Chemistry Is Mostly a Checklist (Ask Ben Johns)

Thursday night in Mesa, Ben Johns and Federico Staksrud walked out as the No. 1 seeds in men’s doubles at the Veolia Arizona Open. Johns’s regular partner, Gabe Tardio, was out of the country, so two of the best players alive teamed up for the first time. It was supposed to be like borrowing a Ferrari because your Porsche is in the shop.

They lost 11-4, 11-5. Pickleball.com clocked it at 34 minutes. The team across the net, Nico Acevedo and Yuta Funemizu, were the 15 seeds.

The easy explanation is that chemistry takes time, and the broadcast booth reached for it. We’ve reached for it too. In our guide to picking a doubles partner we told you to give a new partnership eight to ten sessions, and we wrote, in so many words, “You can’t shortcut chemistry.”

Here’s what bugs me about that explanation. According to The Dink’s breakdown of the match, Acevedo and Funemizu were a new pairing too. They had barely played together. Asked afterward how they pulled it off, Acevedo said, “I honestly have no idea.”

I think he has some idea. It’s in what they said next.

Two new teams, one conversation

In that same Dink piece, the winners described what they did before the match. They talked about energy, because Acevedo was coming off a draining earlier match and didn’t have the legs for long grinding rallies. And they agreed to, quoting here, “communicate a lot on the kitchen line so we could make clear decisions and stay aggressive.”

Now the other side of the net. Per the same breakdown, Johns and Staksrud were working out their system during the match. Funemizu kept sending balls through the middle, which forced late decisions about whose ball it was. Staksrud was late covering fourth shots. Johns started throwing frustrated cross-body attacks, which is about as in character for him as a foot fault. One more wrinkle from pickleball.com’s tournament preview: Staksrud had only recently moved back to the right side after three seasons on the left.

So one brand-new team showed up with a plan that accounted for a tired guy’s legs. The other showed up with a small museum’s worth of medals and nobody sure who had the middle.

I don’t want to oversell this. Funemizu was, in pickleball.com’s words, “nearly unattackable” that night, and sometimes the other team just plays out of its mind. It wasn’t a fluke, either. Those two kept winning until they were playing for gold on Sunday. But think about what the match says. If Ben Johns can get run off the court in half an hour partly because nobody settled who owns which ball, what happens to you and Doug, who you met at the paddle rack forty seconds ago?

You’ll be fine, actually. Better than fine, if you talk.

Chemistry is two different things

Part of it is telepathy. You know your partner’s dink gets shorter when they’re nervous. You know they’re about to go for the erne before they do. That takes months and nothing speeds it up, so our old advice stands.

The other part is a short list of decisions that any two people could make in advance, and mostly don’t. At the rec level I’d argue that’s the bigger part. You don’t lose points with a stranger because you failed to anticipate their inside-out roll. You lose them because a ball went between you and you both watched it land, then both said “sorry.”

Those decisions fit in a warm-up. Here’s my list. Ask the questions out loud, even though it feels dorky.

The five-minute contract

Who has the middle?

We wrote a whole post on the middle crisis, so the short version is that the forehand in the middle takes it. With a stranger, add a second clause, because “forehand takes middle” falls apart once the ball starts moving side to side. Coaches call it respecting the X: whoever is diagonal from the ball owns the middle, and whoever is straight across from the ball guards their line. If the ball is in front of your partner, the middle is yours, even on your backhand.

Say both rules before the first serve. This is the exact seam Funemizu kept poking in Mesa, and it worked on the most decorated player in the sport. It will work on you.

Which side, and are we stacking?

Ask “do you have a side?” Most people do, and most are too polite to bring it up. They’ll just play worse on the wrong one and stew about it.

Then resist the urge to get fancy. With a brand-new partner, don’t full stack unless you’ve both done it a lot. A half-remembered stack bleeds points through wrong-server faults and sprinting returners, and it costs more than the wrong side ever would. If one of you really needs the left, half stack on your serve and play straight up on returns. Even Staksrud, who is better at pickleball than everyone reading this combined, was still settling back into the right side.

Who gets the lob?

Two systems work. Everybody takes their own, or the partner runs the diagonal and you switch. What doesn’t work is both of you backpedaling, then both stopping. Pick one and agree that the word is “switch.”

This is also the moment to confess your physical limits. “I don’t chase lobs, my left knee is older than I am” is useful information. Acevedo and Funemizu built a game plan around one guy’s tired legs. You can build one around a knee brace.

What happens when one of us drives?

If I drive the third, are you crashing? The shake and bake only works when the non-hitter knows it’s coming and moves in hunting the pop-up. With a stranger, the driver’s partner usually stands at the baseline admiring the drive, and then the fourth shot lands at their feet. Notice that “late on the fourth shot” showed up in the Johns and Staksrud autopsy too.

So agree on it. If I drive, you go. If I drop, we go together. Same deal at the kitchen line: if either of us speeds up, the other gets their paddle up and squeezes the middle, because that’s where the counter tends to come back.

What are the words?

“Mine,” “yours,” “switch,” and one word for leave it. I like “no” because it’s one syllable and hard to mishear. Warn your partner that you’ll be yelling it, so they don’t take it personally.

We covered this last week: anything you call while the ball is still in the air counts as partner communication under the rules. It isn’t a line call, so nobody gets penalized if the ball drops in. And the partner who isn’t being shot at always has the better view.

What don’t you have?

Nobody asks this one. Everyone will tell you their favorite side. Nobody volunteers “my backhand is decorative” or “I can’t reset a hard drive to save my life.” But your partner will find out by the fourth point, and so will the other team. If I know up front, I can cheat a step toward your backhand and take more of the middle. If I find out at 3-7, all I can do is make a face.

Go first. Confess yours, and they’ll usually confess back.

What the contract won’t do

It won’t make you telepathic. After eight to ten sessions you’ll know things about a partner that no checklist can hand you, and that’s still the honest timeline for judging whether a partnership is any good. The contract has a smaller job. It keeps day one from being a disaster.

It also won’t save you from a team that’s simply on fire. Funemizu probably beats plenty of well-organized pairs the way he played Thursday.

And at open play you won’t get five minutes. You’ll get the walk from the fence to the baseline, which is about enough time for the first question and the fifth. “Forehand takes middle, diagonal player covers it when things get fast, and I’m going to yell ‘no’ at you a lot. Cool?” It sounds ridiculous. It’s also more planning than the top seeds at a PPA event appeared to have last Thursday.

Ben Johns will be fine. Tardio gets back, order gets restored, and this becomes a trivia question. The rest of us have Doug.

Talk to Doug.