What should you do when you aren’t happy with the choices in front of you? Create a new option. That’s exactly what we did with pickleball instructor certification. 

In this episode, Mark talks about launching Level 1 PB Instructor Certification through Pickleball Coaching International. 

You learn about what makes it stand out from the crowd and why PCI Instructor Certification might be right fro you. Hint: it’s 100% online! Check it out here. 

Discussed in this episode:

PCI Instructor Certification

Article: Why I’m Not a Certified PB Coach

Personal Video Analysis

Selkirk.com

JigsawHealth.com

Need help with Hydration & Recovery? Here’s the brand that we prefer to use: Jigsaw Health. Visit them at jigsawhealth.com. And when you use our code to make a purchase, you can save $10 (coupon code: PB3SS10), and support the work that we do here at Third Shot Sports!

Affiliate disclaimer: keep in mind that we may receive commissions when you click our links and make purchases. however, this does not impact our reviews. we try our best to keep things fair and balanced, in order to help you make the best choice for you.

Woah! We Launched Instructor Certification! Transcript

Host: Mark Renneson 

Where It All Started [0:01]

In early 2018, when I was already coaching Pickleball, I decided that it would be good for me, it would be in my own best interest if I went ahead and got some instructor certification for Pickleball. That would give me some credibility. That would give me some standing the in Pickleball world. It would just be good for business to go and do that. And at the time, there was one organization out there and I went, and I looked at their curriculum and I started to go through the process, and I wasn’t loving it. I didn’t think I would really on it a whole lot. But you know what, it was a hoop I was willing to jump through.

And as I went forward in that, that hoop became smaller and smaller, and smaller. That was because we were on really different pages when it came to teaching and learning Pickleball. We didn’t see things quite the same way. My colleagues thought that it was really, really important to teach all players how to be really great dinkers even though beginning players very rarely have a chance to play a dink because they very rarely receive a good drop when they’re up at the net. But great dinkers they should be, even though they will never use it in real life while they’re still at that beginning and novice level.

Also the third shot drop is really important to them, teaching players to play those third shot drops. Didn’t matter whether they hit 90% of them in the net or too high that they got punished. But that was 10% would pay off over time.

Anyway, all I know is I went ahead and did it, and got to the point where I realized where I couldn’t take it anymore. I would rather not have any sort of Pickleball instructor certification rather than jump through that increasingly tiny hoop.

So I went off on my own. I did my own work, I taught my own Pickleball. We still had students coming out. They didn’t really care whether I had instructor certification for Pickleball or not. And it wasn’t too long after that that I thought, “Hey, maybe we can offer an alternative? Maybe there are other people out there who feel like I do, who want to put their students first rather than some idealized version of what Pickleball should be. Who want to teach in a way that’s safe and fun and effective, and really practical. Maybe there are other people out there who felt like that.”

And so in 2018, we launched Pickleball Coaching International. And Pickleball Coaching International, also known as PCI, wasn’t intended to be a certification outfit. It was intended to be an education outfit. While other people do the certification, we do Pickleball coaching education and we offered a whole bunch of resources, videos, articles, audio files, case studies. We teamed up with Selkirk so people could get 50% off of paddles. It was amazing!

I don’t know if anyone was going to sign up. I don’t know if they were going to join. It was $99 for the started plan, $149 if you also wanted insurance. I mean that’s a great deal but I don’t know if anyone’s going to pay. But guess what? They did. Hundreds and hundreds of people came out and said, “Yeah, we want to sign up for PCI.” That’s the camp where we find ourselves.

And so shortly after that, I wrote an article called “Why I’m Not Certified”. We put that on the PCI website. And that article more than – most others I’d say I’ve written, really resonated with people. Got a lot of emails from people saying, “Hey, that’s exactly how I feel. I want to teach Pickleball in a way that is practical, that will help my students right from day-one, that they can go out and have more fun on the court, and they won’t be embarrassed and they’ll be confident and competent, that’s where we want our students. So we launched PCI and we had hundreds and hundreds of members join, and it was great.

And over the last year or so, we’ve had a lot of those members come back and say to us, “Hey, what’s next?”

I’d say, “What do you mean what’s next?”

“Well PCI is good, the education is good but do you think you can do a certification program?”

I said, “Certification? I just wrote this article why I’m not certified? Why do you want a certification program?”

