PicklePod: Unique Pickleball Drills that Fueled Augie Ge's Rapid Rise

Augie Ge (pronounced 'Guh' – don't ask why, even he doesn't know) might be the smartest pickleball player in the world. If not, he's pretty darn close. He's also this week's guest on the PicklePod (click here to subscribe).

His pickleball results lately have skyrocketed him into a new stratosphere, essentially taking him from a relative unknown to the hottest doubles partner that everyone wants to play with.

A bit about Augie

Augie was born and raised in Phoenix and played college tennis at the University of Arizona. He played on the table tennis team while getting his Masters degree at Brown. He's "a notable lefty," as Thomas Shields puts it.

He was drafted 38th overall to Dallas Pickleball Club in the Premier Level Draft of MLP. Oh, and he is an Arizona Pickleball League champ.

Ryan "Picklebald" Dawidasdlfkasjdf called him, "The biggest upside pick in Major League Pickleball." You may remember Ryan from our PickleNerd episode last week.

Augie's blessing in disguise

While Augie started playing pickleball in grad school, he didn't take it very seriously until he graduated in September 2022.

This past December, after being laid off from his dream job (something about biostatistics 🤓) he decided to go all in.

All credit goes to HeyShay

Augie's name became known after his incredible run with Hurricane Tyra Black at PPA Desert Ridge. It never would've happened if HeyShay (no one knows who this person really is) hadn't messaged Tyra about playing with him on a Discord server.

The rest is PPA history.

Who and what does Augie watch or listen to?

Augie Ge is just like us. He watches all the pods and all the videos and finds interesting tidbits and value in each of them.

The Arizona Pickleball League

The APL is a unique pickleball league that has gained a cult following over the last few years. They even made a documentary called "Breaking Pickleball."

Augie discusses the unique rules of the league and offers some suggestions he'd like to see adopted by other leagues.

Augie power ranks the lefties

Lefthanders are hard to come by in pickleball. There are only a handful of note. So, how does Augie rank them? And was Altaf Merchant chosen number one? If not, can we really believe anything Augie Ge says?

Find out.

Unorthodox training methods

How does a data science nerd improve his pickleball practice? He codes his own random number generator for wall drills, of course. We can see why Augie got a perfect score on the math portion of his SAT.

Augie discusses beating Zane

"The student has become the master." Okay, not quite. But, earlier in the podcast, Augie credited Zane with being one of the content creators he's looked up to in pickleball.

Who knows, maybe knowing all his skills helped Augie beat him.

Does Augie watch pickleball when he's not playing?

Augie is a self-proclaimed pickleball junkie. He's just like us.

The podcast finishes with some of your voicemails.

Got one you want to send? You can call the voicemail at (512) 200-4299 any time. Maybe we'll play it during a future episode.