By Mark Peifer, USA Pickleball Certified Referee; Past Chairman, USA Pickleball Rules Committee
Question:
When I play in a tournament, to determine who serves first, the referee gives the winner of the choice four options: serve, receive, end, or defer (Rule 17.C.4). Why is there an option to defer the choice when deciding who will serve first?
Answer:
Here is perhaps a little hint as to why the option exists at all: we added it to the rules because we found that some players literally hate making decisions.
So, the defer option is less about strategy and more about human behavior.
For some players, when there is no obvious advantage, they simply don’t care. At many levels of play, especially recreational and amateur tournament play, players aren’t evaluating sun angle, wind direction, background contrast, or which end of the court might provide some competitive advantage. They just want to play. Defer allows the process to move forward without forcing them to make a decision they don’t particularly want to make anyway.
Even when a more experienced player might recognize an advantage immediately, a small percentage of players, typically newer players, would rather turn that first decision over to their opponents. They view deferring as a gesture of courtesy or goodwill. Whether that has any actual competitive value is really beside the point. The rule gives players room for that behavior without complicating the procedure.
In a way, some players see it as giving the other team a little “grace,” with the thought that perhaps they’ll be rewarded for having done so. Kind of a Karma thing.
So, you have stumbled across one of the stranger rules in the Rulebook, not so much because of what the rule does, but because of why we put it there in the first place.
And now you know the rest of the story.