They said, “Oh well, the place that I’m going to work, the tennis club that I’m going to work at, the city that I’m going to work for, the community center that I’m going to volunteer at, they require people to have Pickleball instructor certification. And I don’t want to go elsewhere to do it because I’m not really in those camps. Can you offer it?”

And we also had people who come and said, “No, I don’t need it for a job. I just want to do it. I want the fulfillment that comes from going through a course, and studying and learning, and going through an assessment and then coming out the other side.”

And so what we did as of yesterday, it was a year in the making, as of yesterday, we launched Pickleball Instructor Certification from PCI.

And today on Pickleball Problems, that’s what we’re going to talk about.

 

The Rundown [4:55]

Alright! Welcome back to Pickleball Problems. I’m your host, Mark Renneson. And today, we’re talking about the Pickleball Coaching International Level One Instructor Certification Course. We just launched it. We’re in mid-May right now, 2020 when I’m talking to you and we just launched it yesterday, May 15. And really excited to give you a bit of a rundown about what it is, why people might be interested and what you can do to sign up?

So I already told you a little bit about the backstory. Didn’t really find a home with any of the other coaching certification programs, and so we built our own. And there’s a few things that you should know about it.

First, and this might be the most important one, and this is 100% online. So one of the real barriers to other certification programs is that you have to travel for them, right? They happen in whatever city and you have to fly or drive or take a bus. You got to often stay at a hotel overnight, and that can really add up. And I understand if you are someone who is going forward and say, “Hey, this is my brand-new profession. I’m going to invest heavily in it right away. I don’t mind spending, $500, $600, $700 jus to be able to go and do this,” then that might be okay.

But a lot of the people that I hear from are people who are volunteers. They are people who are working on coaching as a bit of a side gig. They’re just getting started and they don’t want to invest that kind of capital in just going to the workshop to do a course. So what we did is we built out this course where it’s all done online. So as soon as you sign up, if you go pickleballcoachinginternation.com/certification, as soon as you sign up you’re going to be emailed a welcome email. And attached to that welcome email is a PDF, and that PDF is full of all of the documents, we call them training documents,  all of the training documents that you’re going to need to go through the course. And I wrote all these documents myself and you’ll go through the documents. Very often, they will link you to the PCI website because you’re going to have to look at some material that’s already up there. And I think last time I said, it was like 68 or 69 pages long and that doesn’t include the links that take you to the PCI website. So it’s pretty comprehensive.

You’ll go through those materials and you go through it at your own pace. You’re not timed. The clock is not ticking once you received that email. So what’s nice about it is you don’t have to miss a day of work or leave your family or like I said, stay in hotels or take a flight somewhere to go and do this.

 

Training Materials  [7:20]

So you go through the training materials and when you’re ready – well, maybe I’ll tell a bit more about what those training materials are, what’s in them. So there’s a few different categories within the training materials. We’ve got whole sections on technique. We’ve got whole sections on tactics. At the very beginning, we have  a whole section on kind of who it is that you’re teaching and what the mentality of those players might be. And in a lot of cases, Pickleball lessons that are being done are introductory lessons whether it’s a brand-new, learn to play program or whether it’s a novice or intermediate session. And the mentality of those players is really important to take into consideration. Of course, not everyone has the same mentality. But very often those people doing the learn to play programs for example, they really just want to come and yeah, they want learn but they don’t want to embarrass themselves, right? They want to go out and they want to be able to play and have some confidence and not be embarrassed. And that’s quite different, that’s a different mentality than someone who comes out and says, “I want to be a 5.0 Pickleball player” right? So it’s important that we as instructors understand the mentality that most of our students are going to have when they come. So it’s a whole section on that.

We talked about technical fundamentals and you can see how that links up to what we have on the PCI website. We talk about tactics.

In addition, we talked about how to organize people. There’s just so much in those training materials, that’s why it takes quite a while to do it. I’d argue it takes about 15 hours maybe to go through all of the training materials.

So yeah, it’s done 100% online and you’ll go through them at your own speed.

 

And when you’re done going through them at your own speed, that’s the time where if you’re ready, you can go and take the evaluations. There are four evaluations to take and we’re going to talk about all of them in just a minute.

Sponsor: Selkirk Sport

 

 Four Evaluations [8:57]

Alright, welcome back to Pickleball Problems. I’m Mark Renneson. Today, we’re talking about the brand-new Pickleball Coaching International Pickleball Instructor Certification Course.

