Before you can move well, you have to stand well — and in pickleball the stand happens between shots, in the half-second when the ball is on the other paddle. How wide your feet are in that moment quietly decides how quickly and how balanced your first step is. Too narrow and you tip. Too wide and you're stuck. There's a sweet spot, and it's simpler than it sounds.

Why width matters more than it looks

Stand with your feet close together and you're balanced on a narrow base — the smallest gust of a ball to your side and you're falling before you're moving, catching yourself instead of pushing off. Every reach becomes a save.

Now stand with your feet way out wide, like you're bracing for a shove. Stable, sure — but locked. To move left you first have to gather your wide-planted right foot back underneath you, and that gathering step is pure wasted time. A too-wide base trades quickness for a stability you didn't need.

The base that actually moves is right in between: feet about shoulder width and a touch beyond. Wide enough that no single ball tips you, narrow enough that either foot can push off now. It's the base sprinters, infielders, and boxers all share, and pickleball is no different — quick in every direction starts from a base that's ready in every direction.

What CoachVision measures

CoachVision reads your feet compared to your shoulders and reports it as ready stance, a ratio — around shoulder width and a bit beyond sits in the balanced zone, very narrow reads low, very wide reads high. It's a body-relative number, so a tall player and a short player are judged on the same scale.

Here's the honesty that matters: stance width only reads from behind. From the sideline, your feet line up front-to-back and the camera can't measure how far apart they are side-to-side — the width foreshortens away. So if your side clip says nothing about your stance, that's not a gap in your game, it's just the wrong angle for this one number. Film a clip from behind the baseline when you want your stance read; film from the side for everything else.

The drill — Split-Step Reset Drill

Stance width isn't something you set once and forget — it resets every time you land between shots, so train it there. Shadow a rally and split-step to the imaginary opponent's contact, landing each time with your feet about shoulder width and a touch beyond, knees soft, paddle up. Feel the base. Every landing is a rep of a good stance.

Three sets of ten. You're grooving the base you'll actually use, the one you land in mid-rally, not a static pose you strike before the point.

Film a clip from behind the baseline afterward and check your ready stance read. A balanced base is the quiet foundation under every quick first step — get it right and the reaching, the tipping, and the stuck-flat-footed moments all fade at once.