By Casie Caldwell
On Dinks on Tap, Lauren and I ask our guests about their biggest pickleball pet peeve. Well, pull up a chair. Apparently, mine requires a blog.
I have waited my entire pickleball career for this moment. Four years to be exact. Please respect my tenure.
Finally, the pickleball world is discussing something I have been quietly, and occasionally quite loudly, losing my mind over: People who scream like they just won Wimbledon because their opponent hit a ball into the net.
Enter Genie Bouchard and Maria Ford.
Their recent Chicago Cup match featured loud celebrations from Ford, disputed calls, and a frosty finish without the customary paddle tap. The internet had thoughts. Naturally. I’m calling it “the scream heard around the pickleball world.”
And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, I felt seen.
Like someone had finally brought my complaint to management.
Here’s the deal. I love a celebration. Hit an incredible winner? Scream. Win a ridiculous hands battle? Let it out. Chase down a ball that required your hamstrings to revisit their twenties? Honey, I’ll celebrate with you. But if I hit my third-shot drop into the net, and you respond like you’ve just secured your fifth Wimbledon title?
What, exactly, are we celebrating? You stood there. I did the disappointing thing. We both saw it.
And before someone says, “You’re just trying to police people’s joy,” let me save us both some time. I am a 53-year-old woman who plans her schedule around hitting a plastic ball and having drinks afterward. I am deeply committed to joy. I just don’t need your joy screaming directly into the open wound of my terrible backhand. There’s a difference between celebrating a great point and throwing a parade for somebody else’s mistake.
Which brings me to my own deeply embarrassing contribution to this conversation. Because unfortunately, I have receipts. And some of them are against me.
At the beginning of the summer, Lauren and I played in a local tournament against two women in their twenties. We could have been their mothers, and by the end of the match, I wanted to call their mothers.
These girls screamed the entire time. Not an occasional “Let’s go!” after a great rally. No, it was full-volume, somebody-check-the-baby-monitor screaming.
We missed. They screamed.
They won a point. They screamed.
I began to wonder whether the entry fee included a nap.
We lost that first match.
Then Lauren and I won all our other matches, worked our way through the bracket, and landed in the gold medal match.
Against, you guessed it, the screaming twenty-somethings.
At this point, a mature adult might have taken a breath, focused on her game, and trusted that good pickleball would speak for itself. I looked at Lauren. “I apologize for what I’m about to do, but we need a new strategy.” Her eyes got big and then she said, “OK, let’s go.”
This is an important thing to understand about a good partner: sometimes she supports your growth. Sometimes she witnesses your regression and agrees to cover the middle. I walked onto that court and became the very thing I despised.
Every point we won?
I screamed.
A winner? Screamed.
An unforced error? Screamed.
A perfectly ordinary point that warranted absolutely no public announcement? You would have thought I’d just been reunited with my family after six years at sea.
I was obnoxious. I was excessive. I was out of my 53-year-old mind.
Somewhere inside me, a toddler had found a paddle and been given full decision-making authority. And yes, I understood the irony. I was protesting unnecessary screaming through an aggressive campaign of unnecessary screaming.
But guess what? We won gold.
And because apparently I had not yet exhausted my commitment to making this awkward, I had to say something during the paddle tap. With our opponents licking their wounds, I delivered these words of wisdom: “Doesn’t feel real good when someone’s screaming after all your shots, huh?”
Then I took my baby cries all the way to the gold medal podium. Was I proud of winning? Absolutely. Was I proud of the performance art that accompanied it? No. It was embarrassing. Truly. I had set out to demonstrate how ridiculous they sounded and successfully demonstrated how ridiculous I could sound.
Gold medal in pickleball. Participation ribbon in emotional regulation.
I wish I could tell you there was a beautiful moment of mutual understanding afterward. That we all grew, hugged, and agreed to use our inside voices. I have no idea what they took from it. I know I left with a medal and the uncomfortable knowledge that I’d given a very convincing audition for the behavior I hated.
But my point, the one I could have made without turning the gold medal court into a daycare uprising, still stands.
Celebrate all you want when you earn it. Have some class when your opponent hands it to you.
Yes, you can force an error. Yes, a long, hard-fought rally can end with a ball in the net and still deserve a full-body celebration. We know the difference. I’m talking about the routine miss. The easy return dumped into the net. The third shot of a match that has barely begun.
Take the point. Tap your partner’s paddle. Be happy. You do not need to provide a soundtrack to my disappointment. I already have an internal monologue handling that, and she is thorough.
That’s why this Genie and Maria conversation hits such a nerve for me. It’s a bigger, louder version of something we encounter on our own courts. Most of us want to compete hard, play well, and enjoy the people across the net enough to consider having a margarita with them afterward. It gets harder to extend that invitation when someone has spent the last twenty minutes screaming at your mistakes.
And I say that as someone who has been that someone.
For one gold medal match.
With witnesses.
PSA: If your opponent hands you a point, accept the gift graciously. You don’t have to scream at the person who gave it to you. And if you ever catch me doing it again, please hand me a juice box and tell Lauren it’s time to take me home.
Cheers! 🥂