← Pickleball Together

Why we play pickleball with each other, not against

How a daily game with my wife became a cooperative way to play — one that couples can actually enjoy together.

By Alex P. Wang | October 7, 2026

About two months ago, my wife and I started playing pickleball. About an hour, almost every day. We don't play hard. The goal was never to beat each other. The goal was to exercise, have fun, and, I'll admit, lose a little weight while eating a little more. Two months in, I'm five pounds lighter. Pretty good deal.

That was my experience, not a promise. Regular physical activity supports weight management alongside healthy eating, and results vary from person to person.

We never wanted to beat each other

What kept us coming back was doing something together. A long rally felt good for both of us — and then we wanted the next one to be a little longer.

There was a practical problem too. I'm the stronger player, so in a regular game every point has a winner and a loser — and the loser would usually be her. That's no way to spend an hour with your wife.

Standard pickleball scoring works the other way. It rewards the shot your partner cannot reach: the sharp angle, the hard drive at the feet, the lob over the head. That works for competition. That does not work for two people who just want to play together for an hour.

The winning shots are also the risky ones

Chasing a winning shot means lunging, backpedaling, and diving. For older players, those movements matter. A 2021 study of emergency-department injuries among players aged 60 and older found that 63.3% of pickleball injuries in the study involved slips, trips, falls, or dives. A 2024 study of fracture cases found that most involved upper-extremity fractures after falls in women over 60. A 2025 Vanderbilt case series found soft-tissue strains and ruptures were the largest category.

These studies count people who needed care, not anyone's odds of getting hurt. But they point at something simple: the game gets riskier when someone has to win the point.

So we flipped the goal

The question became simple. What if the rules rewarded the game we already enjoyed? Keep the ball, the paddles, and the court. Change the purpose.

We call it Pickleball Together™.

Once the goal changed, everything else followed. Every shot is hit so your partner can return it. Lobs and smashes make no sense. Letting a difficult ball go becomes good play, not giving up. Nobody wins or loses, because there is only one team on the court — and the only measure is whether the team did a little better than the last rally, and a little better than yesterday.

We still wanted a score

To keep the game from getting boring, we needed a score — one that fits the purpose. So we came up with a way for the team, both players as one team, to score each game.

Counting shots mid-rally turned out to be hard. Noticing how long a rally lasted was easy. So a rally earns team points by its length, and longer rallies earn a lot more. Both players earn every point, and over weeks the team score becomes a small record of time well spent together.

The rally-to-rally chase is what keeps a single game interesting; the day-to-day chase is what brings you back tomorrow.

The scoring details live in the rulebook.

Easy in, easy out

A small 2018 study of middle-aged and older adults found pickleball provided moderate-intensity activity, with fitness, blood pressure, and cholesterol improvements after six weeks. That is real exercise, but only if you keep showing up.

AAOS guidance recommends warming up with easy hitting and keeping playing time manageable. So every session starts with a short, gentle warm-up and ends with a short wind-down. The games happen in between.

Who it is for

Anyone who would rather rally with someone than against them, at any age. But it is especially good for couples — a man and woman playing together.

Here is the problem with the regular game for a couple: men can usually play better than women. More power, more speed. So every game becomes a dilemma. Play your best, and your partner spends the hour losing. Hold back, and nobody is really playing. Either way, someone walks off the court feeling bad — and that feeling comes home with you.

Pickleball Together™ removes the dilemma instead of asking anyone to solve it. There is only one team, so there is no one to go easy on. Every shot is hit so your partner can return it, so the gap in strength stops mattering. And the score belongs to both of you: a 45-second rally is worth the same no matter who hit the last shot — there is no her rally or his rally, only the team's rally. And the only contest is with yourselves: can this rally top the last one? Can today top yesterday?

The full rules, scoring, and play styles live in the rulebook, and they'll keep improving as more people play and tell us what they enjoy.