Every pickleball player uses metrics when they play as a way of measuring performance.

Even the score is just a metric: How many points you have compared to your opponent. There are useful metrics, like how many serves am I missing per game on average. And there are useless metrics, like your unforced errors (more on this one in a subsequent article).

In this article we tackle one of the most common and damaging metrics players use: the win/loss metric. These next sections are pulled from our book "Pickleball Therapy: The Book," available now on Kindle and paper copy at Amazon.

This next statement usually perplexes players at first: You cannot go out there to win a game. Think about it for a moment. What does “I am going to win the game” even mean? What are your action items that flow from “I will win the game?”

The answer is that there are no action items. Winning is not something you can directly do. Rather, winning is something that happens. It is a result.

Let’s contrast winning with some things you can do – areas that you have control over:

- You can aim your serves and returns of serve high over the net, reducing net errors.

- You can aim your returns of serve deep in the court, maximizing your positional advantage at the start of each rally.

- You can pick a spot on the court you want to aim your shots toward, potentially exploiting a weakness in your opponents’ formation.

- You can identify your opponents’ strengths (like a strong backhand putaway volley), allowing you to avoid hitting too many shots there.

Each of the above is within your control. Broadening this concept, you have control over the shots you hit and the strategies you choose during a game. The sum of these decisions and how well you execute them over the course of the contest will yield a result: you will win that game or you will lose that game.

No matter what, you cannot simply skip the process and “win this game.” That is nonsense. This is important because you want to employ metrics that are useful to you. Metrics are useful if they provide you with feedback that you can benefit from or help you determine your future actions. To be actionable, the information provided by the metric must be something that is under your control.

An example of a useful metric would be deciding that the next time you play you will target your volleys at least 6 inches above the net each time. You will use your volley metric by asking a follow up question any time your volley lands in the net: “Did I aim my volley 6 inches above the net?” If the answer is “no,” then your action is to focus on your intentionality when hitting volleys. If the answer is “yes,” then you can turn to your mechanics to see what occurred.

The exact steps to take to correct the shot are beyond the scope of this book. The point here is to know that you have control over the intentionality of the net clearance that you select for your volleys. The better you exercise your control over this part of your volley, the better your chances of hitting your volley successfully.

You do not, however, have direct control over whether you will win – or lose – that contest. Those are simply results. As winning is not an actionable item, its related metric – win/loss – is likewise not an actionable metric. You will be much better served by focusing on metrics that are either actionable (like the 6 inches over the net volley metric from above) or provide you with some other useful information.

Now that we have debunked the usefulness of win/loss as an actionable metric, let’s see if it otherwise provides us with any useful information.

The win/loss metric does not actually measure anything – so why use it?

As we set forth above, a metric is a measure. For something to work as a metric, it must provide a measurement that is useful to us in some way. We’ve established that the win/loss metric is not actionable, but does it give us any information that we can use in some way?

Spoiler Alert: the answer is “no.” Win/loss does not actually measure anything in a way that is useful to us. And, in any event, we cannot act on the information it provides.

Lastly, even if we were to believe that we could obtain useful measurement with it – in a theoretical sense – win/loss still fails in a real-world setting, which happens to be where we live and play pickleball.

Take a moment with this: win/loss tells you nothing about how well you played. You can play your best pickleball and lose every single game you played that day. Perhaps your partners were off. Or you were playing against objectively higher-level opponents. Or you were playing “at level” all the way around, but the ball just did not bounce your way a few times.

Winning every game in a day can likewise be uninformative. For example, if you are a 4.0 player but were playing in a beginner group. Or you happened to be paired with the best players for each game that day. Or you got favorable matchups each game that day. Whether it’s winning a bunch of games, or losing them, the mere act of winning or losing does not give you feedback about how you played. As a result, there is no reason to use win/loss as our measuring stick.

Plus, as you now know, when playing at level you are “supposed” to win 50% of the time and lose 50% of the time. There is simply nothing to measure here.

