Take the Sun in Game One: The Equinox, the Coin Toss, and the End Nobody Wants

There is a week every September when the after-work game quietly turns into a different sport. Nobody changes the rules. Nobody gets worse. The sun just slides down the sky, sets up shop directly behind one baseline, and starts deciding points.

The equinox lands next week. On that day, and for a few weeks either side of it, the sun sets due west. Not northwest like it did in June, when the five o’clock sun still sat high and off to the side of your court. Due west, and low. Around five in the evening in the middle of the country it sits a bit above 20 degrees off the horizon. By six it’s closer to 10. Latitude shuffles those numbers a little, but the shape is the same everywhere: the sun spends the last hour of your play window at exactly the elevation where a lob lifts off your opponent’s paddle.

Most advice about playing in the sun stops at “wear a hat.” There’s a lot more to it, and the best part is hiding in the rulebook.

Why your courts face the sunset

USA Pickleball’s construction guidance says outdoor courts should run north-south so nobody looks directly into the sun in the morning or late afternoon. Tennis has had the same rule forever. So why does your local court stare right into the sunset?

Because a lot of the courts you play on were tennis courts first. The popular four-courts-on-one-tennis-court conversion often drops two pickleball courts on each side of the tennis net, rotated 90 degrees, with the pickleball nets running along the old service lines. A tennis court that was built correctly, north-south, produces four pickleball courts that run east-west. The parks department did everything right in 1988 and handed you a sun problem in 2026.

If your court already runs north-south, the sun still sits off to one side. Keep reading. That turns out to matter.

What the sun actually does to you

The ball is only “in the sun” for a fraction of a second. If that were the issue, you’d lose one lob a month. The real damage happens in the second after.

Look toward a low sun, even without staring at the disc, and light scatters inside your eye and washes contrast out of everything near it. Your pupils clamp down. The ball, which was a bright yellow object against a blue sky, becomes a dark speck against a white one. Then, when you finally look away, the afterimage sits in the middle of your vision for several seconds, which is a long time when someone is speeding up at your hip.

This is why the sun end loses more than lobs. Speed-ups are harder to read. Dinks lose their edges. You start guessing on balls you’d normally see fine, and you never connect it to the sun because you weren’t looking at the sun. You were looking near it, which is enough.

One more piece of geometry. A right-hander hits overheads with the contact point up and to the right of their head. If the sun sits to the right of the court’s axis, every right-handed overhead on that end is a stare-down with the disc. If it sits to the left, right-handers are fine and the lefty is blind. If you have a lefty partner, the sun tells you who takes overheads today. Nobody checks. Check.

The coin toss is backwards

Here’s where it gets interesting, because the rulebook sets up a trap and almost everyone walks into it.

Rule 5.A.1 gives the winner of the coin toss first choice of end, serve, receive, or defer. The other team gets what’s left. Most people take the serve, which is nearly worthless. The opening server gets one serve, not two, and at 4.0 and up the receiving team wins more rallies anyway because they’re the ones already at the kitchen. The end is the only asset in that toss with real value, and on an east-west court at five o’clock it’s a big one.

So take the end. Obviously. But which end?

Read the rest of Section 5. Teams switch ends after every game. In the deciding game, they switch again when the first team reaches 6 (or 8 in a game to 15, or 11 in a game to 21). Now follow that through a best-of-three:

• Game 1: you’re on the end you picked.
• Game 2: you’re on the other end.
• Game 3: you start on the end you picked, then switch at 6 and finish on the other one.

Whatever end you choose for game one, you will be standing on the opposite end when game three gets tight. The end you pick isn’t an end for a game. It’s an end for the first six points of the decider, and you’re handing your opponents the end for the finish.

Which means the play is to take the sun in game one. You eat it while everyone is fresh and the light is the least bad it will be all evening. You get the good end for all of game two. And you get the good end for the back half of game three, the part with the 9-9 speed-up battles and the 10-10 lobs, the part that decides who goes home happy. Your opponents get the sun for the finish, in the worst light of the night, and they chose it.

One caveat, because the sun moves. In an evening match the light gets worse with every game, which makes the sun-first logic stronger. In a morning match the sun is climbing and the worst of it is over by game two, so flip the whole thing and take the good end while it matters. A single game to 15 works the same way as a decider: the switch at 8 means the second half is longer and carries every pressure point. Sun first, clean finish.

One small bluff. Deferring hands the first choice to the other team. If they reflexively take the serve, you get the end. Against anyone who has read this paragraph it fails, and you lose nothing you cared about. Low risk, occasional payoff.

Open play has no coin toss and no switching. The team that walks onto the sun end eats it for an entire game, and if the rotation doesn’t shuffle ends, the same people eat it all night. Propose switching at 6. It takes fifteen seconds and it’s fairer than whatever the paddle rack is currently deciding.

Playing the sun end without falling apart

You’ll be on the bad end half the time regardless. Some things that help:

Change the default on lobs. On a normal day, a lob over your head is an overhead if you can get there. On a sun day, agree with your partner beforehand that anything you lose in the sun gets bounced. Turn, run, let it drop, and put a deep reset or a lob back. You give up the put-away. You keep the point, which beats whiffing an overhead into the fence with your eyes closed.

Steal the outfielder’s trick. Baseball outfielders don’t look into the sun for a fly ball. They raise the glove to block the disc, track the ball over the top of the glove while it’s above the sun, then flip and track it under the glove as it drops below. Your free hand does the same job. Get it up early, before you need it. A hat brim works too if you tilt your head to put the brim on the disc.

Don’t feed the lob. Lobs come off high, floaty dinks. On the sun end, dink lower and deeper, toward their feet. A ball at shoelace height is hard to lift with any accuracy. You’ll lose a few extra dinks in the net. That’s the tax, and it’s cheaper than the alternative.

Block, don’t counter. Speed-ups are harder to see in the glare. A calm block into the kitchen resets the rally. A counter you didn’t fully see goes into the parking lot.

Playing with the sun at your back

Now the fun part. The other team is squinting. Be a jerk about it, within the rules.

Lob more than feels reasonable. The offensive lob is a low-percentage shot on a normal day and a very good one when the opponents can’t see the top of it. Aim it to the sun side of the court, so their tracking path runs straight through the disc.

Lift everything else too. A high, deep return of serve makes the server track a ball into the sun and then handle a high bounce. It’s a moonball. It’s ugly. It works. Same logic for the lob serve: a ball dropping steeply out of a bright sky is a ball the returner sees late. If you’ve been meaning to try it, this is the week.

Don’t get greedy. In an hour it’s your turn.

Gear, briefly

A full brim, not a visor, because a visor leaves the exact spot you’re tracking uncovered. We said that in the wind piece and it’s twice as true here.

On lenses: polarization removes glare bouncing off the court, cars, and windows. It does nothing to the disc itself. What helps is a darker tint and a wraparound frame that stops light leaking in from the side, which is exactly how a low sun arrives. And if you’re wearing glasses anyway, wear the ones that stop a ball.

Fix the court, not just the game

If your park is building or resurfacing, show up to the meeting and say the words “north-south.” Orientation is the one glare fix that costs nothing at design time and can never be added later. The people fighting you on noise won’t fight you on this. They don’t care which way the court points.

If the court already runs east-west, ask for a windscreen on the west fence. A ten-foot screen on a fence 35 feet or so from where you stand blocks everything below roughly 15 degrees, which is the last forty-five minutes before sunset. That’s the entire problem, for the price of a mesh tarp.

Until then: win the toss, take the sun, and make them finish in it.