openly part of the strategic vocabulary and where, importantly, the players have agreed in advance that this is what we are doing here. I will not contest you. I have written elsewhere that I do not recognize the pro tour as a real entity, but I am willing to acknowledge that within its imagined boundaries, the rules they have set for themselves apply.

But at open play, on a Tuesday night, at the Greenwood Community Recreation Center, on a court adjacent to a class for children learning to swim — no. Absolutely not. Play the game.

I am told that this column will make me unpopular. I am told this often. I file it under things I have heard before, alongside “you are not as highly rated as you think you are” and “could you please not coach me from the other side of the net.”

Doug, if you are reading this: I know you are reading this. I know your wife forwards you the link. Hello, Linda.

— Annie