Even if the win/loss metric provided feedback, it is not useful feedback

Assume that you are still in the “win/loss tells me something” camp. Alright, let’s go further. What decisions can you make or actions can you take based on the information provided by the win/loss metric? Let’s take a day where you lost all your games. What does losing, in itself, tell you to do next?

Presumably if you care about your losses, you are looking for more than just “oh I lost today, boo hoo.” Rather, you are looking for some version of “I lost more than I wanted to today, what can I do about it?” The mere knowledge that you lost provides you with zero useful information that you can use to answer “what can I do about it?”

In other words, the win/loss metric is of no use to you when you lose – other than to tell you that you lost. That is it. Likewise, winning is of no use to you along your pickleball journey beyond “you won that game or X games that day.” Perhaps when you win a bunch of games you could say “That was great. I have reached the pinnacle of all pickleball and have nothing more to do.” But you know that makes no sense, right?

Even though you won a lot that day, you probably noticed how you had difficulty with a particular shot. Or how you could have done a bit better in some situation or another. You know that you still have more room to grow. The mere fact of winning also gives us nothing to chew on so that we can continue to get better.

Focus instead on 'actionable' metrics

Let’s now compare the win/loss metric to a specific and actionable metric about your play. “Today I hit 25 volleys into the net over 6 games” is an example of a useful metric. The metric here is: how often is my volley landing in the net? This metric measures your performance in a way that provides you with feedback you can use. You can work on your volley trajectory to reduce the net errors in your game. Hence, this metric has value.

When you pivot from useless to useful metrics, you gain an additional advantage. Focusing on process-driven metrics (e.g. keeping your volleys out of the net), allows you to gain the improved results you are looking for. The better each part of your game becomes, the better your overall results (i.e. winning) will be.

The win/loss metric fails in the real world

When you play pickleball, do you think you should win every single game that you play? Actually, no reason to stop there. Why not expect to win every single rally when you play? Take it one step further: let’s never miss another shot … ever again!! It is patently silly when we put it this way. You can see how completely unrealistic this way of thinking is.

Yet when we play we often fall into a fantasy world of believing that we should have won that game. Or that one. Or that one. We extend this idea that we should have won to everything that happens. When we lose a rally, the first question we ask ourselves is “what did we do wrong?” When we lose a game, we sometimes resort to “we should have won that game.”

This kind of thinking is, at a minimum, unproductive. Often, however, this kind of thinking can become damaging. In the short term, we are unable to concentrate on the next rally because we are ruminating on the past. Longer term, this sort of thinking chips away at our confidence as it causes us to hyperfocus on the negative – the loss.

To avoid these harms, we will need to exit the fantasy-land thinking that we should win because, well, we should win. As we discussed previously in this book, when we play “at level” we expect 50% wins and 50% losses.

This 50/50 proposition is the real world that we inhabit. Because this is the case, then you should, over time, be about equal in wins and losses. If our long-term reality is 50% each of winning and losing, then how does the win/loss metric help us? After all, we expect to be winning and losing the same number of games. I cannot stress this enough.

If you are playing at level, it means that the other team has a chance (50% if exactly at level) of beating you. If the other team has no chance of winning, then consider perhaps that you are not playing at level as there is no challenge to you. If you set a framework for yourself where winning is good and losing is bad, then you unnecessarily stack the mental deck against yourself. At level, you will lose 50% of the time. Using win/loss as your metric will leave you disappointed about 50% of the time.

And there is no reason to do this to yourself. When you use the win/loss metric, you are setting up a mental framework that is of no use to you and is going to leave you disappointed half the time. A lose-lose proposition, if you will allow the pun.

Tony Roig is a nationally recognized coach and host of the Pickleball Therapy podcast — dedicated to helping players navigate the mental challenges of pickleball. In his new book, Pickleball Therapy – The Book, Tony shares a perspective honed from a lifetime of sport and his years hosting the podcast as well as coaching thousands of pickleball players. Order your copy of the book here.