And I just finished talking about the training materials that you’ll receive. Once you’ve gone through the training materials, you feel confident that you understand them, then you can take your evaluations. And there are four evaluations to take.

So just to be clear, you don’t earn PCI Instructor Certification just because you read the materials or signed up. There’s no rubber stamp here. It’s really important to me that this is actually a pretty tough course to make your way through because my credibility is kind of the line there, and our company’s credibility is kind of on the line. If this is essentially a rubber stamp, then that’s no good for us or frankly for the people taking the course.

So there’s four evaluations that you have to pass. Three of those evaluations take place on a Pickleball court and one of them does not.

 

Knowledge Test [10:43]

Let’s talk about the one does not take place on the Pickleball court first. This is called the knowledge test. And what will happen is this is a quiz that you’ll do online. I believe there’s 36 questions. And this knowledge test is based on the material that’s in the training documents. So when you’ve gone through all those 69 plus pages, there’s information in there that you need to be able to draw on to be able to answer the questions, or also on the PCI website. This is the kind of test – I mean, if you’re like me, you’ve probably gone through online tests before and sometimes you even look at the test first and say, “Can I just do this whole test without going through the materials and save myself some time? Do I have that much background knowledge that I can just wing it?” You can try to do that with this test. My very strong suspicion is that you will fail.

Oh, by the way, to pass this test, you’ve got to earn 85% or better. This is the kind of test that really relies on the materials that we’ve provided, so it’s going to be important that you go through them and you study them before you take that knowledge test.

 

Teaching Evaluation [11:54]

So you go through your knowledge test, you got to get 26 out of 31, that’s 85% roughly. And then you have three more tests to do and these are on-court tests.

So the first on-court test – well, you can do them any order you want, but the first on-court test I’m going to talk about is called the teaching evaluation.

The teaching evaluation, actually you don’t need another person for this. Imagine that you’re standing in front of a group and you are explaining a teaching point. For example, the way that the horizontal paddle angle at the moment of contact with the ball is what controls the direction that a serve travels. So the teaching point is the horizontal angle of my paddle at the moment of contact controls the direction that the serve travels. Now, you’re going to have to explain that to your students somehow, kind of like what I just did with you. So what you’ll do in this evaluation and there are four teaching points, I think that you have to do this for. So you’ll stand in front of your camera and you will talk about what we can setting the sage or setting the context.

It’s like, “Hey, when you’re serving, it might be important to be able to control the direction of your serve.” You’re going to have to explain the tactic. Why does this even matter? Oh wouldn’t it be great if you could pull your opponents off the court so that they had further to run to get back to into it. Wouldn’t it be great if you could identify a weakness of your opponent and then serve right to that weakness? Wouldn’t it be great if your opponent was cheating over to one side of the service box, you could then hit to the other one and make them move, right? So you have to set up some sort of tactical significance for why you’re teaching them this thing, why do they care about it?

And then finally part three, is you have to be able to talk about what that teaching point is. Hey, the horizontal angle of the paddle at the moment of contact controls the direction of the ball. And as you’re talking about it, you also have to demonstrate. When you demonstrate teaching points, it’s important to hit balls. This is something instructors often miss. And so you have to be able to demonstrate the teaching point that you’re talking about after having said that tactical context as you’re doing it.

So there’s a lot going on here, and you have to deliver those. We give you what the topics are so you don’t have to make them up or anything like that. You just have to be really – you have to show that you can deliver them in a clear, concise, and correct way.

And that is known as the teaching evaluation and there are four different elements to it that you have to do and submit. Once you’ve done that, congratulations! You have completed the second of the four evaluations.

We’re going to talk about the next two in just a second.

Sponsor: Jigsaw Health

 

Playing Skill Evaluation 15:12

Alright, welcome back to Pickleball Problems. Today, we’re talking about the PCI Level One Instructor Certification Course, just newly launched. And we just finished talking about the two evaluations that you’re going to be doing, or the first two of four. One is the knowledge test that you do online. The second is the teaching evaluation where you can show that you can deliver a teaching point in a really clear and concise way as well as hit balls while you do it.

