When a shot you’ve made a thousand times suddenly becomes impossible.
Have you ever stepped up to serve, bounced the ball, looked across the net…and suddenly felt like somebody stole your arm?
Welcome to the yips.
One minute, you’re serving perfectly normally. The next, your arm feels like spaghetti, the service box looks approximately three inches wide, and you’re wondering whether the pickleball gods have placed an irreversible curse upon you
And naturally, this tends to happen when the score actually matters.
So Tracie asked Leia Miller—coach, tournament player and now the force behind Leia Miller Pickleball—what the heck is going on when a completely automatic shot suddenly deserts us.
Leia has seen the serving yips in her students, experienced them herself and discovered that sometimes the solution is surprisingly simple: stop treating the serve like it’s a life-or-death event.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
Why pressure can make a perfectly reliable serve suddenly disappear
How creating a simple pre-serve ritual can settle your brain
Why Leia wants you to say the score, breathe and take your time
The physical adjustment that can make your serve feel more controlled
Why trying to hit the world’s greatest serve may be exactly the wrong goal
How calling one bad shot “the yips” can turn a mistake into a self-fulfilling prophecy
And we get into something bigger than serving: how easily we talk ourselves out of shots we actually know how to hit.
The big takeaway:
You probably haven’t forgotten how to serve. Your brain has just decided to make the whole thing much more important than it needs to be.
Sometimes the smartest goal is also the simplest one:
Just. Get. The. Ball. Over. The. Net.
Share this with a pickleball friend whose perfectly reliable serve mysteriously disappears the second the score gets tight and tell them to SUBSCRIBE.
Short, practical insights for recreational players who want answers.
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