Collin Johns: Tennis Past and The Future of Pickleball

Well, I didn't play the left side at all. Oh no, Anna Leigh played the left. Let's be clear here. You don't know that you're about to get hit by Henry until you've been hit. Like, it's already in your chest, and you'd have to see it to really understand. He surpassed me briefly, and I was like, "Well, I can't let my little brother be better than me." So, it definitely materially changes the way the game is played because you have different equipment, essentially, that you can do different things with. So, I think that'll be interesting to keep an eye on how the technology affects the game. So, I'm here with Collin Johns. I'm the Pickleball Pirate, and he's given us a few minutes to just ask a few questions. So, first off, you know, I want to hear your origin story. I know it kind of came through Ben, but I know you were playing tennis. How long have you been playing? How did it evolve? Yes, like many people, I began my pickleball journey through tennis. That was the racket sport of choice for me. I played five years of professional tennis, and in 2018, I decided to stop playing pro tennis and started working for my old tennis coach. I anticipated working in tennis, but that's when my little brother was like, "You know what, this pickleball thing is a lot of fun. I think you could coach it at a minimum, and we could be doubles partners." It's growing a lot. There are a lot of advantages to re-examining pickleball because I had actually rejected pickleball in the beginning when I was playing tennis. I thought it was a silly sport for old people. I was playing a real sport, tennis. And here we are, what is it, six years later? So, it's been a great journey, but in the beginning, I definitely had a lot to learn. Some of the skills that I had from tennis translated really well, and others just did not. I worked a lot with Ben on that. Simone Jardim was a very integral part of me learning how to play pickleball properly. I played my first big tournament the following year, in 2019, at the US Open, and I played singles. Singles was my best event coming from tennis early on. So, I made the semi-finals in singles. I had a pretty good year in singles. I got my first sponsorship, and I played my first tournament with Ben that following year. Even though I wasn't good enough to deserve Ben at the time, I'm his older brother, so I'm like, "You owe me for all the games that I got you good at." We actually won three of the four tournaments that we played that year. Granted, it was not as competitive as it is now. There were no pro tours or anything like that. It was a good time to get in the game, and ever since then, it just seems like pickleball has exploded even more every year. Here we are in 2024, and we're launching Gen 3 Yola paddles with the latest tech, half of the number one doubles team in the world, so I couldn't be more privileged. That's awesome. Well, you kind of led me into a couple of different questions. How long ago was it that you started? It was in 2018. Right, around six years. You said something I thought was really key, and it was kind of the question I was asking. You came in and you really kind of learned the game that was not intuitive as a tennis player. So, what would you say to the new tennis players coming in? What is the most integral part of them having success in pickleball coming from a tennis background? This is an interesting question, especially more recently, because the paddle technology has changed so much. You can play tennis on a pickleball court and have more success these days than you could have when I started in 2018. You didn't have as much power, not nearly as much spin. Carbon fiber surface wasn't even around at that time. You can't come in with a semi-western or western grip and expect to get the ball to go over the net with fiberglass paddles like you had in 2018. So, I had to learn what I would coin as traditionally or properly, whatever you want to say. Some players coming in more recently, all they know is carbon fiber surface with a lot of power. So, they're like, "Well, I can hit certain shots and make them consistently enough to win." And while that might be partially true, I feel like using a carbon fiber face allows you to "cheat," quote-unquote, in ways that we were not able to with fiberglass, especially because they didn't have a lot of power. Learning how to dink, be patient, and choose the right shot at the right time from the right court position, because there are two things I always talk about that are super important that have nothing to do with physical skills. They affect physical skills, but they're not physical skills, and those are court positioning and shot selection. I would tell the tennis players coming into the game to have a good fundamental understanding of those two things. Where should I be on the court, and what shot should I hit from that area on the court? Simply by doing that, your physical skills will be better because you're choosing the right shot from the right area. I would say there's a bigger discrepancy in the game of pickleball when it comes to court position versus tennis. In tennis, you can run miles behind the baseline and track down a lot of balls, and that can work for you. There are people that more or less play in a certain style where their court position is not always all that great. In pickleball, if you don't control the kitchen line, well, forget it. You have no chance. There's a lot of really important things to learn when you first enter pickleball when it comes to court position. Coming from you, that doesn't shock me. It's an elemental part of the game, right? One of the best coaches I heard in pickleball is really teaching the analytics behind it. I heard you guys analyze all your matches, but you made a statement in another interview that we saw, and you talked about table tennis and how that actually really helps with pickleball. Expand on that a little bit. What did you mean by that? To give a little background on me and Ben, we grew up in Maryland, and we happened to grow up 20 minutes from the best table tennis center, maybe in the country. Maryland Table Tennis Center is a pretty renowned place, and someone who won the US Open at one point coaches there. To give you some perspective, we're not anywhere close to that level, but we played a lot of table tennis. We had a table, we had nice paddles, so we got better than your average person at table tennis. We did not know pickleball existed at that time. This was all when we were teenagers. When pickleball came much later, it was natural for us to recognize certain things that your average person who didn't play a lot of table tennis at a high level wouldn't pick up on. Spin recognition, whether it's sidespin or slice. Just to give you an easy example on that, if somebody slices you with the ball and you hit topspin back, you're going to get more topspin on that shot than if the ball was delivered to you flat. As a table tennis player, that really registers with me. I was like, "Oh, of course, it's the same concept in this game." Of course, we don't have the rubber surface that we have with table tennis paddles, so it's less extreme, but at the same time, you're going to have that same sort of adjustment needed when something like that happens. Something that a lot of people don't know that I think I mentioned in the interview recently was that