Now, the third test that you’re going to have to do, and this one is also done on court. And this one, you’re going to need some sort of assistant for, and this person should be of an equal skill level or better, is fine as well, and we call this the playing skill evaluation. Now, I get it. you could be an amazing player and not a great instructor. And you could be a great instructor and not a superstar player. But here’s the thing, if you want to be a Pickleball instructor and have some credibility and be able to hold your own out there, you have to be able to play. You have to have some competent skill level. That’s going to help with your credibility. If you go out there and you say, “Oh yeah, it’s really important you can return serve deep,” and you can’t consistently return serve deep, that’s going to be a problem. If you tell your students that, “Hey, when your opponents are up at the net, it’s important to keep the ball low.” But as you start to rally with the person who’s up at the net, you hit one ball in the net and you hit one ball over their shoulders and you hit another ball in the net – well, that’s not going to give you a lot of credibility either, and so it is important. It’s not the most important thing but it is important that certified instructors, at least by us, Pickleball Coaching International, can demonstrate a certain level of playing skill. And so, what we do is we outline it. You can see exactly what this test looks like, pickleballcoachinginternational.com/certification, and you can see the video. And there’s a whole series of tests, of skills that you have to show that you have. So let’s see if I can remember all of them off the top of my head.

Rallying from baseline to baseline on half the court. A baseline groundstroke rally, you have to show that you can do that consistently, sending the ball back and forth with the forehand and the backhand, and hitting the ball within that half of the court and deep enough that your partner can play from the baseline. Simple baseline – I shouldn’t say simple. A baseline groundstroke rally using three forehands and three backhands, you have to be able to do that.

You also have to be able to rally from the baseline when your opponent is up at the net, I just referenced that one. And when you’re opponent is at that net, it’s also important that you keep the ball low, right? Because if you hit a high ball as your opponents are at the net, they either fly along and go out or they get pounded by your opponents, so you got to keep the ball low. And so there’s an element of this evaluation where you have to rally from the baseline, keeping the ball below the shoulders of your partner.

There is another evaluation where you have to show that you can volley. So when you’re up at the kitchen and your opponents are at the baseline or in this case, your assistant, and they’re hitting balls to you, you have to be able to show that you can volley back to the baseline on half a court consistently so you can get it back to your partner who’s at the baseline, that’s an important skill, to control your volleys. When you’re up at the net, sometimes, you get lobbed and so you have to show that you can receive that lob and send it back with an overhead smash. It doesn’t have to be a devastating overhead smasht that finishes the point. No, you got to be able to hit that overhead smash on the half the court where you can control the speed and the direction and the depth of that overhead smash.

And finally, it’s important that you can control your serve. And so, what we do it you have to serve five on the right side of the court, five on the left side of the court. And there is a cone right in the middle of each service box. And your assistant would tell you when to serve to the left side of the cone or the right side of the cone. It’s not a very small target, it’s half the court you have to aim for and you’ve got to be able to show that you can hit those serves with some directional control. And if you do all these things well and then you submit your video, boom, you’ve passed that evaluation.

So now we’ve got three of the evaluations done, two of them have been on court, one of them was on the computer.  And in just a second, we’re going to talk about the fourth and final evaluation.

Sponsor: Third Shot Sports

 

Final Evaluation [20:03]

Alright, welcome back to Pickleball Problems. Today, we’re talking about PCI Level One Instructor Certification, newly launched. If you want to be a Pickleball instructor through PCI with Pickleball Coaching International Certification and all the benefits that come with that, then you might want to go check it out, pickleballcoachinginternational.com/certification.

Now, the fourth evaluation that you’re going to have to do is also on court an this is one where you’re going to need some helpers, some players. You’re going to need three or four of them. And what you need to be able to show, we call this the demonstration evaluation. You have to be able to set up and run different playing activities. Sometimes people call them drills. You’ve got to be able to set up and run this in a way that matches the lesson plan. And so what’s I’ve done – there are five different activities, five different drills that you have to run through with your players, and it’s fairly straight forward. You have to set up your court so that it’s safe. You have to put all of the players out in the correct positions, and then you have to demonstrate to those players exactly how the drill, how the activity should be done.

So one example that we have is we call it Serve Return Plus One. And so, what happens is on a cross-court on the diagonal, you are going to serve and you have to try to serve deep. You put a cone out there about ¾ court . You have a cone on your ¾ court on your side as well. You serve, trying to get it past the cone. Your partner returns the serve trying to get it pass the cone and then you hit some sort of third shot all cross-court. And then they catch it, and then they serve, and you return, and they hit a third shot.

