This Week in MoCo Pickleball · Issue #6
This Week in MoCo Pickleball · Week of June 30, 2026
Quiet news week, loud culture week — Hollywood discovered pickleball, and your speed-up timing is still costing you points. We'll fix the second one.
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
📅 On the calendar
- July 4 weekend — courts will be packed. Go early, or use the map to find a quieter spot than your usual.
- MoCo courts map — linkanddink.com/map — 69+ courts, filterable by lighting and amenities.
- See where MoCo's playing — the community map shows where readers are checking in this week.
- Next Popup Pickleball (P3) — grab a spot on the next bracket. Level-honest, player-funded, capped fields.
- MoCo Rec & Parks summer programming — adult clinics, leagues, and court schedules on ActiveMONTGOMERY.
🔥 The lead
Pickleball just got its own Hollywood comedy — "The Dink," produced by Ben Stiller, lands on Apple TV+ July 24.
Jake Johnson plays a washed-up former tennis pro who aggravates an old injury and gets, of all things, a pickleball prescription — handed to him by a doctor played by Ben Stiller. Mary Steenburgen, Ed Harris, Patton Oswalt and even Andy Roddick round out the cast. It's the kind of mainstream moment that takes the sport from "thing your neighbor won't shut up about" to Saturday-night-couch culture.
Here's why it matters to you: every time pickleball breaks into the mainstream, a fresh wave of people Google "pickleball near me" the next day — and some of them walk onto your open play that weekend, brand new and nervous. How they get treated in their first hour decides whether they ever come back. When the movie drops in late July, expect that wave. The welcoming move is simple: pull the newest player into your game and don't make them feel like the worst one there. We all started at zero.
📍 MoCo pulse
Direct MoCo news this week: None again — and that's now several quiet local weeks in a row. No court votes, no facility bulletins from MoCo Rec & Parks, nothing moving in the county feed. Here, a quiet week mostly means the courts are full and nobody's fighting about them. That's not nothing.
Regional / DMV-adjacent:
- Skechers — yes, the shoe company — just entered the paddle market. They hit the USAP approved list this week, betting their grip on pickleball footwear carries over to paddles. The take for you: the gear arms race isn't slowing down, and that's exactly why you shouldn't chase it. A new logo on a paddle won't fix your speed-up timing. Play more, buy less. link
- The court build-out is accelerating everywhere — and MoCo's edge isn't courts, it's players. New complexes and clubs broke ground across the country this week, from California to the Carolinas to Ohio. Cities are scrambling to build the supply MoCo already has: 69+ free public courts, mapped. The thing other towns haven't figured out is that courts alone don't make a community — organized players do. link
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
Speeding up is the decision that separates a 3.5 from a 4.5 — and most players treat it like a mood instead of a read. You get bored in a long dink rally, so you go, usually off a ball below the net, usually into the other team's best hands. The Dink ran a solid five-factor checklist on this; I boiled all five down to the one question that actually matters: is the ball above the net, or are you manufacturing offense from below it? I wrote up the four speed-ups I see every open play that should never have been taken — and the green-light/red-light read that fixes it.
→ Read the full breakdown on Link & Dink
💪 Drill of the Week
The Green-Light Dink Drill — fixes speeding up at the wrong time in about 15 minutes with a partner. Here's the twist: it scores you on the decision, not the outcome. You earn a point for correctly leaving a low ball alone, and you lose one for attacking it even if it lands in. That's the rep nobody trains — and it's the one that drops your unforced errors overnight. Pairs directly with this week's Coach's Take.
🏆 Pro Tour storyline
MLP spent the weekend at Randall's Island for MLP New York — and the most-shared moment had nothing to do with a rally: a wind gust knocked the baseline scoreboard onto Brooklyn's Rachel Rohrabacher mid-match (she's reported OK). The storyline underneath it is the St. Louis Shock, who rolled into New York on an 11-0 tear since their late-May loss to the New Jersey Fives — the closest thing this season has to a juggernaut. The coaching takeaway worth stealing if you catch the replays: watch when the top teams choose to speed up. They don't attack because the rally got long; they attack when the ball sits up and a body's out of position — the exact read in this week's Coach's Take, just played at 5.5+. MLP standings →
✦ From the Link & Dink desk
This is issue #6, and the sport keeps having its mainstream moment — a Ben Stiller movie this month, pickleball fever hitting India, a new world No. 1 in the headlines. All of that points new players toward the courts. The part that actually decides whether they stay isn't the marketing — it's whether they find a real game with real people when they get here. That's the whole reason this exists, and why the core community is free forever: no take rate, no premium tier on the stuff that matters.
One small ask that makes it better: tap your area in the poll up top. The more I know about where MoCo actually plays, the sharper this gets — better open-play tips, better court calls, better matches. And if you already run a regular game or want to start one, that's exactly what Coach Up is for. Reply and I'll send the details — or just reply and tell me your home court. Every email reaches me.
— Sam · Link & Dink / MoCo