the table, when you account for the height of the table and the height of the net, is exactly the same height off the ground as a pickleball net. If you stand behind a table tennis table and you make contact right at the end of the table, it's almost identical in distance to the net as if you're standing at the kitchen line and reaching forward. If you have a decent wingspan, the distances are very, very close. The strokes translate very well because of that. Ben's backhand roll, for example, is very table tennis-esque. He was able to take it to the pickleball court in part because of the technique he had developed in table tennis. Who's better at table tennis, you or him? I'm going to be honest, we're really about the same at this point. There was an evolution where I was better growing up because I was older, and then he took lessons from somebody who was really good at the University of Maryland. He surpassed me briefly, and I was like, "Well, I can't let my little brother be better than me," so then I took some lessons and leveled the playing field. Ever since then, I would say it's pretty much even. I think I won the last time, but it's definitely pretty much 50/50. So, now you've been in the sport for six years. Where do you see the sport in the next five years? Put on your Swami hat. What do you see the sport being like five years from now? I think a lot is going to depend on international growth. The paddle technology, you see this new Gen 3 technology coming along, and a lot of other companies are following suit. It definitely materially changes the way the game is played because you have different equipment, essentially, that you can do different things with. So, I think that'll be interesting to keep an eye on how the technology affects the game and whether there will be rule changes or alterations because of that. The international piece is even more intriguing because if a country in Asia, let's say, that has a lot of badminton and table tennis players at a high level, suddenly enters the scene, it'll be really interesting to see how the game changes. A backhand roll is going to be very natural to them. Certain badminton shots use a lot of wrist, which can be very effective on a pickleball court. So, how is the game going to change when you have thousands of those players suddenly entering the game and trying to tweak certain shots to change the game? I think it'll be really, really intriguing to see when that happens. Yeah, I know you guys know Hendry Winarto, right? Of course, yes. He's one of the first. Yep, and I remember just hearing you guys be like, "Come on, Hendry," because he had these weird angles he would do with his hand, and you never could read where he was hitting. So, I know exactly what you're talking about. I took a few lessons with him, and I'm like, "Dude, I can't do what you're doing." He's like, "No, you can't. I've been doing this my whole life." Exactly. You don't know that you're about to get hit by Hendry until you've been hit. It's already in your chest, and you'd have to see it to really understand. I have a couple of great clips of him just putting the ball on me in a New York minute, and it's just like, "Whoa." You can't read it, you have no chance. You just better hope that he misses and hits it out because you have no chance of reading where it's going. Last question. You can also plead the fifth on this. Who do you like beating the most when you play pickleball? If you could put one name out there, like, "I really enjoy beating this guy." It doesn't have to be an enemy, but it could be a rival or somebody that just talks a lot of trash and you like putting it on them. Is there anybody out there that you can think of? Julian Arnold? I mean, I'm not going to argue with you if you throw out a name like that. I'm not going to say a specific name, but I will say it is more satisfying to beat the people that generally approach the game with more ego or talk trash on the court. I was taught to play the game in a certain way by my parents and my tennis coaches: humility and a certain level of respect. Certainly, gamesmanship up to a point is okay, but if you take it too far, I feel like you're disrespecting the sport. Certainly, what I was taught is whether you win or lose, try to do it with class. There are certain players that I don't believe have those same principles, and I certainly enjoy beating those players. Yeah, like the non-paddle tappers. Alright, I get it. Mr. Competitive, it demeans the professionalism of the game. I hear what you're saying now. Well, I lied. One last question: should amateurs try to play like pros, in your opinion? Like you coach, should they try to emulate what you guys are doing? As a general principle, I think people should imitate the generalities. What I mean by that is if you see all the pros hitting a third-shot drop in the same specific sort of way, for example, the paddle head drops beneath the ball, you need to do that because that is universally the right way to do it. If you look at different pros' techniques, they can vary quite a bit. Tyson's forehand is different than Ben's forehand in certain specific ways. It's not that one is worse than the other, it's that their personal style is going to vary a little bit. So, I wouldn't tell somebody, "You have to swing like Tyson," or "You have to swing like Ben." But if they're both doing something, I would say that you should mimic that. You're not going to be able to hit the ball as hard or move like them, but I would say approach the game in that sort of lens, and that will put you on the right path. Nice. And what about beating your brother, though, if you play against your brother? Beating my brother? I love beating my brother because I've been doing it for so long. However, I will say I have never beaten him in any event in pickleball. I played him three times in singles before I quit singles. I lost in three games every time, and one of those matches, I had match points and I lost at Texas Open 2019. He knows exactly, I know exactly when, and it scarred me for life. It scarred me for life. Then there were a couple of mixed doubles, sort of like exhibition matches, I think the Sketcher Invitational, where I was playing with Anna Leigh. We lost to him and Callie, very close. I was like, "Oh, wait, what's this left side all about?" Yeah, well, I didn't play the left side at all. Oh no, Anna Leigh played the left. Let's be clear here. So, we got pretty close. Then in men's doubles, I think the closest I've ever been to beating him in men's doubles would be when I played with Eric Lang at the PPA Championships in the bronze medal match. He had just lost, so he was not super into the match. He played with Matt Wright. We lost in three games to them. I have never beaten him in men's doubles, mixed doubles, or singles. So, I love beating Ben, but in pickleball, it has not happened, and I don't know when it's going to happen. I don't play singles anymore. Mixed doubles is not really in my favor. Men's doubles would be my best chance, but who am I going to get to beat him? It would be tough because he's going to have a good partner. Hopefully, I would have a good partner. Ben is the best, so he's hard to beat. That's awesome, man. Well, this is Keith Valentine. I'm the Pickleball Pirate, and this is Collin Johns. Thank you so much, brother, for spending some time with us. You're so gracious, man. Thanks a lot. Yes, no problem.