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The Pickleball Lab

The Pickleball Lab

About Josh

Hi! I’m Joshua Mackens, the Founder and one of the coaches here at The Pickleball Lab!

You can learn a bit more about The Pickleball Lab, more of my journey, and how it got started here.

But for a brief synopsis: I started playing Pickleball in January 2023 when my girlfriend and her family introduced me to it.

And I absolutely loved it.

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For the first four months or so I just played games constantly. Never drilling or practicing, mostly because I didn’t know to drill and even if I had, I wouldn’t have known how.

However, in June of 2023 when I moved to Indianapolis, I then decided I liked the game enough to start getting serious. My background in basketball helped me out quite a bit and I knew in order to get better, I had to start practicing. But I didn’t even know if people did that or not.

Luckily, Indianapolis pickleball players take the game pretty seriously, so I was able to find a drilling partner pretty quickly in Kyle. Kyle and I drilled consistently around 4-5 days a week.

Because of this, I started to notice myself getting better and better. And I had friends and family remark on it too. I was watching YouTube videos, breaking down professional matches in film study, & practicing constantly. By this time I had put hundreds if not over a thousand hours into pickleball.

And that’s when I started to get coaching requests. I didn’t even have to consider it. I knew as soon as I was asked that I wanted to coach. I love people and love to educate. I was an education major (for a semester) in college and in my previous life had owned a digital marketing company where I had to do training constantly. And in that same company I loved consulting. I loved working with people and helping them improve.

So, I decided I wanted to to continue that in pickleball and started to try to figure out how share my knowledge.

And that’s when I started The Pickleball Lab in September of 2023.

While this was going on, I entered my first tournament in October of 2023 (you can see my tournament results below) and it wasn’t quite the result I was looking for. So, I decided to train harder and harder. And then the next tournament I was in, we won gold.

That was such an amazing feeling and gave me my first taste of success. And many tournaments later, I haven’t stopped drilling and practicing since.

As far as coaching goes, in February of 2023 I joined the team at IRC here in Indianapolis as a Pickleball Pro. I coach now over at IRC East as well as outside at various courts.

And I am continuing to pursue growing the game and helping people get better at pickleball through The Pickleball Lab as well.

Our YouTube channel is about to ramp up where we will be putting tons of instructional videos up at and we will also be offering online courses soon too.

However, for now, you can learn more about my in person coaching here.

And if you have any questions you can always contact me here.

 

Tournament Results

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Life Time Castle Creek Fall Classic Tournament

 

 

Tournament Summary:

This was my first ever tournament and my partner was none other than my girlfriend Ashlee. Which is only right because she actually introduced me to the game of Pickleball in January ’23.

We did really well in pool play, going 3-1. We also did well in the knockout stage, winning our quarterfinals and semifinals, making it to the gold medal match.

In the gold medal match we actually got up around 11-9 but the gold medal match was played to 15 and the other team ended up playing extremely well and came back to beat us.

All in all, for our first tournament, it was a ton of fun.

 

 

The Hungry Games

Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of this tournament.

Tournament Summary:

My partner Kyle and I went into this tournament pretty confident in ourselves. We’d been drilling pretty much 5 days a week for 2 hours a day. We had put in the time and work and expected it pay off.

We got there and did very well in pool play. We went 3-1. We ended up moving to the quarter finals and unfortunately fell in that game. We got down around 7 points early. We dug ourselves out and actually went up 1 point but ended up losing in the end.

At the time, it was a disappointing result for us. We felt like we could have done much better. But the team we ran into was very good and played extremely well.

It was a great learning opportunity and just made us even more motivated to keep drilling and get back to another tournament and do our best to win it all.

 

The Crimson Pickle – Grand Opening Tournament

 

 

Tournament Summary:

After losing in the quarter finals in The Hungry Games in November, Kyle and I continued to drill and train for the following 2 months to get back to another tournament and try again. And The Grand Opening Tournament at The Crimson Pickle gave us that opportunity.

We started off strong in pool play again and went 3-1.

However, in the quarter finals we ran into what we thought was the hardest team in the tournament to play. We got down again. It was a little bit of a deja vu moment reminiscent of The Hungry Games. This time though, we got back up, stayed up, and ended up winning 15-13 (tournament games were played to 15) to move to the semi finals. Winning this quarter final was honestly a bit of a relief.

In the semi finals we played extremely well and ended up beating the only team that beat us in pool play 15 – 8 to move to the finals.

And in the finals we really hit our stride and ended up winning 15-2.

This was a huge moment for both of us as neither of us had won gold before and we were able to move on from the 3.5 division of pickleball. We both felt like we wanted to move up but needed to actually win or at least medal in a 3.5 event before we could. And after this tournament, we felt relieved that we could move up after accomplishing that goal.

 

 

Life Time February Doubles Tournament

 

 

 

Tournament Summary:

After winning the 3.5 – 4.0 division at The Crimson Pickle Grand Opening Tournament, I partnered up with Elliott Gilmore for this next tournament.

I felt confident that through all my drilling (still 5 days a week, 2 hours a day, sometimes more) that I had moved up probably closer to a 4.5 division. When playing in the previous tournament, I had probably outgrown the 3.5 division but I didn’t want to move up until we had won. So, when we won, I decided I wanted to challenge myself.

Elliott and I discussed it and we decided to enter into the highest division, which was the 4.5+ division (there was no division for 5.0+) for the Life Time February Doubles Tournament.

This tournament actually had a ton of our friends in it who are extremely good players. A lot of whom actually drill with Elliott and I. So, we knew the tournament was not only going to be a ton of fun but was going to be stacked with talented players. We knew the top of tournament would be approaching the 5.0 level and we were looking forward to the challenge.

We went 4-1 through the pool play stage with our lone loss coming in a game where we got up 10-4 and lost our edge and ended up losing. It was a good lesson for us to always stay in the game because your opponents are good players and they can make you pay for mental errors like that. However, even with the loss, our pool play record was good enough for the #1 overall seed in the single elimination bracket.

In the quarter finals we had a really good opponent that pushed us and we ended up winning 11-8.

In the semi finals we had another really strong opponent. They were former tennis players and they made us work for every point. We ended up moving to the finals with a score of 11-8.

And in the finals we met some good friends of ours that were likely the best team there that we could play and we ended up getting hot, winning the finals match 11-3.

Overall, it was a very fun tournament. It’s always fun to play with friends. And it’s also always fun to see your hard work pay off. Not to mention being able to jump a division and win a 4.5+ tournament with players at the top that were likely closer to 5.0.

All in all, it was a great tournament and the result was the one we had hoped for.

Onto the next one!