How to Keep Playing Great Pickleball at 70 and Beyond

By Steve Kennedy · South Florida Pickleball Academy · Davie, FL

I'm Steve Kennedy. I coach at Bamford Park in Davie, and some of my favorite students are in their 70s and 80s. They didn't take up pickleball to fill time. They love this game the way I love it, and what they want from me is simple: help me keep playing well for as long as possible.

That's worth saying plainly, because most advice for older athletes is written as if the goal were merely to avoid injury. The real goal is bigger. You've built a game, a skill, a weekly rhythm, a circle of friends around these courts, and the job now is to protect all of it. Everything in this article serves that. The players I know who are still competing sharply at 75 and 80 didn't get lucky. They made specific adjustments, usually in their late 60s, and those adjustments are learnable.

Recovery becomes part of your game

The biggest single change past 70 is that recovery stops being optional. Your body still adapts and improves with training at any age, and the research on older athletes is genuinely encouraging on this point. What changes is the repair timeline. The soreness that cleared overnight at 55 now takes 48 hours, and playing hard on unrepaired muscle is how small problems become long layoffs.

Practical rules my older students follow:

• Hard day, easy day. Never schedule two intense playing days back to back. A hard Tuesday earns a walk or a rest on Wednesday.
• Sleep is training. The repair happens overnight. Players who guard their sleep recover visibly faster than players who don't, and I can see the difference on court.
• Hydrate before you're thirsty. Thirst signals dull with age while South Florida heat does not. Start drinking water the evening before a morning session.
• Keep strength work in the week. Two short sessions of basic strength training, legs especially, plus daily calf raises, do more to protect your game than any gadget. Muscle you maintain now is muscle you get to keep playing with.
• Finish one game early. The most dangerous game of the day is the one you play on empty legs. Fatigue degrades your movement before your judgment notices, and that's when falls and strains happen. Leaving the courts wanting one more game is a good habit, and it also means you show up eager next time.

Schedule like a professional

Professional athletes don't train at random hours on random days, and past 70 you shouldn't either. Three well-spaced quality sessions beat five crammed ones, every time.

Play in the morning if you can. The heat is kinder, the courts here are livelier, and your energy is more predictable. Protect a full rest day or two each week without guilt, because that's where the improvement from your playing days is actually banked. And add ten minutes of real warm-up before every session: brisk walking, dynamic movement, slow calf raises, then progressive hitting from dinks outward. At this age the warm-up is a non-negotiable part of the session rather than a nicety.

If you take lessons or clinics, schedule them on fresh legs early in your week, then use the later sessions to apply what you worked on.

Doubles positioning that saves your legs

Here's the good news, and I've watched it play out hundreds of times: pickleball rewards positioning over athleticism more than any racquet sport I've played, and smart doubles is the great equalizer. A 72-year-old who understands the court beats a 50-year-old who runs everywhere, regularly. These adjustments cut your running dramatically without costing you points.

Live at the kitchen line. The kitchen line is the least demanding place on the court to play from. Balls come to you, reaches are short, and points are won with hands and touch rather than legs. The exhausting version of pickleball is the one played from mid-court, where every ball demands a lunge. Get to the line early and hold it.

Move as a unit and own your lanes. You and your partner should slide together, connected by an invisible rope, each covering your own half honestly. The players who run themselves ragged are the ones poaching, chasing angles that were their partner's, and recovering from positions they never should have left. Disciplined lane coverage cuts total movement enormously.

Let the lob bounce. Never backpedal. Turn, take an angled path back, and play it off the bounce, or let an obviously deep one go. Backpedaling for lobs is the single most dangerous movement in senior pickleball, and giving up an occasional point beats giving up a season.

Make the soft game your identity. Dinks, drops, resets, placement. The soft game requires touch and patience, which don't decline the way footspeed does, and it forces opponents into the long, controlled points that favor you. My rule for every serious student holds double here: put 80% of your drilling into the dink game. A 70-year-old with great hands at the kitchen line is a nightmare for opponents half his age, and I can introduce you to several.

Serve deep and return deep. Depth buys time, and time replaces the footspeed you'd otherwise need. It's the cheapest gift you can give your own legs.

The mental game of the aging athlete

I've competed my whole life, and I'll tell you the hardest opponent past a certain point is the memory of your younger self. Every athlete who plays long enough meets him. You'll reach for a ball you'd have gotten fifteen years ago, miss it, and feel something sharper than the lost point.

The players who thrive past 70 make peace with that opponent, and they do it by changing the scoreboard they use. Stop measuring yourself against the player you were. Start measuring craft: whether your drop was better this month than last month, whether you held the kitchen line longer, whether you broke down that hard-hitting younger pair with patience. Those measures can keep improving for years, and in my experience they genuinely do. Several of my students hit the best shots of their lives in their 70s, because touch and tactics reward accumulated hours, and they have more of those hours than anyone else on the court.

Guard the joy, too. Play with people you like. Keep one competitive game in your week to stay sharp, and let the rest be the social, laughing kind. The friendships around these courts are half of what you're protecting, and the players who remember that stay in the game longest.

You've spent years building something on the court. It's worth protecting properly, and the adjustments are very learnable with a coach who has seen them work. I'd be glad to help you make them.

Text Steve at (954) 461-9946 for private lessons and small-group clinics at Bamford Park in Davie. Mornings Monday through Friday, which happens to be exactly when smart senior players want to be on court anyway.

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