And so you have to demonstrate how to do this drill. Once you demonstrated it correctly and everyone understands, great! You then run the activity with your players. And if you have three players helping you, the you are the fourth one and you play in. And if you have four players helping you, then they’re the ones who run the drill.

And of course, you won’t be evaluated on how well your players do this drill or not, that’s not what makes a good coach, right? You will be evaluated on how well you set up the court, you put people in position, and then do you demonstrate correctly how to do the activity.

There are other ones as well. One of them is a two on one activity where you imagine you have a semi-private lesson. You’ve got two people there and you need to assess their skills as a team. And so, you set up a court in a particular way and then you run through that activity.

So what we’re doing here even though this is an online course, you’re still on-court showing us your stuff. And you take a video of it and then you send all of these videos in for an assessment.

By the way, we make it exceedingly clear how you’re being measured, how you’re being assessed. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll have access to the rubric so you can see exactly the marking scheme that we’re using. And once you’ve passed all four of those evaluations, then you have earned PCI Level One Certification, yey!

 

What’s In It For You? [22:59]

So what else do you need to know? Why else might you benefit from having PCI Level One Certification? Well, I already mentioned a few of the things. Our good friends at Selkirk Sport offer 50% off the Selkirk paddle of your choice, so it’s a $75 value right there. They also offer through us really great pricing on sort of lower-end paddles that are really great if you’re running a program at a community center or if you want some demo paddles to have on hand. Selkirk’s been a great partner with us for PCI.

Other things you get, by signing up and joining and going for the certification, you get one year of access to all the Pickleball Coaching International resources online. So if you’re looking for drill ideas, if you’re looking for business development ideas for your coaching business, if you’re looking for a whole section of case studies, we have of this on the PCI website that you’ll have access to, that will help you with your coaching as you go forward.

Liability insurance, it is included. So when you sign up, and you go ahead and you pass your instructor certification, you will get a year of liability insurance, that’s included in the price. So it’s a really great deal. Personally, I know I wouldn’t be on the court coaching if I didn’t have liability insurance. We live in a fairly litigious society and you will want to protect yourself, so we thought that would be a great thing to offer. And for the price, I mean – we should talk about the prices.

 

What’s the Cost? [24:28]

So here is how it works, so right now we are working on rolling this out in Canada. It’s not quite there yet. So right now, we’re focused on the United States and internationally. And so let’s say you’re not a current PCI member, you haven’t joined Pickleball Coaching International just as a general member, you’re brand-new. So the cost is just US$249, all-in. And that is going to get you membership for the year, liability insurance, access to all the testing that you’re going to do, access to all of the materials, access to the great Selkirk deals, so $249.

Now let’s say that you’re already a Pickleball Coaching International member and I know many of you are. Well, guess what? We’re going to deduct the cost of your membership from that price. So let’s say you’re a starter member with PCI and you paid $100 to join Pickleball Coaching International six months ago before we launched the certification. The $249 price, we’re going to deduct the cost of your current membership because remember, your membership is included. So for you, it would be $149. So even if you’re paying the top price because you’re coming in as a brand-new PCI person, $249, that’s still a great deal. And by the way, much less expensive than if you went elsewhere and had to travel and stay in hotels and miss work and all that stuff. So that’s how it works.

 

Conclusion [25:45]

I hope I gave you a pretty good outline of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, what it looks like. You can get way more information at pickleballcoachinginternational.com/certification and you can check it out. If you have any questions, please hit me up, mark@thirdshotsports.com or you can find this at info@pickleballcoachinginternational.com. You know how to find us everywhere; Facebook, Instagram, all that stuff.

And I really hope whether you’re currently coaching and looking to advance your skills, whether you’re thinking about getting involved in the coaching game, whatever your relationship to coaching might be – I mean, I even had someone this morning emailed and say, “Hey, I just signed up and it’s not because I really coach yet besides helping people here and there, I just want to improve my own understanding of technique and tactics and organization and all that.” And we can have those people too.

So give it a look, pickleballcoachinginternational.com/certification. And if you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, this is Mark Renneson coming to you from my closet. We’re still in quarantine time. My children watching Paw Patrol downstairs, I had to hide myself in the closet to record this for you. Hope you’re doing well, hope you’re staying safe. Let me know if you have any questions.

Until next time, I’m Mark Renneson from Third Shot Sports, and Pickleball Coaching International