This Week in MoCo Pickleball · Issue #2
This Week in MoCo Pickleball · Week of June 2, 2026
National media wrote the sport's obituary this week. The 7 AM courts at Bauer Drive didn't get the memo.
Where do you play in MoCo? Tap your area to add yourself to the map: Down-County · Central · Up-County · Eastern · Western → See where MoCo plays
🎾 Tonight: free Link & Dink Night at Olney Mill — 5:30 PM until dark. Open to all, plays best around 3.5+. Every game is scored and recorded — results count on the leaderboard, and the best points land on the highlights feed.
→ RSVP for tonight — takes 30 seconds and tells us how many courts to set up.
🔥 The lead
Axios just buried pickleball. The MoCo courts are too full to notice.
Axios and the Palm Beach Post both ran "the craze is over" pieces this week — paddle sales cooling, a couple of cities pulling back on new builds, "the bubble is popping." Look around MoCo and that story falls apart fast. Memorial Day weekend the courts at Wheaton, Olney Manor, Cabin John, and Veirs Mill were wall-to-wall. The MD Pickleball Facebook group keeps adding members. Wheaton's six new dedicated Rubini courts are on track for this spring, and PlayTime Scheduler still shows MoCo open play as one of the most active feeds in the DMV.
What the national desks are calling "the bubble popping" is actually pickleball settling in — moving from craze to infrastructure. That's not a story you can write from behind a desk in DC. You feel it when you can't get on a court before 9.
📍 MoCo pulse
Direct MoCo news this week: None crossed the wire — no court votes, no facility openers, no rec-league bulletins across seven days of feed-scanning. Quiet weeks here are usually good news. If something's happening on your courts that we missed, reply — that's how this section gets sharper.
Regional / DMV-adjacent:
- Madison just got crowned the US pickleball capital — here's how MoCo actually stacks up. WKOW in Wisconsin reported Madison now leads the country in outdoor courts per capita. Quick MoCo reality check: our courts map sits at 69+ public courts and growing, with six new dedicated lighted courts at Wheaton's Rubini complex slated for this spring. We're not Madison yet — but we're a lot closer than the national headline implies. See the MoCo courts map →
- Utah's pickleball champs flew to China this week. MoCo did it first — and at a different scale. KSL covered Utah's school-exchange pickleball trip. The bigger story is right here: MCPS was the first school district in the country to make pickleball a varsity sport (piloted at 11 high schools fall 2023, all 25 by 2024). Their Pickleball Diplomacy Initiative sent 30 students to Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing in 2025, and Athletics Director Dr. Jeff Sullivan got a letter back from Xi Jinping for his trouble. Second exchange is already on the books for February 2026. If your kid plays MCPS pickleball, you live where the trend started. Sports Illustrated has the full story.
Got a MoCo story for next week? Reply to this email or post in the MD Pickleball Facebook group.
🎯 Coach's Take of the week
The Dink published a 4.0+ doubles-patterns piece this week — the patterns the 3.5–4.0 rec player is trying to graduate into. Most of the article is right. The one thing they buried, and it's the thing that actually decides games at MoCo open play: which partner takes the middle ball at the kitchen, by default, and when you switch it. It's not a body-language read. It's a pre-point conversation, and it has to happen before every single serve. Skip it and you and your partner will both reach for the same kitchen ball at 6-6 in a tiebreaker. Guaranteed.
→ Read the full breakdown on Link & Dink
💪 Drill of the Week
Recovery-Position Shadow Drill — fixes the "I just hit a great speed-up and now I'm standing flat-footed" problem in 8 minutes. Solo, no partner, three cones. Pull the trigger, immediately snap your paddle and your back foot back to ready position — the move every 4.0+ player makes automatically, and the one most 3.5s skip. It's the cheapest court-IQ upgrade you can give yourself this week.
🏆 Pro Tour storyline
While big media was writing the "craze is over" pieces, Anna Leigh Waters was busy stacking the most dominant singles streak in modern racket-sport history — The Dink put real numbers on it this week. She's 19, undefeated, and rewriting what's possible at the top of the women's game. If you're going to watch one pro this summer to steal one habit from, watch how she resets after every defensive shot. It's the cleanest pro-speed version of the drill above. The Dink's full breakdown →
📅 On the calendar
- Tonight — free Link & Dink Night — Wednesday, June 3, 5:30 PM until dark, Olney Mill Neighborhood Park, Olney. Open to all, plays best around 3.5+. RSVP for tonight.
- Next Wednesday works too — Link & Dink Night runs every Wednesday. RSVP for June 10.
- MoCo HS Pickleball — DUPR rating event — Sunday, June 14 at Walter Johnson High School. Free, 16 spots. Details + RSVP.
- Find your home courts on the map — linkanddink.com/map — 69+ MoCo courts, filterable, growing.
- MoCo Rec & Parks summer programming — adult pickleball clinics, leagues, and court info on ActiveMONTGOMERY.
✦ From the Link & Dink desk
National media gets MoCo wrong because they're reading paddle-sales spreadsheets and we're playing on actual courts. The thing that's "settling in" here is the part that lasts — the community. The core community is free forever: no take rate, no premium tier on the things that matter. If you already run a regular game (or want to), that's exactly what Coach Up is built for — reply and I'll send details. And if there's one thing that would make this newsletter more useful to you, reply and tell me. Every email reaches me.
— Sam · Link & Dink / MoCo
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